Chapter 6 My Child

Damian's POV

I was sitting in my dark office, the glass of liquor still in my hand, when the phone rang.

"Alpha." It was the guard in charge of transporting Elena, fear plain in his voice.

"There's been a problem. When we stopped at the border gas station, Elena said she needed the bathroom. She climbed out through the vent window and ran. It's dense forest all around. We couldn't catch her."

"I already know." My voice was calm.

I pulled open the bottom drawer and dug out a slip of paper. There was a contact I hadn’t used in years on it. I picked up the phone and dialed. When the line connected, I spoke in a low voice, and then hung up.

When the call ended, I pulled open the other drawer of my desk and lifted out a velvet box, careful. Inside lay the pendant I'd smashed with my own hands.

I took out the adhesive I'd bought for it and began, clumsily, to fit the fragments back together, one shard at a time.

My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I got the letters — Elena and Damian — roughly back into place, but the surface of the pendant kept an ugly, jagged crack that would never close.

Just like what I'd torn apart between us.

I ran the pad of my thumb over the pendant, cherishing it, almost greedy. The window glass threw back the pain and despair on my face.

Elena's POV

After I fled that forest, I made my way, eventually, to Stillwater Pack.

In the four years since, I've marveled at it more times than I can count.

For an outsider with no one to lean on — a pregnant woman who'd even lost her wolf — my life here went almost unbelievably smoothly.

The Alpha of Stillwater Pack not only approved my request to stay right away, he gave me a small, well-guarded house, a steady single-mother's stipend every month, even an easy clerical job in the pack library.

I thought fate had finally smiled on me once and let me bring my son into the world safe. Leo.

Leo was the only reason I stayed alive those four years.

He was the sweetest, most thoughtful child. Every day when I pushed the door open after work, he'd come barreling at me like a little cannonball, wrap himself around my legs, tip his face up, and say, soft and sweet, "You worked so hard, Mommy!"

Last month I ran a high fever, aching all over, flat on my back, and at just four years old he dragged a little stool to the bathroom to wring out a towel for me.

He pressed his cold little hand to my forehead and, copying the way I always soothed him, blew gently on my head. "It doesn't hurt, Mommy. Leo blew all the ouchies away."

Every time I looked at him, guilt filled me.

I couldn't give him a whole family. I didn't even dare tell him who his father was.

One night, pointing at a picture-book of a wolf family — a father, a mother, and a child — he suddenly asked, "Mommy, where did my daddy go?"

I looked into those beautiful silver-grey eyes, the exact ones he'd inherited from Damian, and my heart clenched.

I swallowed the ache, stroked his hair, and promised, "When you're a little bigger, Mommy will take you to meet your daddy. Okay?"

But the day I'd take him to meet his father never came.

The year he turned four, on my birthday, Leo disappeared.

Because the wolf inside me was truly dead, I'd lost a werewolf's most basic gift — the scent that lets you track.

I searched the pack like a madwoman for a day and a night, asking everyone.

Until a guard patrolling the east told me, "I think I saw a little boy heading toward the slope by the border yesterday afternoon."

The slope.

A scene from the morning before flashed through my mind.

Leo tugging at my shirt, his eyes shining. "Mommy, the blue star-flowers are blooming on the east slope. I want to pick some to make your birthday present!"

And what had I been doing?

I was busy going over the library's accounts, and I only patted his head, distracted. "The slope's too far. Be good and wait at home for Mommy to get off work."

I understood then. He must have wanted to surprise me, and slipped out of the pack alone to pick the flowers.

Remorse and terror drowned me whole. I dropped to my knees on the grass of the slope and slapped myself hard across the face, twice.

What was I doing? Scraping to get by, always brushing him off, and now I'd even lost him.

Why couldn't I do a single thing right?

I burned through every bit of savings I'd built over those four years. I even sold the furniture in the house to hire the most notorious tracker in the underground black market.

Now I sat in his office, thick with the smell of cheap cigarettes, gripping the edge of the desk, shaking as I looked at him.

"Miss Winters, I found something." The tracker pushed a blurry photo across to me. "Your son didn’t wander off on his own. I traced his scent, and the last lead I picked up…"

He paused and blew out a ring of smoke. "…was near the border of Frostridge Pack."

Frostridge Pack.

The moment I heard those words, my heart sank.

Damian's pack. The nightmare I'd sworn I'd never set foot in again as long as I lived.

I snatched the photo off the desk and, without a moment's hesitation, stumbled out of the office. Even if it was hell, I would get my son back.

Third Person POV

The tracker leaned back in his worn leather chair, watching Elena's forlorn figure rush out into the rain, a smug sneer curling at his mouth.

He reached for the thick stack of cash on the desk and lifted it to his nose, breathing it in, greedy.

"That crippled woman without even a wolf is dumb as a rock," he said, flicking the bills, sneering to his assistant. "Emptied her whole life’s savings for a brat who’s probably already dead. Who’s actually going to help her find him?"

"But boss, you sent her to the border of Frostridge Pack…" the assistant said, hesitant.

"So what?" The tracker laughed, vicious, calculation glinting in his eyes. "The biggest rogue packs on the continent prowl around Frostridge’s borders. A woman like that walks in alone, she doesn’t walk out. There won’t be bone shards left of her. No witnesses, and this money's ours, clean. Too easy."