---
In the dream, Cade saw Mara at thirteen years old.
She'd just come to the Thorne Pack house — skin and bones, eyes that wouldn't give.
A Thorne cousin pushed her into the Pack's decorative pond. She came up soaked. She didn't make a sound.
Cade pulled her out and wrapped his jacket around her.
"Why didn't you cry?"
She looked up at him. Her eyes were very bright.
"What would crying do?"
Later he learned she was never not hurting. She'd just taught herself to swallow it.
She grew stronger every time they hit her. Like a weed that roots harder the more you pull it.
That was what had drawn him in.
On their Bonding Day he'd clasped the gold chain around her neck himself and promised her a life together.
"Mara. I'll never leave you."
She'd laughed with wet eyes and said, "If you betray me, I'll run so far you'll never find me."
He'd said okay.
But then he'd locked her in the dungeons for three years.
He'd sent a three-year-old to the disciplinary quarters because Vivienne told him to.
He'd sent Mara to the isolation quarters and let her be shocked until she broke.
When she'd knelt in the rain and begged him to look at their son, he'd walked away.
"Mara!"
Cade woke up swinging.
He reached out, instinct. Nothing there.
Just an empty bed. And the dark.
He was on his feet before he was fully awake, shoes forgotten, running.
He ran straight for the cliff.
The waves hit the rocks below and the sound was brutal.
Cade searched the coastline for three days and three nights.
Eleanor came. Vivienne came. Neither could move him.
On the morning of the fourth day, Eleanor arrived again. She was carrying something small.
Ren's ashes.
Cade stopped turning over the rocks. He took the box. His hands wouldn't stay still.
He remembered when Ren had been born — Cade had carried him in one hand. He'd stayed up every night at the Pack infirmary and not let anyone else touch him. Ren's first smile. First time he rolled over on his own. The first time he said "Dad."
He remembered all of it.
And now there was only this. A small box.
Cade held it against his chest and finally let himself cry.
He didn't know how he got home. When he came back to himself, he was standing outside Ren's room.
He pushed the door open.
The crib he'd built himself — gone. The stuffed animals Mara had sewn through the night — gone. The picture books Ren had loved — all of them gone.
Cade walked in and let the memories run.
The nights Ren ran a fever and Cade paced the hallway holding him for hours. Ren's first day at the Pack nursery, clinging to Cade's leg and refusing to let go. Cade crouched down for half an hour, talking him into it.
And Mara. Grimacing through the treatments to get pregnant — needles and herbs and weeks of nausea — and telling him it was fine, she was fine. Then holding Ren after he was born and saying, This is everything.
Cade sat down and pressed his fists into his eyes.
When he opened them, he saw it.
On the wall, drawn in chalk, crooked and child-sized: three figures holding hands.
Below them, spelled out painstakingly in child's handwriting:
I luv dad and mom.
Cade stopped breathing.