Chapter 8 Before the storm

Chapter 8 Before the storm
Scarlett
She heard him before she reached the front door.
That was how it usually worked. Sound first, the particular acoustics of a bad night, the too-loud television, something knocked over, the specific cadence of Dale's voice when he was past the point of no return. She'd developed an ear for it the way some people developed an ear for music. Involuntary. Precise.
She stood on the porch for a moment with her key in her hand and breathed.
One hour at a time.
She went in.
He was in the kitchen. That was worse than the living room, the living room had exits, open space, room to navigate. The kitchen was small and Dale was blocking the part of it that mattered, standing at the counter with a bottle that was three quarters empty and an expression she knew the shape of intimately.
Looking for something to land on.
"You're late," he said.
"It's eight thirty," she said, keeping her voice even. "I texted you."
"I don't care about your texts, Scarlett."
She set her bag down by the door and didn't move further into the room. "Okay. I'm home now."
"Where were you."
"Maya's. I told you this morning."
"Maya." He said the name like he was testing it for something. "Making yourself comfortable."
"Just watching a film."
"Right." He took a drink, set the bottle down with more force than necessary. "Just like your mother. Always somewhere else. Always someone else more important."
The words landed the way they always did, not like a slap, more like something finding an existing bruise. She kept her face still.
"I'm not mum," she said quietly.
"No." His eyes moved over her in a way that was more tired than cruel, which was almost worse. "You've got her eyes though. Every time I look at you" He stopped. Something crossed his face that she couldn't name, grief or anger or the place where they'd fused together so long ago she wasn't sure he knew the difference anymore. "She'd have loved Ashveil," he said, half to himself. "All this fog and forest. She always wanted"
He caught himself. Shut it down the way he always did when he got too close to something real.
"Go to bed," he said. Voice flat again. Door closed.
"Dale"
"I said go to bed."
She went.
She sat on the floor of her room with her back against the bed because sometimes the floor was easier than the height of the mattress, and turned her phone over in her hands without unlocking it.
She'd have loved Ashveil. All this fog and forest.
He never talked about her mother. In nineteen years, fragments. Pieces that didn't add up to a picture, just a suggestion of one, dark eyes, a laugh he'd once described as inconvenient, a love of places that felt alive. Gone before Scarlett was old enough to remember.
She always wanted,
Wanted what? Scarlett pressed the back of her head against the mattress and looked at the ceiling. What had her mother always wanted, and why did Ashveil fit into the shape of it, and why had Dale looked, for just a moment, like a man who had lost something instead of a man who had nothing left to lose?
She got up before she could think too hard about it and went to the small box she kept at the back of her wardrobe. She'd had it since she was twelve, found it in a move, tucked into a box of Dale's things that had split open, and kept it without telling him because something in her had known it mattered.
Inside: three photographs and a folded piece of paper.
She took out the photographs.
The first was Dale, young, barely recognisable, unguarded in a way she'd never seen in person. The second was a woman Scarlett had studied so many times she had it memorised. Dark hair. Grey eyes almost silver. A smile that looked like it knew something.
Her mother.
The third photograph was different. She'd looked at it a hundred times and never been able to place it — her mother standing in a forest that looked nothing like anywhere Scarlett had ever lived, beside a woman she didn't recognise. Tall, pale, dark-eyed, with something about the way she held herself that felt almost formal. Almost ceremonial.
On the back, in her mother's handwriting: Ashveil. E says it's time.
Scarlett sat very still.
Ashveil.
Her mother had been here.

Caden
Jace called him at nine fifteen.
"Your girl's light has been on since eight thirty and hasn't moved," he said, without preamble. "I'm on the east boundary. I can hear" A pause. "It was a bad one tonight, Caden."
Caden was already reaching for his jacket. "How bad."
"He didn't touch her," Jace said quickly. "Nothing like that. Just" Another pause, and the fact that Jace, who had a word for everything, was struggling to find one told Caden everything he needed to know. "The things he says, man. The way she just takes it and keeps her voice level and—" Jace exhaled. "I wanted to go in there myself and I'm not even bonded to her."
Caden said nothing. He was out the door.
"You can't go over there," Jace said, reading the silence accurately. "She doesn't know about any of this yet. You can't explain why you know. You can't—"
"I know," Caden said.
"So what are you doing."
"Going for a walk."
"Caden"
"I'm not going in, Jace. I just-" He stopped walking. Pressed his free hand against the back of his neck. Looked up at the sky which was doing its usual Ashveil thing of being mostly cloud and completely indifferent to human problems. "I just need to be closer than this right now."
A long pause on the other end.
"Yeah," Jace said, quieter. "Okay. I get it."
He stood outside her house for an hour.
Her light stayed on the whole time. Occasionally her shadow moved across the curtain, sitting, standing, sitting again and he tracked it the way his wolf tracked everything that mattered, with a patience that came not from calm but from somewhere deeper than calm.
He thought about what Jace had said. The way she just takes it and keeps her voice level.
Nineteen years, he thought. Nineteen years of learning to make herself small in a space that should have been safe, and she still walked into Maya's house and laughed at Eli's terrible jokes and let herself have one quiet almost-moment on a Friday night and woke up the next day and did it all again.
The light went off at ten forty seven.
Caden stood in the dark for another few minutes. Then he turned and walked home and sat at his kitchen table and thought about Dorian Blackthorn returning to Ashveil in six days and everything that was coming and made himself be honest about one thing:
He wasn't just protecting his mate.
He was already half gone on her.
And she didn't even know his world existed yet.