Chapter 305

Chapter 305

Alex's POV

She didn't say no.

That was the thing I kept coming back to as I drove through the pack gates and parked in front of the house. She hadn't answered me. She had sat with her hand pressed against her chest and looked out the window and said nothing for the remaining twenty minutes of the drive but she hadn't said no.

I was going to hold onto that.

I got out and took her bag from the boot before she could reach for it. She didn't argue, just pulled her jacket tighter around herself and looked up at the house for a moment.

I watched her take it in, the stone front, the wide windows, the height of it against the late afternoon sky. She had been here for days already but this was different. Before she had been a captive and then a patient. Now she was arriving.

There was a difference and we both knew it.

"Same room as before?" She asked.

"If you want it or we can move you somewhere else. Bigger windows, different floors whatever you prefer."

She thought about it for a second. "Same room is fine I know where everything is."

I carried her bag inside.

My mother was in the front room when we came through the door and she stood up the moment she saw Caitlin. She crossed the floor and put both hands on Caitlin's face the way she did with people she had decided belonged to her, and looked at her carefully.

"How are you feeling?" She asked.

"Sore," Caitlin said honestly. "But better than two days ago."

"Are you hungry? I can have something ready in twenty minutes."

"I'm fine, Luna. My mum sent soup.”

My mother's expression shifted into something warm. "Of course she did."

She dropped her hands from Caitlin's face and looked at me over her shoulder with an expression I knew well. It meant we would be talking later. "I will set the table."

I carried Caitlin's bag upstairs and left it inside her door and came back down to find Landon in the hallway.

He looked at me the way he always did when he wanted to say something and was deciding how to say it.

"How did it go?" he asked.

"The visit was fine her parents didn't suspect anything."

"And the shift?"

I paused. "Last night in the woods east of her parents' town.”

Landon's expression didn't change much but his eyes sharpened. "First shift that soon after the turn. That's fast."

"I know."

"How did she handle it?"

I thought about Caitlin on her knees in the forest dirt, furious and frightened, eyes glowing gold. I thought about the white wolf stepping out from between the trees, calm and sure, like she had been born to it. Which in a way, now, she had.

"Better than I expected," I said. "Much better."

Landon studied me for a moment. "And the colour?"

"You'll hear about it from someone soon enough."

He waited.

"White," I said.

He was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the floor and then back at me and I could see him working through the same thing I had been working through since I watched her disappear into those trees.

"Alex-"

"I know, Dad."

"A white wolf hasn't been born into this pack in four generations. And this one wasn't born. She was turned."

"I know what it means."

"Do you?" He looked at me steadily

. "Because if you do, then you understand that this is larger than a decision you made in a moment of panic. Something like this doesn't happen by accident. The elders are going to want to know."

"The elders can wait," I said.

"She has been through enough in the last week. She doesn't need elders standing in her bedroom doorway asking her questions about her wolf before she has even had time to understand what happened to her."

Landon held my gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once. "Fair enough but not for long."

He walked past me toward the kitchen and I stood in the hallway alone and thought about white wolves and things that didn't happen by accident and a girl who had looked out the window and not said no.

Dinner was quieter than I expected.

Caitlin came downstairs and sat at the table and ate the soup her mother had sent, which my mother heated up without comment and served with bread. Maya was absent, which was not an accident.

I had spoken to her that morning before we left and told her plainly that Caitlin did not need any more of what she had said in that doorway and Maya had looked at me with tight eyes and said she would eat in her room.