ALPHA: Heir Of The Four

Chapter Twenty-Three

The one thing I could count on in that moment was Kane's silence. He didn't question me. He didn't say anything else. He would probably be the only one out of the entire pack that would easily let me go, and I was actually grateful to him for that reason.

Whether or not it was because my departure now made it easier for him to stay, it didn't really matter. All that mattered was that, just like he had been forced to do, I, too, was making the best choice for myself. And there was no way that Kane could ever hold that against me, find error in my decision or cast judgment upon me because of that choice.

I packed my things faster than I probably needed to. My initial goal was simply to get in and get out without drawing too much attention to myself, but I had been in a house full of wolves and highly doubted that my presence had gone undetected. Even so, my task was accomplished without distraction. If the pack was at all curious about my return, they refrained from allowing it to seek me out, which left me unbothered.

Packing hadn't consumed very much time—I literally threw everything I could into my suitcase and sent a quick 'thanks' up to the heavens when it managed to close. So what had taken up most of the twenty minutes I spent in the room I shared with Caleb was the fifteen spent looking around it, allowing my gaze to travel along every inch and settle in every corner.

The door I had been pushed against when Caleb first revealed to me what he was.

The exact spot on the wooden floorboards where I was hijacked by his emotions the night I first met the pack and his parents.

The California King where I slept most comfortably because it was the only place where Caleb's scent was the strongest.

The large window that was always left unobstructed by the drapes so that both day and night could have their complete fill of the room.

Caleb's room was probably always meant to have been a safe space. Sure, the den as a whole was as secure as it was beautiful, and there was enough love within the pack to fill a thousand houses as large as this one, but once that bedroom door closed, nothing outside of it was meant to exist.

I was supposed to just be Ava-Rain, and he was supposed to just be Caleb. A place where we were free of titles, and where complications, issues and worries would have been left at the door. That was the hope. That was Caleb's hope. But it never became anything more than a dimly lit desire, put out before it was ever really given a chance to grow into a bigger untameable flame.

And it was for that very reason that I had to leave.

Because fantasies were not real. Hiding away in a bedroom did not mean that the world outside of your door stopped rotating. As much as we both wished to become anybody other than who we actually were, in a world other than the one we were struggling to survive in, that room would always be just a room. It didn't harbour the power to change anything, and the door that kept us in and everything else out was nothing more than a seven-foot high and three-foot wide piece of wood.

I had already spent most of my life tucked away between four walls, and I was not in any rush to return to that sort of misery. So long as I continued to allow Caleb to regard me and his pack as separate entities instead of two halves of a whole, so long as I allowed him to continue making decisions for me instead of with me, there just could not be a place for me at the den.

I didn't really know what to expect once I was ready to leave, but the entire pack—minus Kane and Caleb—Caleb's parents, and Angelie all scattered around the grand foyer certainly wasn't what I thought I would find when I made my way downstairs. My heart started to pound a little harder, and if any pair of eyes were to look down at my hands they would have seen them shaking. But having them all together—even Mr. and Mrs. B, whose presence I was surprised by—meant that I could deliver one big goodbye instead of nine individual ones, but to do it that way seemed so impersonal.