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I snapped my gaze up to him and widened my eyes, my stomach twisting and turning again today. Something was wrong; that was why we had come back. But … nothing seemed to be broken into or ruined around the pack house. Which meant …
My throat dried. “What happened?”
“It’s your father,” he whispered, tucking some hair behind my ear. “Your father …” Calder trailed off, his words getting lost in the deafening silence.
It wasn’t like him to hold back what he wanted to say. Like Thayer, Calder was usually unapologetic about his words and how they were taken.
Fingers curling into his chest, I stared up at him. “Tell me.”
“He’s dead.”
My heart stopped beating for a second, and I found myself shaking my head. Over and over.
I ran through all the rooms. Screaming his name. Shouting that this wasn’t a funny game they were playing on me. Needing him to come back.
“No,” I said, running through the house again. “Where is he? Where is my dad?”
Calder walked down the stairs to Gaian, speaking a couple of muffled words to him. I tumbled down the stairs, nearly tripping over my two feet multiple times, and hurried over to them both.
“Where is he, Calder?” I asked again.
“He died for me,” he whispered, grasping my hand once more. “I tried to stop him, but he refused, and I couldn’t move. He gave me every last bit of his soul that he had left for me to be with you, for me to continue the Paragonian life with you.”
Tears welled up in my eyes. I shook my head again.
“No,” I sobbed, my knees weak.
Calder caught me before I collapsed and wrapped his strong arms around my body. I lay so helplessly in his arms.
“No, you’re lying. Tell me you’re lying. I just … I just met him.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
And while Calder spoke those words, I heard Dad’s voice for the last time, drifting through my ears, apologizing to me about what he had done, the choice he had made to help Calder live, the need for me to forgive him.
I pressed my lips together and pulled away from Calder, wiping my tears with the backs of my hands. “It’s not your fault,” I whispered, staring at the ground between us. “He wanted to do this one last thing for me. It’s okay.”
“But—” Calder stuttered, eyes widening.
After lifting my gaze, I gently placed my hands on his chest and smiled up at him. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re all okay now. This was how it was all meant to turn out. We have a pack, a family, and now …” I gazed out the front door window at the Paragons that Thayer and Darius were now leading to the spare houses on the property. “And now, we have time to focus on us.”
“On all of us,” Gaian said.
Calder looked from him to me to the others outside. “You did it.”
I snatched his hands and squeezed. “We did it.”
95
the last journal entry
sina
“We’re goingto play a little game with you,” Thayer growled in my ear.
I teetered from foot to foot and whimpered, a sleeve of silk covering my eyes and shielding my vision. My hands were pulled behind my back and bound around a large tree trunk in the forest behind the pack house. I had been standing here—completely naked and unable to move—for almost an hour now. Waiting for one of them to touch me.
Over the course of the last week, since I had saved the Paragons, we had enacted every entry from my journal, except this one. And I had been begging—aching—for them to complete my fantasies.
