Page 110 of Glitched Fates & Stolen Mates

Another door. Locked. All locked-locked-locked. Territory denied. Freedom stolen.

Behind—footsteps. Shouting. Human-pack giving chase-sounds. But slowing. Why slowing? Scent-trail confused. Fear-smell stronger than hunt-smell.

Sniff.

Air currents carrying information. Weapon-oil. Silver-tang. Concrete-dust. And underneath—freedom-scent. Open-space beyond walls.

Double doors at corridor-end. No silver-smell here. Metal-clean but not poison-metal.

Push.

Shoulders against barrier. Doors give way. Swing wide.

Freedom.

Concrete under paws now. Cool relief flooding burned pads. Wide room. Empty-space. Territory unmarked by cage-makers.

But men have stopped. Why stopped? Why not chasing?

Listen.

Breathing. Not from corridor-hunters. Different breathing. Closer breathing. Here-breathing.

Sniff.

New scent-marker in territory. Human-form but wolf-scent underneath. Old scent. Ancient scent. Pack-memory scent that makes brain stutter and fail.

No.

Eyes adjusting. Shapes forming in blackness. Someone here. In territory-space. Waiting-still like predator-patient.

Scent again.

Deeper inhale. Scent-trail older now. Changed-scent. But underneath—pack-bonds. Blood-ties.

No-no-no.

Fight-flight explodes through every nerve. Wrong-wrong-wrong. Pack-bonds severed. Broken. Shouldn’t-be-here-scent.

Need to shift back. Need human-thoughts to understand this impossible thing. Wolf-brain cannot process pack-ghost. Cannot understand severed-bonds-walking.

Bones cracking. Muscles tearing. Must be human to face this.

The figure stepped forward into what little light bled through the doorway behind me. Older now. Greyer. But the face—that face I’d tried so hard to forget.

He was dressed in dark, loose clothing, stripped of any identifying marks. An anonymous uniform. His feet were bare against the concrete.

The silence yawned between us like a chasm.

My father. Standing there in the shadows like some bloody ghost made flesh. The man who’d raised me to believe that duty came before everything—before happiness, before love, before your own beating heart. The man whose disappointment had carved itself so deep into my bones that even now, over a decade later, it still ached.

He looked older. Thinner. The broad shoulders that had once seemed capable of holding up the entire Highland sky now curved inward. His hair had gone completely grey, and there were new lines carved around his eyes—deep grooves that spoke of pain I couldn’t begin to imagine.

But it was definitely him. The same stern mouth. The same piercing stare that had always seen straight through me, finding every weakness, every failing, every moment I’d fallen short of what a Thorne should be.

I shouldn’t have been so surprised. We’d gained intelligence, passed on from White, that Greywatch had him. That he was not in fact dead, buried deep in the ground where he couldn’t hurt us anymore.

But knowing something intellectually was different from seeing it. Different from having the demon of your childhood standing three metres away, wearing clothes that weren’t his own and staring at you like something that had crawled out of your worst nightmare.