Chapter 39 Chapter 39

Chapter 39 Chapter 39


I hesitated, my hand hovering over the door handle. Part of me wanted to send him away, to maintain the distance I'd been trying to create. But another part, the lonely, exhausted part, craved the comfort he was offering.

"What did you bring me?" I asked instead of answering directly.

"Something that belongs to you. Something I should have returned a long time ago."

My breath caught. There was only one thing of mine that Kyle could have kept all these years. "You didn't."

"I did. And I'm sorry it took me so long to give it back."

With trembling fingers, I opened the door. Kyle stood in the hallway holding a familiar leather-bound notebook, the one I'd been writing in that terrible night six years ago. The one I'd dropped when I'd fled the pack house after he'd read my letter aloud.

"My journal," I whispered, reaching for it with shaking hands.

"I found it that night," Kyle said quietly. "After you left. I meant to return it the next day, but then..." He trailed off, running a hand through his hair. "I kept it. I told myself I was protecting it for you, but really I was just being selfish."

I clutched the notebook to my chest, feeling the worn leather under my fingers. Inside were months of my thoughts, my grief, my desperate attempts to process losing everything I'd ever known. "Did you read it?"

Kyle's face flushed with shame. "Some of it. Not all. I stopped when I realised... when I understood how much I'd hurt you that night."

I sank onto the edge of the bed, still holding the journal like a lifeline. "This has all my letters to my parents in it. Every single one I wrote after coming here."

"I know," Kyle said, remaining in the doorway. "That's why I kept it safe. I knew how much it meant to you."

I opened the cover, seeing my younger handwriting on the first page, a letter dated just two weeks after arriving at the Williams pack. The sight of it made my chest ache with remembered loneliness.

"Thank you," I said quietly, meaning it despite everything. "For keeping it safe."

Kyle nodded, his amber eyes soft with something that looked like relief. "There's something else. Something I found tucked inside the back cover that night."

He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, and my heart stopped. I recognised it immediately, a photograph of my parents and me taken just weeks before the attack. I'd thought it was lost forever.

"My picture," I breathed, taking it from him with reverent fingers. My parents' faces smiled back at me, young and happy and alive. ”That photo was the last one that was ever taken of us, together. I had just won a violin competition, and that was three months before they died. I had also won a brand new violin, but that was the one I was playing in the attack; it got destroyed in the bloodbath.”

“Oh, Goddess, and the one you were playing yesterday when I came into your room?

“That one was my mother’s. She left it here when she moved out to go to my father’s pack. Yeah, my mother was an omega, but she was my father’s fated. I remember my father’s stories that it was our park's law that our fated mate was to be accepted with no question, but I guess those laws were made in simpler times.” I said, closing my eyes.

Kyle's face softened with understanding. "I didn't know that was your mother's violin."

"There's a lot you don't know about me," I said, tracing my finger over the photograph. My mother's smile is so much like my own. My father's proud stance as he stood beside us. The way my 11-year-old self beamed at the camera, violin case clutched in one hand, trophy in the other. A perfect moment frozen in time, before everything fell apart.

"I'd like to learn," Kyle said quietly. "If you'll let me."

I looked up at him, really looked at him. The boy who had tormented me was gone, replaced by a young man whose amber eyes held nothing but sincerity and regret. Through our bond, I could feel his desperate hope that I might give him a chance to make amends.

"I'm meeting Marcus for coffee tomorrow," I said instead of answering directly. "I need... I need space to think about everything that's happened."

Kyle nodded, accepting this without argument. "Of course. Just be careful, okay? Silverclaw could still be watching."

"I know." I clutched the journal and photograph closer to my chest. "Thank you. For returning these."

"I should have done it years ago," he said, his voice rough with emotion. "Goodnight, Imogen."

After he left, I spent hours going through my old journal, reading letters I'd written to parents who would never receive them. Pages and pages of grief and loneliness, of trying to make sense of a world that had been shattered beyond repair. The last entry was dated the night of the pack gathering, the night Kyle had read my letter aloud.

Dear Mom and Dad, it began. Tonight is the spring gathering. I don't want to go, but Grandmother says it's important for us to appear as normal pack members. I'll bring this journal so I can write to you afterwards and tell you how it went...

The entry ended there, unfinished. I'd never had the chance to complete it, to tell them about how thoroughly I'd been humiliated, how completely my heart had been broken.