Page 87 of A Wolf in the Garden

“Yes, I do. Van… after Jenny…” Her voice breaks off in another sob, and I hear her sucking in deep breaths. “Van,” she chokes out after a minute, “none of my visions made sense. Nothing made sense anymore. I’m sorry. I thought I must have been mistaken.”

I feel numb. “You could have told me, Mom. You could have told me that you thought she was my mate.”

“I thought,” my father growls, “I thought that if you really gave a shit about that girl, if she really was your mate, you’d leave the pack like you were supposed to. You blame me for those orders, but you were free to go at any time in the past nine years, Evander. You were just too cowardly to do it.”

I sit up beside Ellie, seeing red. “We wereGRIEVING!You wanted me to tear what was left of our family apart? Is that what you wanted? Because that’s what it would have done! Look at us now! I stayed to keep our family together!”

“I wanted to be free from the tension between us! It was supposed to getbetterbetween us, boy!” He’s snarling just as much as I am now, a continuous growl that filters through the call.

“You never said anything! You’re so fucking emotionally stunted, you could have spoken to me man to man, we could haveagreedon a way forward. Instead you pulled bullshit stunts time and time again to get me to snap —”

“Well it worked.”

“Oh, it worked out so fucking well for you. How many children do you have left, huh? How many do you have that actually want to speak to you, or spend time in your presence? You pushed me away, you pushed Lacey away.”

“She knows I didn’t mean it. I was never going to make her remain with that piece of shit, I didn’t want her with him in the first place.”

“I don’t care what sheknew. It still hurt her. It hurt her bad. You hurt a member ofmypack.”

“Your pack that you’ve left abandoned over here while you’re there in New Zealand fucking some female; I should have known that’s why you picked some run down vineyard —”

“Ellie is my mate, and you will berespectfulwhen you talk about her.”

There’s silence on the other end. I stare straight ahead at the opposite wall. I can see Ellie watching me out of the corner of my eye, and I am ashamed, to say the least. I didn’t want Ellie to see this side of me, the wolfish aggression, the snarling that my father brings out in me. She knew about it already, of course, but it’s different, witnessing it first hand. I had hoped to keep this part of me buried away, out of sight.

“This is what I know,” my father speaks up, his voice low, a deep rumble I would recognise anywhere. “I killed a fae that was coming after Ellie. A year later, my daughter dies.”

“It’s not connected,” my mother cuts in.

“We don’t know that,” he continues. “She died in a freak accident, nobody knows how she got into that pool area, it was locked. That gate waslocked. It should not have been possible.”

“There was no scent of fae, there was no fae. They couldn’t have crossed the ward I had in place,” my mother continues, speaking over him, her voice rising in pitch.

“You don’t know that, Bronte.We don’t know. We’ll never know. But what I do know is that the fae are vindictive, they areknownfor that. I hope, Evander, I truly hope that you never have to experience the pain of burying your own child. Do not come at me for making a decision to protect what was left of my family in the wake of that. I chose to protect the lives of my remaining children, and that meant getting out as fast as possible, and severing ties to what I deemed to be a source of danger. And that is what a good alpha does. They make hard decisions and stick with them.”

I’m having an out of body experience, I’m sure of it. “That was a bad decision,” I hear myself say, without fully processing the words coming out of my mouth. “It was the worst decision. Years of pain, for Lacey, for myself, for Ellie. That was the opposite of protecting us. And a good alpha doesn’t leave pack members behind.”

“She —”

“Don’t youdaretell me my mate was not part of our pack. She was. Every summer. She was underyourprotection, and you know how I know that? Because youdidprotect her. She was in danger and you made a split decision tokillon her behalf, and I have been thinking about that all evening, becausethattells me more than any words ever will. You want to know how I know? Because I’m an alpha too. I know how you think, and I know how yourwolfthinks.Hethought Ellie needed protecting, didn’t he? I bet it’s been eating away at you, all these years, that you abandoned Ellie here —”

The call disconnects.He hung up on me.

I pull Ellie into my arms. She sobs, clutching at her chest. “Jenny…”

“Not your fault,” I whisper fiercely. “Not your fault at all.”

“But —”

“Ellie,please.” My face is in the crook of her neck, hers in mine. I’m shaking, I realise after a moment, my body crashing after the events of today. What I wouldn’t give to rewind twenty four hours, back to bed in that glasshouse, where I had naively begun to feel like we’d faced the worst of it already — that we could fully forget fae had ever come after Ellie, and move on.

I scoot backwards, Ellie still in my lap, until I’m leaning against the headboard, the back of my head hitting it with a thunk. Ellie cries silently in my arms, and really, I can’t ask her to stop. Not between everything that’s happened to her today and that awful admission from my father. He’s not accusing her, he’s not saying it’s her fault. In fact, this is the closest in nine years to me understanding what the hell he was thinking with the decisions he made. But it’s still terrible to think about, still horrific for someone to think that Jenny’s death could be attributed to some sort of collateral that came from Ellie being fae.

What if her presence puts Lacey and the boys in danger?It’s a hideous thought, a terrible, intrusive one that I’ve had before and refused to entertain. I refuse to believe it now. Ellie is part of my pack, just as much as they are, and beyond that, she is my everything. I can’t — I willnever— choose a life without her in it.

My phone starts buzzing, vibrating on the bed, and we both stare at the screen.

Mom.

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