My Pack Erased Me, The Lycan King Didn’t

Ch. my pack erased me, the lycan king didn’t 13 my pack erased me, the lycan king didn’t 13

Chapter 13

She wouldn’t let go of my hand on the drive to the healers.

I let her hold it. I want that on the record. Because I swore a thousand times in that cabin I never would.

+45 Coins

By two a.m. I was standing in a healing room with five brothers. Three on their feet. Two full of wolfsbane tonic and stitches. None of us knew how to start.

My father came in last and stopped six feet away, like there was glass in the air.

“Mom’s next door,” I said. “She’s asking for you.”

He didn’t move.

“Sienna. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Just stop trying to manage my life.”

“Understood,” he said. Then, very quietly: “Boss.”

Something in my chest tilted.

Then Marcus closed his eyes and did something none of them had done in a year.

He opened the pack link.

It hit me like sunlight after a long winter. Warm. Loud. Five brothers all talking at once inside my head, overlapping, clumsy, desperate.

Little Moon. Little Moon. We’re sorry. We’re so sorry. Can you hear us? Please say you can hear us.

I grabbed the bed rail so I wouldn’t fall.

Gabe, who has never held anything in for longer than four seconds, shoved his phone into my hand.

“We made you a wall,” he blurted out loud.

Photos. A whole wall in Marcus’s office, floor to ceiling. Midnight blue and silver swatches. A seating chart for the lake lodge. A menu of every dish I ever cooked in our kitchen, which meant someone had been writing them down.

And in the middle, a printed list. Six feet long. A hundred and forty–one items. Almost all crossed off.

–

SIENNA THE TRUTH.

Chapter 13

+45 Coins

At the very top, taped over three times, yellow with age, a page in my mother’s handwriting from twenty–two years ago.

Item 1. She will never doubt, for one single day, that she was wanted.

Not crossed off.

I broke.

Not like the King’s Head Warden. Like a girl who ate breakfast alone two hundred times.

Marcus caught me. Then Liam. Then all of them, even Ryder reaching out from the bed with tubes in his arm, and I was buried in a pile of enormous crying idiots.

Then my mother walked in wearing a healer’s gown, silver burns on her wrists, and made it so much worse.

“I have every notebook,” she said into my hair. “They were in my desk all year. I couldn’t open the drawer. I was too afraid of what I was doing to you.”

“Then why didn’t you open it? Once, Mom. Just once.”

“Because I thought I’d have you afterward,” she whispered. “I thought I was borrowing one year. And you were gone eleven days before I noticed. I’ll carry that until I die.”

We’re not fixed. I want to be honest about that. There are things I’ll flinch at forever. Closed doors. The words not now. The look in a wolf’s eyes when they’re talking in a link you can’t hear.

But at four a.m., my mother said, “Sunday. Just us. Terrible movies and the greasy diner.”

“I’m working Sunday.”

“Then the Sunday after.”

“Yes,” I said.

Twelve times I asked her. She asked me once. I said yes. I’m not sorry.

Kael drove me back at sunrise.

Forty minutes of silence. Then I said, “You said mine.”

His hands tightened on the wheel.

“How long?” I asked.

“Since the throne room,” he said. “The first second I smelled you. My wolf nearly broke through my skin.”

Chapter 13

“Six months. You knew for six months and you didn’t tell me.”

+45 Coins

“You’d already been claimed and thrown away once. In front of everyone.” He kept his eyes on the road, but the tips of his ears had gone red, which I found deeply satisfying. “I wasn’t going to let a bond choose for you. I wanted you to choose me. With your eyes open. Or not at all.”