My pack stilled.
“We saved him from Richard,” Joe said. “Barely. He was running, but Richard caught up with him. Richard escaped, but David… I sent him here. With a message for Ox.”
“And you didn’t think to tell us?” Mark asked. He didn’t sound angry, just confused.
I had. Multiple times, but I’d let my anger get the best of me.
“And he knew,” Elizabeth asked, letting me off the hook for now, “that you were an Alpha?”
I nodded. “Said he’d been around them enough to know.”
“Where is he?” Mark asked. “If he’s still on the run, we need to make sure he’s not talking about—”
“He’s dead,” Joe said. “A few weeks ago. Not that far from here. Idaho.”
“Richard?” Elizabeth asked her son.
Joe nodded.
“That’s why you came home, isn’t it?” she asked. “Because you think he’s coming here again.”
“Maybe,” Joe said. “And maybe I just wanted to finally come home.”
“They said you didn’t speak,” Elizabeth said. “That you stopped talking again.”
He looked down at the floor. It was quiet in the house.
“Do you know why?” she asked him.
“It hurt,” he said in a low voice, sounding like the tornado who’d once waited for me on the dirt road, wide-eyed and demanding. “Being apart from you. From him. I couldn’t… find the words. To say anything. I just wanted to find the monster so I could come home again.”
“And here you are,” she said. She rose from her feet and approached her son. I didn’t know what, if anything, they’d discussed since Joe’s return. I had a feeling she’d been waiting for me to talk to him first.
She was so much smaller than him now. It was oddly endearing, the way she had to reach up to cup his face. He leaned into her hands, even as he still held on to mine.
“Your father would have been very proud of you,” she said.
“I don’t think—”
“Joe,” she said.
He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close, his nose on her neck as she ran her fingers over the stubble on his head. She glanced at me and smiled.
Eventually, she pulled away and took a step back. “I think we should try,” she said. “Because we are so much stronger together than we could ever be apart.”
“Is it going to be bad?” Rico asked. He looked tired. They all did.
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s been bad before, and we’ve always gotten through it. Because of the pack. But if you don’t think you can do this, I won’t hold it against you. But I need to know. Because if you stay, I have to be able to count on you. So tell me now.”
No one spoke.
I hadn’t thought they would. They were brave, all of them. Foolish, but brave.
“Then we do this,” I said. “As a pack.”
I wondered if this is what it felt like to heal.
TWO DAYS later, Robbie said, “She wants to speak to you. Both of you.”