8
Savannah’s POV
I came out of Declan’s office and the afternoon light in the hallway was doing that thing it does in late autumn — cutting sideways, stretching every shadow out long and thin.
I heard them before I saw them.
That specific kind of whisper, the kind that’s pitched just loud enough to be overheard.
Deliberate.
A weapon dressed up as gossip.
“Look who finally came back.
Six years later.”
Three She-wolves, blocking the hallway ahead of me.
The one in front was younger than the others — mid-twenties at most — but her eyes had that particular excess of aggression you see in wolves who haven’t learned yet that confidence and hostility aren’t the same thing.
Honey-gold hair with a silver streak threaded through it.
Blue Blood Pack marker, same as yesterday’s troublemaker in the training ground.
Of course.
“Fighting in human circuits for a few years and suddenly you’re an instructor?” She tilted her head, voice dropping like she was sharing something private.
“Or did you get Alpha heir’s attention some other way?”
I didn’t say anything.
My first coach, back when I was nineteen and broke and learning how to turn the anger into something useful, used to say: *You don’t have to answer every bell that rings.
Some silences land harder than any punch.*
I’d spent six years learning what he meant.
The She-wolf’s eyes narrowed.
She didn’t like the silence.
People like her never did — it took the shape out of their performance, left them swinging at air.
She shifted her weight forward.
I read the movement before she completed it — lead foot dropping, hips rotating, the exact trajectory and angle of a charge.
I calculated the landing point.
Set my weight.
“Enough.”
David came around the corner, unhurried, and his voice wasn’t raised, wasn’t sharp.
It didn’t need to be.
The three She-wolves locked up like someone had grabbed the back of their collars, the aggression wiped off their faces inside a single second and replaced with an expression so carefully blank it might as well have been a confession.
David looked at them the way you look at something mildly inconvenient.
“The training base has rules.
You know them.” He paused.
“Go.”
They went.
The hallway emptied out, and the quiet that followed had a specific quality — the kind that comes after something almost happened.
David turned to me, and I straightened up, waiting.
He reached into his briefcase and produced a small box.
Not large, not showy.
Inside was a key.
I recognized the engraving on the handle.
I’d seen that district marker on my way into the compound yesterday — the residential block on the east side of Shadow Fang territory, the one with the larger units, better light, a view of the mountain ridge instead of the parking structure.
“From the Alpha heir,” David said, in the tone of someone conveying information they believe is self-evidently significant.
“It’s a considerable honor.”
I looked at the key for a moment.
Then I closed the box and held it back out to him.
“Please thank him for me,” I said.
“But Finn and I are fine where we are.”
David didn’t take the box immediately.
He looked at my face, looked at the box, and I could see him calculating whether there was a version of this conversation where the outcome was different.
There wasn’t.
He took the box.
“I’ll pass along your response.”
“Thank you, David.”
He walked away, footsteps fading around the corner, and I was alone in the hallway.
I leaned back against the wall.
The stone was cold through my jacket, which was exactly what I needed — something solid and cool to lean into while I waited for the tight feeling in my chest to loosen.
My phone was in my pocket.
I’d been aware of it for most of the afternoon, the way you’re aware of something you’re trying to decide about.
I pulled it out.
The number had been in my contacts for six years.
Added on a night when I was three weeks out of Silver Creek, sitting in a laundromat in Portland at two in the morning because I needed something ordinary to do.
I’d typed it in from memory, saved it, and never once pressed call.
I pressed call.
It rang twice.
“Dad.” My voice came out level.
Steadier than I’d expected, which almost surprised me.
“It’s Savannah.”
Silence.
A long one.
Long enough that I could hear my own heartbeat clearly, could feel the pulse of it in my throat.
“Savannah.” His voice was older.
Six years older, but it was more than that — worn down, like a surface that had been dragged across rough ground for a long time.
“I heard you were back.”
“Finn is doing well,” I said, before he could say anything else, before he could shape the conversation into something I didn’t want it to be.
“He’s smart.
He’s kind.
He’s strong.” I kept my voice even, each word landing flat and clean.
“Everything a Silver Creek Alpha’s grandson should be.”
I left it there on purpose.
The silence stretched again.
“I should have let you explain.” His voice fractured on the last word.
Barely, but I heard it.
“Back then.
I should have given you the chance to—”
“Goodbye, Dad.”
I ended the call.
The phone screen went dark in my hand.
I turned it over and set it against my thigh, and I sat down against the base of the wall — just slid down until I was sitting on the cold hallway floor, back to the stone, knees drawn up.
The urge to cry was there.
Of course it was.
It lived somewhere in the back of my throat and behind my eyes, and it had very good reasons for being there.
Six years of reasons.
A father’s voice that sounded like it had been breaking for a long time.
Three words that came six years too late.
I let the feeling arrive.
I didn’t let it move.
I sat with it until the wave crested and flattened, the way they always eventually did if you were stubborn enough to wait them out.
Kept my breathing even.
Kept my spine against the wall.
The hallway was quiet.
Somewhere down the corridor, a door opened and closed.
A distant voice, then nothing.
I thought about Finn.
About the way he’d looked this morning, eating cereal in the small kitchen of our assigned housing, telling me very seriously about a dream he’d had involving a talking owl and a mountain made of cheese.
The way his amber-brown eyes scrunched at the corners when something was genuinely funny to him.
Everything I’d done in six years had a reason.
Every fight, every early morning, every night I lay awake calculating how to make the money stretch, every rule I’d taught him and hated teaching him because children shouldn’t need armor but he did —
It was all for that face.
That laugh.
The tightness in my chest loosened by one degree.
Then another.
I waited until the urge to cry had dropped back down to something manageable.
Something I could fold up and put away.
Then I put my hands on the floor, pushed myself upright, and stood up.