Chapter 143

Lauren

Sophia’s cabin looked… worst then I thought it would be.

Untouched. Weather-worn. Quiet.

I didn’t even want to imagine how much she hated it. The mud, the low closet space, and I’m sure the bugs.

I didn’t even known this was were she was, or that Mark had been with her. That they were even… close. Before the battle, before the betrayal, before she threw herself between me and a blade that would’ve pierced straight through my spine.

And now?

Now, she was a ghost with a name I still couldn’t say without flinching.

The path leading up to her old place was overgrown, but not neglected. Wildflowers bloomed between the stones. The ivy hadn’t claimed the porch. Someone had been tending to it. Carefully. Lovingly.

That couldn’t have been Sophia’s doing, could it?

I looked up and my heart softened a bit, finding that gently giant.

Of course, he had.

Mark wass in what looked like a garden, crouched low, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, hands deep in the soil. He didn’t look up when I stepped into the clearing. Just kept gently patting down earth over a new set of roots. Dandelions. Or something that looked like them. I wasn’t exactly an herbologist.

“I was told I’d find you here,” I said, my voice light, awkward.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t even glance at me.

“I tried,” he said after a moment, quiet. “Walked away the day after we buried her. But it kept calling me back.”

There was a long pause where I was a bit flabberedgasted. Mark had never spoke so out right. Could he always do that? Even so, it felt more like the voice of an old tree, or the wind it’s self and less like a person saying it.

Like it was nature’s secret way of voice.

I couldn’t decide if I was supposed to leave or sit down and start pulling weeds like I knew what I was doing.

“She hated when weeds got too close to the windows,” Mark added.

I took that as an invitation.

I walked around to the side of the cabin and sat on the edge of the old porch, watching him work. His motions were slow, deliberate. There was something grounding about it. About him. He always had that energy. Like a mountain trying very hard not to collapse on you.

Still, I had so much to learn about him.

“I didn’t know she liked dandelions,” I said.

“She didn’t,” he murmured. “She liked that they came back no matter how many times people tried to pull them out. And the tea you can make with them.”

Huh.

Yeah. That sounded like her. Yet, it didn’t.

We sat in silence for a few more minutes before I asked, softly, “Do you hate me?”

It came out before I could stop it. Before I could think better of it.

Mark’s hands paused. He brushed dirt off his palm and leaned back on his heels, finally looking at me.

“No,” he said simply. “I don’t hate you.”

“I hated her,” I admitted. “For a long time. Yet she, this, learly means something to you.”

“Yes… I know all of that.”

“But she died to save me,” I whispered, throat thick. “And I still don’t understand why.”

He tilted his head toward the sky, like listening to something I couldn’t hear.

“She didn’t die to rewrite the story,” he said. “She died because it was her end. Because in her own, chaotic, selfish, beautiful way, she loved you. And she knew that that kind of love wasn’t enough—not for anyone. But it could be, in the end.”

I looked down at my hands.

“I still don’t know if I forgive her.”

“You don’t have to,” he said. “But you should understand her.”

“I don’t think I ever did, or will…”

He leaned forward, placing one hand gently on the dirt beside him.

And then I heard him.

Not aloud. Not in words. But like wind rustling through leaves. A thought not mine.

“People are never what they seem, Lauren. The mask you saw, the knife in their hand… it was never real. It was fear. It was survival. We all wear something that hurts the people we love before we know how to take it off.”

I sat frozen. His voice—his thoughts—echoed like the trees themselves were speaking.

“How…?” I asked aloud, breath caught.

He gave me a small smile. “You’ve been too wrapped in noise to hear the earth.”

“You speak through dirt now?”

“No. I speak through the place where things grow.”

Of course he did.

“I used to think Sophia ruined my life,” I said after a while, my voice softer than the breeze that stirred the tall grass around us. “If she hadn’t shown up… if she hadn’t torn everything apart—Alexander would’ve married me.”

The words hung there, suspended between the rows of flowers Mark had been tending, fragile as their petals. I felt the heaviness of them settle like mist on my tongue, like they’d been waiting years to be spoken.

“I wouldn’t have gone to school,” I continued, voice picking up momentum as the truth tumbled out. “I wouldn’t have become a doctor. I’d probably be raising pups right now in a quiet house with pretty curtains and a picket fence. Maybe a garden with herbs I didn’t actually know the names of.”

My hand drifted unconsciously to the hilt of the knife on my hip. Its weight, once second nature, now felt intrusive. “I certainly wouldn’t have been an Alpha.”

Mark’s hands stilled in the soil. The air around us shifted. He didn’t look at me right away—he just kept his gaze on the ground for a moment longer, as if he needed to plant the silence somewhere before turning to me.

“Would that have made you happy?” he asked, voice low, steady.

I swallowed hard. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

But he didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just waited.

“Probably not,” I finally admitted.

He nodded. Not smug. Not satisfied. Just… sure. Like he’d always known.

“She didn’t ruin your life, Lauren,” he said. “She rerouted it.”

The words were like a thread pulled loose in a sweater. Everything I’d wound tight inside me for years began to unravel, just a little.

“I hated her for that,” I said quietly.

“I know.”

He looked back to the dirt between his knees, brushing it gently from a sprouting leaf like it was something sacred. “But think about all the lives you saved as a healer. The children who lived because your hands knew what to do. The people who came home whole. All those kids walking around right now, laughing, fighting, falling in love—because you were there instead of tucked away in some kitchen stirring soup or folding linens.”

I blinked quickly, eyes stinging as the weight behind his words landed.

“You found your path,” he said. “Just like Alexander found his through her. Just like Sophia… found hers. It didn’t look like anyone else’s. And it sure as hell didn’t end the way any of us wanted it to.”

He paused, then looked up at me, eyes sharp but warm. “But it ended right.”

I let the breath in my lungs slowly leak out, letting it carry the hurt with it. The scent of crushed petals, damp soil, and sun-warmed herbs curled in the air around us like incense.

“Why do you still come here?” I asked after a pause, voice quieter now, almost childlike in its sincerity.

Mark glanced back at the wild little garden Sophia had planted—chaotic and overgrown, but still blooming.

“Because things grow here,” he said simply. “And I like knowing something good still can.”

Something about that made my throat feel too small for my breath.

I smirked faintly, wiping a stray tear off my cheek with the back of my wrist. “You know… you really should’ve told me you could talk like this all along. I want to know my brother more.”

His back stayed to me, but his shoulders twitched with something close to a laugh. He kept working the roots with careful fingers.

“I didn’t because I couldn’t,” he said, like it was the easiest thing in the world. “Only recently has the wind agreed to pass along my voice.”

A short, surprised giggle escaped me before I could stop it. “You’re such a weirdo, big guy.”

His hands paused for the briefest second before returning to the soil, slower this time. Maybe gentler.

But he didn’t deny it.