Once, when Marisa, my jealous ex-lover, hung her from the deck railing with a chain, intending to get her out of the way.
Kat spent her first day back in Burning Wood here. With fresh sheets and the windows open, airing out the smell of blood, there’s little sign she occupied one of those beds.
I perched on one of the hard wooden chairs that Gregor uses to encourage us to leave, and I didn’t move until Gregor told me Kat was out of the woods.
Gregor didn't order me out of his infirmary the way he usually does when someone has outstayed their welcome. He told me to get up so he could put a cushion on the chair, then he walked out and came back with a tray of food, telling me to eat. That cushion is now missing, so I guess I’m back to being unwelcome.
I was ten when a feral persuaded my mother to open a silver cage, and she paid for that decision with her life. The feral escaped, killing her, my dad, and three of his enforcers.
I was fifteen when I first entered the Wolf King Trials, winning it so I could do more to protect other shifters from ferals than I could as Alpha of a small pack in rural Montana. Now, at twenty-nine, I have fought and earned the right to be Wolf King in the trials every three years since.
It’s moments like these that I miss my parents the most.
My dad would have cleared his office and beckoned me over to stand at the window overlooking the creek, and I’d tell him about whatever problem I had. We’d break it down and come to a resolution together.
My mom would be outside helping someone with something. She always seemed to be in a million places at once, helping, listening, laughing. She would wrap me in a deep hug and tell me that I needed to listen to my heart.
And even though I’d shrug off her sappy advice, I’d walk away feeling a little lighter than I had been before.
Life has never been the same after a feral took them from me, and it never will be.
“Gregor, what did my dad do when he fucked up and pissed off my mom?” I ask.
Gregor straightens a sheet. “Didn’t happen.”
I frown. “Not even once?”
“Not that I can remember.” He moves on to the next bed. “You’re hovering,” he says, not looking at me. “You know how I feel about that.”
Hates it.
When he’s working, he likes to be left alone to think and heal without someone standing over his shoulder, distracting him with their loud mouth breathing—his words, not mine.
It probably has to do with the fact that he teaches the pups several times a week.
Every time I pass the schoolroom, there’s more noise spilling out of the one-story squat building with a handful of kids under twelve than there is in the bunkhouse and main house combined. I think he values silence more than anyone in Pack Kasen since he gets precious little of it in the schoolroom.
“I apologized.”
He hums, nodding his head slightly. “About time.”
My lips flatten. “That’s not helpful.”
“Oh.” He looks up at me, eyes wide. “Was it guidance you were after?”
Growling, I swing around to leave.
And I stop.
Gregor is the best damn healer in the country. He’s also a teacher, endlessly patient when you’re not standing over his shoulder and pissing him off.
“There’s a lesson in there, isn’t there?” I ask, my back to him.
Nearly thirty, I have a feeling that Gregor will still be teaching me important life lessons in another twenty or thirty years. My dad went to him for advice, and he was the Alpha of Pack Kasen, the one everyone went to for guidance.
“An apology is just step one,” he says.
I turn to face him.
