12
Savannah’s POV
The Silver Creek pack house looked whiter in the afternoon light than I remembered.
That particular shade of white that feels deliberate, like someone chose it to mean something.
Finn’s fingers found mine and held on.
He tipped his head back to look at the oak doors, eyes wide, working very hard to contain something.
“It’s so big,” he whispered.
“Mom, did we really used to live here?”
“We did,” I said quietly.
I bent and pressed a kiss to the top of his head, smoothed one of his dark curls back into place.
“Remember what we talked about—”
“Be polite, stay close, don’t show anything special.” He recited it clean, all the way through, then looked up at me with that particular six-year-old pride that comes from a perfect score.
“I remember, Mom.”
The door opened before we knocked.
Theodore stood in the entrance, the warm light of the house behind him.
Six years ago he was the kind of man who walked into a room and changed the quality of the air in it.
He still was.
But the quality itself had changed — less sharp, heavier, the way a person carries themselves when something has worn them down from the inside over a long time.
More silver in his hair.
New lines at the corners of his eyes.
His gaze found Finn.
And I watched it happen — the subtle tremor that moved through his whole body, like a string finally finding the note it had been tuned for and held away from.
He came down the steps.
Slowly, carefully, the way you move toward something you’re afraid of startling.
Then he went down on one knee, right there on the stone steps in front of his own house, and he was eye level with my son.
“Hello, Finn,” he said.
His voice was rough around the edges, something buried in it.
“I’m your grandfather.”
Finn looked up at me, waiting for my signal.
I gave him a small nod.
He held out his small hand, formal and serious.
“Hello, sir.”
Theodore didn’t take the hand.
He pulled Finn into his arms instead, both of them, held on with the kind of grip that’s trying to account for six years of absence at once.
Over Finn’s shoulder, his eyes found mine.
They were red.
He didn’t say anything out loud.
He didn’t need to.
The shape his mouth made was clear enough.
*I’m sorry.*
“How touching.”
Renata’s voice came down the staircase like something poured from a height, each word landing in exactly the right place to cause maximum impact.
I hadn’t heard her come to the top of the stairs. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
I should have been listening for it.
She descended slowly, one hand trailing the banister, her eyes moving to Finn with an expression she didn’t fully manage to hide — a slight downward pull at the mouth, the look of someone encountering something that shouldn’t be where it is.
“The missing daughter returns,” she said.
“With a surprise.”
She stopped three steps from the bottom and looked at me directly.
“Savannah.
Bringing this *child* into this house — have you no shame at all?
What will the other packs think?
Silver Creek’s bloodline, and some unknown man—”
“Renata.”
Theodore’s voice.
One word.
The warning in it was unmistakable.
She stopped.
I looked down at Finn.
He was looking up at Renata with those amber-brown eyes, expression caught somewhere between confused and very carefully polite.
Holding onto the rules I’d given him with both hands.
“Go say hello,” I said quietly.
“Call her grandmother.”
Finn cleared his throat.
Squared his small shoulders.
Used the most solemn voice in his entire vocabulary.
“Hello, Grandmother.”
Then he paused.
Looked back up at me, and said, in the perfectly honest way that six-year-olds say things they don’t yet know they shouldn’t—
“But Mom, I thought Grandma was Margaret.
The real one.
The one who planted the white roses.”
The hall went absolutely still.
Margaret’s name hung in the air like a window someone had forgotten to close, wind coming through, undoing everything that had been carefully arranged to stay in place.
The composure, the staging, the six years of Renata carefully positioning herself in the space Margaret had left.
Undone in one sentence by a child who was only telling the truth.
I watched it move across Renata’s face.
Blank first.
Then red.
Then something I didn’t have an exact word for — not anger, though anger was in there.
More fragile than anger.
More humiliating.
She’d spent six years building something in this house, and Finn had just named the foundation it was built on without even knowing he’d done it. This chapter was taken from NovelPing without permission.
“How dare you—” Her voice shook.
“Enough.” Theodore rose to his full height.
That quality in his voice — the one that didn’t need volume to move the air in a room — arrived in full.
“Aurora.
Out.”
Renata went still for exactly one second.
Then she turned, skirt swinging like an angry flag, heels sharp against the floor all the way out of the hall.
The door closed.
Silence settled, soft and strange.
Finn looked up at me, genuinely uncertain for the first time since we’d arrived.
“Mom.
Did I say something wrong?”
I put my hand on his head.
“No, baby.” I smoothed his curls.
“You said exactly the right thing.”
His face relaxed back into its normal shape immediately, the way children’s faces do when they trust the person telling them it’s okay.
Theodore stood in the middle of his entry hall for a moment without speaking.
I watched something move through him — not the Alpha steadiness he’d been wearing since the door opened, something older and quieter underneath it.
He looked at Finn, then at me, then at the corridor that led toward the back of the house.
When he spoke, his voice had changed.
Still his.
But something in it that I recognized from a long time ago, from before any of this, from when I was small enough that his voice was just my father’s voice and nothing more complicated than that.
“Would you like to see the garden?” He said it simply.
“Margaret’s white roses.
They’re still there, all of them.
We’ve kept them exactly the way she left them.” He paused.
“White was her favorite color.”
Finn turned to me so fast he nearly lost his footing, both hands grabbing my arm, eyes enormous.
“Mom.
The roses.
Can we go see them?”
I stood in the hallway of the house I’d grown up in, breathing in old wood and beeswax and the specific smell of a place that had been yours once.
I watched my son reach up and take my father’s hand without hesitating, tugging him toward the corridor like they’d done this a hundred times before.
My throat tightened.
I held very still until it passed.
“Yes,” I said.
“Let’s go see the roses.”