Chapter 121 Beg for Forgiveness
THIRD PERSON’S POV
It had taken everything she had to come back here.
Jane had walked away from all of it years ago — from her sick child, from the pack, from the life she and Liam had carefully built — and she had done it without a single backward glance. No letters. No word sent through anyone. No quiet inquiry about whether Leo had pulled through the worst of it. She had simply gone, and the silence that followed had been entirely her own doing.
She had told herself it was the only option available to her. Watching Liam die had fractured something inside her beyond repair, and that staying in that house, surrounded by things that reminded her of him, his belongings, his people, his son who looked more like him with every passing month— without him would have finished the job. She had told herself she was useless to the boy in that state. That leaving was a mercy of some kind.
She had been lying. She had known it even then, standing at the edge of pack territory with her bag over her shoulder. She had known it and she had gone anyway.
What followed was its own punishment.
Her family had closed their doors to her completely. Her mother would not speak to her. Her brother returned her only letter unopened. The message from everyone who had ever known her was identical and unambiguous. You abandoned your child when he needed you most. You have no place among us anymore.
She had betrayed the single most basic thing a mother is trusted with, and they wanted nothing further to do with whoever she had become.
So she moved south. She found a loose group of rogues who had no interest in her history and asked no questions, which was all she required from anyone at that point.
The first weeks were hard in a way she hadn’t fully anticipated. She had little to no food, strange faces, the constant low-grade wariness of people trying to determine where she had come from and whether she was a problem.
She walked through it all in a fog she had largely constructed herself, not ready to surface, not sure she wanted to.
Slowly, things became more manageable. Faces became familiar. She found work. She found reliable meals. She assembled the smallest possible version of a stable life and told herself it was enough and almost believed it.
That was when the loneliness became something she could no longer reason her way around.
Leo came back to her constantly in those years. She had buried guilt deep enough that it rarely surfaced cleanly. He came back as a face. Small and dark-haired and entirely Liam’s, except for the particular way he tilted his head when he was thinking, which had always been hers. She wondered whether he had survived. Whether Elijah had kept his word and taken him in. Whether anyone had thought to keep the toy train he’d loved so much.
She told herself she couldn’t go back. If Leo had died, she would be held responsible, and she deserved that, but she was not prepared to face it. And if he had lived, she would have to stand in front of Elijah and account for what she had done, and she was not confident she would survive that either.
So she stayed. And she moved forward. And then the symptoms began.
She ignored them at first. She couldn’t afford to address whatever was wrong with her. Then the fainting had started but she blamed it on poor sleep. It progressed into nosebleeds. The deep grinding pain in her abdomen she told herself was grief finally finding a physical address after years of being pushed down. But when the ear bleeds started and the exhaustion became something that pinned her to the bed for entire days, she went to the doctor primarily to be told she was catastrophizing and sent home.
He did not tell her that.
“You’ve been unwell for some time, haven’t you,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.
She thought about it honestly.
“I thought it was stress. I didn’t think it was anything like this.”
“It’s advanced. It was discovered too late for treatment to be curative. The cancer began in your stomach and has spread to your internal organs. At this stage we can only manage what’s coming. Your immune system is already significantly compromised.”
She had sat with the shape of that for a long moment.
“How long do I have?”
“With medication, two months if things progress reasonably. Without it, three weeks at most.”
Two months alone, in pain, in a place where no one knew her well enough to sit with her at the end. Or three weeks, also alone, also in pain, but finished sooner.
Neither felt like a life. Both felt like what she had earned.
But Leo kept returning to her. Not as grief, not even really as love anymore — something simpler and more stubborn than either.
He was the one thing she had made that was genuinely good. The one part of everything she had walked away from that had never stopped being hers. She wanted to look at him. She wanted to ask for something she had absolutely no right to ask for and then accept whatever answer he gave her and let go completely.
She decided against the treatment. She had nothing to extend her life toward.
The journey back had been difficult. Her body was not what it had been and the distance was unforgiving, but she had made it. She had stood at the door and knocked and waited.
Now Elijah stood in the doorway and she could see exactly what was on his face. She had expected it. She had prepared herself for it on the road here, rehearsed standing in the heat of it without flinching.
She was not welcome. She had known she wouldn’t be. Still, she forced her lips to move and said the words.
“I’ve come to beg your forgiveness,”
Her voice came out smaller than she had intended. She did not try to correct it.