Chapter 152
Nolan POV
The house was quiet. Too quiet.
I sat behind my desk, papers in neat piles I didn’t plan to read just yet. I hadn’t touched a single one since the morning, my mind elsewhere.
The usual rhythm of the pack, the meetings, the schedules-they all felt distant, irrelevant.
Cassian had checked in earlier, voice low and steady. “Ellie is fine, Nolan. She’s safe at home with the twins p>
The word “home” had been a knife in my heart, but I’d let it go. They were safe. That had been enough. I had let it rest. No pursuit. No ultimatums.
And yet the absence of her presence gnawed at me. Every hour without seeing her twisted tighter around my chest, a quiet reminder that I had lost control the moment she’d slipped through my fingers.
I had replayed that moment over and over in my mind her sudden departure with the twins, the confusion, the chaos. And beneath it all, that realization: my own brother had helped her leave.
Lance had facilitated her escape, subtly ensuring she and the boys were safe.
Safely away from me, as if I were a monster that she needed to be protected from. And maybe I was. I felt sick when I thought of the way I’d treated her.
Like she was an inconvenience, a nuisance that only existed for me to use. I truly was a monster, wasn’t I? At least in her story p>
It ate at me. Not just that Cassian and Lance had worked against me, not just that she had left. No, what was tearing at my chest was the realization that she had only agreed to come back to keep me from finding out about the boys.
I thought that she was giving me another chance. I thought that I could make up for everything. But in reality, Ellie had returned to Silver Fang only to keep me away from Moonstone. To keep me away from my sons.
I closed my eyes and felt the memory surface again. The scent of the boys, the way
it had struck straight through him. The overwhelming need to protect and the way he
had moved to separate them from Kieran without even thinking.
Was this normal? Did all parents feel this for their children? If they did, then how could his own parents have treated him the way that they had?
I kept circling back to that. I knew what Ellie was afraid of, why she had wanted to keep the boys from me She was afraid that they would have the same kind of childhood I did. That the boys would be thrown into alpha traming the second they could walk. That they would be tools of the pack, not people.
It made my heart ache. It made me think about things that I wanted to forget. My childhood. My parents.
The night of the ambush.
I had been reckless, running away from home with Felicity. It had been stupid and desperate to think that I could escape my fate.
I was going to be the alpha of Silver Fang no matter what I did. I couldn’t escape it.
It was embarrassing now to think
about how happy I had been those
few hours that Felicity and I had been alone in that little shack in the rogue forest had been so sure that we would be fine that I had the strength and the skills to make a life for us out there. I was so naive.
My parents had followed me. They had fallen into a trap, the forest echoing with the chaos of the attack, and I had been left with the staggering weight of their deaths on my shoulders.
The memory of their final moments—the shouts, the blood, the cold, unrelenting fear —had shaped me into the man I was now.
I knew that it was all my fault. I had tried to shirk my responsibility, and they paid the
cost. The guilt never released its grip. Every decision since had been filtered through that lens, every failure magnified against the backdrop of that night.
And now Ellie.
She had run, taking the boys, leaving me to sit in the cold, empty house with nothing but silence and the weight of my failure.
For the first time, I understood the depth of what I had lost—not just in power or control, but in connection, in trust, in family.
The sharp sting of inadequacy lingered, and my hands gripped the edges of the desk as I exhaled slowly. I needed clarity. I needed to reconcile the past with the present, to understand how much of myself he had lost to pride and fear.
It was tempting to blame it all on Felicity. She had been a snake in my ear for most of my life, telling me that Ellie was using me. That she was an ambitious rogue trying to take everything she could from the pack that I had worked so hard to elevate.
I had let myself believe her. That was on me. It was no one’s fault but my own. I needed someone to give me some perspective. Someone who had been there through the years and knew me well enough not to lie to me.