She glanced up at me. “You did,” she said. “I know you.”
She did. Very well. If I’d thought my heart could take it, I would have called her Mother. But hearts are a funny thing; they beat strongly in our chests, even though they can shatter at the slightest pressure.
She heard all I couldn’t say. Part of it was the threads between us. Most of it was because she was Elizabeth Bennett. She just knew.
She said, “He needed to come home. For me. For us. But for you most of all, I think.”
“He missed us all the same,” I said.
She rolled her eyes, something she so rarely did that it still always made me smile every time it happened. “Sure,” she said. “I know that. I am aware of that. But it was for you, Oxnard. Even if you don’t believe it. Even if you don’t understand it. He came here for you.”
She stared at me as if daring me to contradict her.
I said, “Okay. Yeah. Maybe.”
She huffed. “You’ve settled into your skin since he’s been back. You were the Alpha before. But it’s different now.”
“Is it?”
“You know it is. And Joe. He….” She sighed and looked away. “One day, a very long time ago, my son was taken from me by a monster. I’d always told my son that there was nothing to fear. That I wouldn’t let anything hurt him. But I lied, because he did get hurt. Badly. Over many weeks. I heard him crying when… when the monster called us. I heard him crying for me. I wanted—” She broke off and shook her head.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said hoarsely.
Her eyes flashed orange as she looked up at me. “I do,” she snapped. “I do. Because you don’t see your own merit. Still. After all this time. We found him, Ox. We found Joe and he was broken. He was weak and starved and broken. He flinched at everything. And for a while, I don’t think he even knew who we were. And when he did know, when he remembered us, he cowered away because that… that man, that terrible man had told him we didn’t love him, that we never wanted him, that he was never meant to be an Alpha.”
Her claws came out as she gripped the countertop.
She said, “And I despaired over him. Because I didn’t know what to do. I loved him more than I had ever loved anything. I thought maybe that alone would be enough. To bring him back. To put his pieces together again. But it wasn’t enough. Richard Collins had only taken weeks to destroy the little boy I’d known. He was this shell, okay? This empty shell, and I didn’t know how to fix it. And then, Ox. Oh, and then there was you.”
She was crying, and I didn’t know how we’d gotten here. I knew the other wolves could hear her too, but they weren’t busting in through the door. They were waiting. For what, I didn’t know.
“You came,” she said. “And he brought you home, like some
thing he’d found in the woods. And the look on your face that first day. You were so nervous. So sweetly shy. You didn’t understand what was happening. You couldn’t. But I did, Ox. And Thomas did. Because Joe spoke. He spoke to you. He made the choice, even if he didn’t know what it meant. You were his, Ox. Even then. And he was yours.”
I couldn’t speak. I had no words left. Because this was the first time I’d seen her cry. Even after Thomas, she’d grieved as a wolf. So this was new, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. It didn’t help that her words were hitting me hard in the chest, and I almost couldn’t breathe.
“And he had to leave again,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Whether or not it was right, whether or not he should have, he did. They told me. About him. Carter and Kelly. How he closed down like before. How he gave himself over to the wolf. How he didn’t speak for months and months. And yet, the moment he comes home, the moment he sees you again, he finds his voice like he’d never lost it at all. So don’t you say that you’re not worth it. Don’t you think you’re not good enough. Because you have brought my son back to me again and again, and even if you weren’t my Alpha, even if you weren’t the one my son chose, I would be indebted to you for that. You’ve given him back to us, Ox. And no one can take that away from you.”
She laughed then, her cheeks wet, eyes red, but only in a human way.
I said, “I” and “I just” and “I want to be who you think I am.”
She said, “Ox. Ox, can’t you see? I don’t think. I know.”
She was light on her feet, three steps and she was pressed against me, hands curled between us, her head pressed against my chest. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and held her close, and there were those threads between us, and she pushed her way through them, singing pack and son and love and home.
After a time, I said, “It’s tradition, I guess.”
She rubbed her face against my shirt. “It is,” she said.
“Everything okay?” a voice said from the doorway.
She laughed again and stepped away from me.
“Everything’s fine,” she told Joe. “Ox and I were… well. I suppose that’s it. Ox and I were.”
Joe nodded, looking concerned.