Page 74 of The Last Sanctuary
While her heart cried,Please, don’t leave me, Raven had answered with her anger and resentment instead. “I hate you!” she’d yelled. “Go ahead and leave. We don’t want you anyway. Leave and don’t ever come back!”
That day, something crucial had fractured inside her mother. A critical, irreparable fault line. Raven had wished she could take it back, but her stubbornness hadn’t let her.
In that moment, her anger obliterated her love.
She’d unleashed her words like a weapon. She’d intended to hurt, to wound, just like she was hurting. Only now did Raven understand how her mother, already unloved by her husband, hadn’t been strong enough to cope with another bitter rejection, not from her daughter.
Right or wrong, that’s how it happened.
The next day, while Raven was at school and her father was busy fixing a broken fence post in the zebra’s enclosure, her mother had packed her meager belongings in a single suitcase, called a cab, and disappeared.
Raven had come home to an empty lodge. A paper note was folded on her pillow with Raven’s name printed in her mother’s dainty handwriting.
Her mother needed to leave before this place killed her. She had no choice, she wrote over and over. The letter was full of empty apologies, line after line ofI’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.The ink was blurred with splotches that might have been tears.
When her father returned that evening, sweating and dirty, Raven handed him the letter. His mouth thinned to a grim bloodless slash. He crumpled the letter in his fist and tossed it into the nearest trash can.
“Your mother is weak,” he said.
“What are we going to do?” Raven asked, fighting back a sob. A gaping hole had opened up inside her, and she was drowning in it. She didn’t know how to climb out or how to ask her father to pull her up. She didn’t have the language.
Her father must have known that his young daughter would be devastated. How could he not have seen that she was drowning right in front of him?
He hadn’t pulled her into his arms. He hadn’t hugged her. He hadn’t attempted to comfort her.
His expression hardened. “It’s best you learn this lesson early, I suppose. There’s only one person you can depend on. Yourself.”
As if to hammer home his point, he’d left her in the lodge by herself. He’d escaped to the comfort and distraction of his wolves. He’d abandoned her as surely as her mother had, leaving her to deal with her overwhelming grief completely alone.
Her father never brought up her mother again. One moment, she was there. The next moment, she wasn’t. They went on without her. End of story.
Over the months that followed, a few letters came in the mail, a few packages. Raven kept them in her room, hidden in her closet. She knew he didn’t want to see them. Raven never spoke of her mother aloud again, either.
The truth was, she knew that it was her fault. Not that her mother had chosen to leave, but that her mother had left without her. That she never came back for Raven.
Because Raven had told her not to bother. Raven had told her to go. And so, she did.
Raven buried the words she should’ve said somewhere deep inside her. She buried a lot of things. Thoughts she didn’t want to think. Feelings she didn’t want to feel. Tears she couldn’t bear to cry.
She learned to stop pining for what she couldn’t have. She learned to stop dreaming, to stop wishing, to stop wanting her family back. To stop feeling anything that might hurt her.
Now, lying on the rocky floor of a cave, nestled among wolves three times her size, she breathed in their raw animal scent while their large furred bodies kept her warm—warm and safe and wanted.
Despite everything, she found herself wanting this and all it entailed, longing for this moment to never end.
Because she understood. She knew the magnitude of this development, what it signified for her, and for them.
The wolves had made her their pack.
They’d made her family.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Raven woke before dawn. The black wolf stood tall over her. He bent his head and nudged her neck with his cool, wet nose.
Luna stood by the cave entrance, nearly blocking the gray pre-dawn light with her enormous form. Her tail swished with impatience.
The wolves seemed to know it was time to get up and do something. She just had to figure out what that was—and do it.
