Chapter 299

Chapter 299
Caitlin's POV

I cried that night.

Not loudly not the kind of crying that comes with screaming or gasping. It was the quiet kind, the kind where the tears just run sideways across your face into the pillow because you are lying down and you don't have the energy to sit up. I lay in the dark in that bed in Alex's house and I cried until my chest hurt and my eyes were swollen and there was nothing left to cry out.

Then I stared at the ceiling and tried to think.

I had to find a way to get through this that was the only thought I kept coming back to. Not how unfair it was, even though it was. Not how much I hated Alex for what he did, even though part of me did. Just the simple, practical fact that I was still here, still breathing, and I had to find a way to keep going.

I was twenty years old. I had my whole life ahead of me. That life looked completely different now than it had two weeks ago, but it was still mine. Nobody could take that from me. I had to believe that.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed slowly.

Positive I had to stay positive I had to pick myself up and face whatever this was with both eyes open. Falling apart on the floor of a cell had already happened. I was done with that. I was going to stand up.

I kept telling myself that until I almost believed it.

The strange feeling about Alex had started sometime in the night.

I noticed it first as a pull. A low, constant awareness of where he was in the house. I could feel that he was down the hall, sitting in a chair somewhere, not sleeping. I knew this without seeing it and without being able to explain how I knew. It sat in my chest like a compass needle, pointing in his direction regardless of whether I wanted it to.

I did not want it to.

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum and stared at the ceiling and told myself it was just a side effect. Just the turn. Just my body adjusting to something new. It did not mean anything.

It was not going to mean anything. Alex had bitten me without my permission and upended my entire life and I was not going to let some unexplained physical sensation make me soften toward him.

But the feeling didn't go away. It just sat there, steady and quiet, pointing down the hall.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

Luna came in the early morning, before the light outside was fully bright. She knocked first and waited for me to answer, which I appreciated more than she probably knew.

She sat in the chair beside the bed, the same chair I had seen Alex sitting in every time I woke up, and she looked at me with calm, steady eyes.

"Did you sleep?" She asked.

"Some," I said.

She nodded like she didn't fully believe me but wasn't going to push it. She folded her hands in her lap.

"I want to explain some things to you," she said. "If you are willing to listen not to excuse what happened just to help you understand the world you are now a part of."

I looked at her she had a kind face not soft exactly, but warm. The kind of face that had seen hard things and come out the other side without becoming cold.

"Okay," I said.

She told me about werewolves not the way they appear in movies or books, but the real version. She explained the packs, the territories, the hierarchy. She explained why they lived the way they lived, hidden inside normal human communities, running businesses and holding jobs and sending their children to regular schools.

She told me that the secrecy was not about shame. It was about survival. That the history between werewolves and humans was long and violent and that exposure had never ended well for either side.

"We are not monsters," She said quietly. "But we have been treated as monsters enough times that we learned to stay hidden. Every rule we have about secrecy exists because someone before us paid a very serious price for breaking it."

I listened to all of it without interrupting.

Landon came in partway through and sat on the other side of the room. He added things occasionally, filling in details, correcting small points. Together they explained it patiently, like they had thought carefully about how to have this conversation and wanted to get it right.

When they were done, the room was quiet for a moment.

"I don't hate you," I said finally.

"Either of you. I want you to know that. What you just told me, the way you told it i can see that you are good people." I paused. "I'm still not okay with what Alex did."

"You don't have to be," Luna said. "Not yet. Maybe not for a long time."

She reached over and put her hand briefly on mine. Then she and Landon said goodnight and left me alone.

I lay back on the pillow and thought about everything she had said, and the pull in my chest that pointed down the hall, and tried very hard to figure out how to feel two completely opposite things about the same person at the same time.

I didn't come up with an answer. I just eventually fell asleep.

The next morning I got up, showered, and got dressed.

My clothes had been washed while I was unconscious, which was both practical and slightly strange to think about. I pulled on my jeans and my shirt and stood in front of the small mirror above the dresser and looked at myself for a long moment.

My face looked the same my eyes were the same colour. I looked like me. I didn't know what I had expected, but I had expected something to look different.

Maybe it was all on the inside.

Alex was waiting by the front door when I came downstairs. He had his keys in his hand and he was wearing a dark jacket and he looked like he had not slept properly in several days, which I knew was true because I had watched him sitting in that chair every time I opened my eyes.