I Left the Pack Carrying His Twins · Rhea Wolfe

Chapter 3: Cross Creek Plates

I had a bag packed by ten.

Five years of night shifts teaches you to move fast on no sleep. Documents in the front pocket, cash in the lining, the folder with their birth certificates that I had never once filed with any pack registry. Nia's inhaler she doesn't need and carries anyway because it makes her feel like a doctor. Kade's blanket, which he will deny owning until he is forty.

At 11:40 I carried the bag down to the car.

The black SUV was parked across the street with its engine off and its lights out, and it had Cross Creek plates, and there was a man in the driver's seat who did not pretend not to see me.

I went back upstairs and sat down on the arm of the couch with my keys still in my hand.

Tomas answered on the second ring. "Don't run."

"There's a car."

"I know there's a car, I'm forty feet behind it." A pause; the sound of a window going down. "Sel, listen to me. If you run tonight, you run with two five-year-olds in a Corolla against a pack with eleven vehicles and a contractor with access to every plate reader in the state. They'll have you at a gas station by dawn and there'll be nobody standing there but Marcus's people."

"And if I stay?"

"If you stay," Tomas said, "there's somebody standing there who is not Marcus's people. He's an hour out. He's driving himself, he's driving badly, and I'd say the odds of him hitting something on the way are about even."

I closed my eyes.

"You called him."

"I called him at nine o'clock this evening," Tomas said, "and I have been an oath-bound beta of Cross Creek for eleven years, and Sella, I have never once heard a grown alpha make that sound."

* * *

He knocked at 12:52.

Not the door of the building — my door, on the third floor, which meant somebody had let him in downstairs, which meant he had spoken to a human in the hallway and been polite about it, and for some reason that was the detail that got through my guard.

I opened it on the chain.

Five years.

He had aged more than five. There was grey coming in at his temples at twenty-eight, and a new scar under his left eye, and the flat, worn look of a man who does not sleep well and has stopped expecting to.

He looked at me through a four-inch gap and every single thing he had ever felt went across his face without any attempt to stop it. That was always the difference between the Vale brothers and their uncle. Marcus wears a face. Roan just has one.

"Sella," he said.

"You don't come in."

"No." He put both hands up, palms out, and took a step back from the door, which no alpha does. "No. I'll stand here. I'll stand here all night if you want."

"What do you want, Roan?"

"To say one thing." His voice had gone hoarse. "Not to explain. Tomas told me you don't want the explanation and he's right, you shouldn't have to hold it for me. Just one thing, and then whatever you want after that."

The hallway light buzzed.

"Say it."

"I was twenty-three years old," he said, "and I stood in a room and let my uncle take the only thing that was ever mine, and then you asked me a direct question in a corridor and I said nothing." He swallowed. "I've had five years to find a version of that where I'm not a coward. There isn't one. That's the thing. That's all of it. I'm not here to be forgiven, I know exactly what I did."

I didn't answer, because there wasn't any air in me.

"Marcus flagged two children this morning," he said. "I'm here because whatever else I am, I'm still the Alpha of Cross Creek, and no child gets flagged in my territory without going through me. That's it. I don't know anything else and I'm not asking."

And that's when the hall light behind me clicked on, and a small, furious, sleep-creased voice said:

"Mom? Who's yelling at you?"

Nia does not walk into a room; she arrives at it. She came around my hip in her dinosaur pajamas with her arms folded and her chin up, five years old and absolutely prepared to fight a grown man on a landing at one in the morning.

"Nobody's yelling, baby—"

"I heard a man."

She looked up through the gap in the door.

And Roan Vale looked down.

It is a specific thing, watching someone's world end while they're standing in front of you. He went perfectly still, the way he does — the way Kade does, the way I've watched my son do in the school yard for two years and told myself meant nothing at all.

Nia has my hair and my hands.

Everything else on that child's face is his.

"Nia," I said. "Go to bed."

"But—"

"Now."

She went, with a look at me that promised a full inquiry in the morning.

The hallway was very quiet.

Roan had not moved. His hand had come up somewhere around his sternum, pressed flat, like a man checking whether he's been shot.

"How old," he said.

"Roan."

"Sella." He said my name like it cost him something. "How old is she."

"Five." I heard my own voice from somewhere outside my body. "In March. She was born the eleventh of March at 4:20 in the morning, and her brother was born nineteen minutes after her, and their names are Nia and Kade."

He put a hand out and braced it on the door frame.

"Twins," he said.

"Twins."

He didn't ask if they were his. I'll give him that for the rest of my life — he never asked once, not that night, not any night after. He just stood in a fluorescent hallway above a laundromat with his hand on my door frame and his eyes shut, breathing like a man coming up from deep water.

"You were pregnant," he said. "In the chamber. When you signed."

"Nine weeks."

"You knew."

"I found out that morning."

"They made you sign a release of any claim, present or future—" He stopped. Something happened in his face that I had never seen there before, and I have known that man since I was fourteen. "That's what that clause was for. That's what it was for. He wrote it eight months before there was anything to release."

Down at the street, a car door opened.

Then a second one, and a third. Unhurried. The sound of people who are not worried about being heard.

Roan's head came up, and every soft thing went out of him at once, and for the first time in five years I was looking at the Alpha of Cross Creek.

"Get inside," he said. "Lock it. Take the children into the bathroom, it's the only room with no window."

"Roan—"

"Sella." His eyes had gone gold. "That's my uncle's second car and there are four of them on your stairs."