Page 17 of Pack Kasen, Part 3 (Caught #3)

KAT

“ D on’t go far, Leya. Stay where I can see you. Do you hear me?”

“Okay, Momma.”

My feet slap across hardwood floors, and I barrel down worn porch steps, flipping my long, brown braid over my shoulder. I keep a tight grip on Sophia’s hand, my doll’s hair brushing the porch steps as I run down them and jump the last two.

A field of sunflowers stretches forever, and laughing, I run as fast as I can toward them.

My pack sits on the grass. Some are wolves wrestling.

“Kata, where are you going?” Micah, my pack brother, calls out.

“Sunflowers!” I yell back, running as fast as I can.

Oraya snorts and shakes her gray head. “Not sure what she’s so obsessed with. They’re just flowers.”

“She’s four. She’ll grow out of it soon enough.”

He’s wrong.

They’re all wrong.

The sunflowers are magic.

Trampling fallen flowers and weaving through others so tall I can barely see the sky, I run until my chest hurts, my lungs burn, and I slow down, remembering Momma telling me not to run too far.

Yelping, I trip and tumble forward, crying out when my doll falls. I crash through the sunflowers and down a hill.

In front of a brown bear.

The bear freezes.

Momma told me not to go far. Daddy… What did Daddy say?

Daddy said bears are big and scary, but they’re more scared of us than we are of them.

The bear's lips peel back, and its growl is so big. So scary.

It swipes.

My wolf hasn’t come yet, but I feel her inside me.

I roll, push myself up, and I run.

I hear it crashing behind me.

Twisting around to see how far back it is, I take a step.

Nothing.

Screaming, I tumble and fall.

My head cracks on stones, and I fall forever.

It’s dark when my eyes open.

A pretty woman with light brown hair and green eyes is sitting in front of me.

“How do you feel, sweetie?” she asks me.

“My head hurts.”

“You have a bump.” Her eyes widen. “But it’s… it’s not swollen anymore. I could have sworn…”

I stare at her. “Are you my momma?”

Her face turns blank.

A man with black hair and a brown beard steps forward. I don’t know him, but maybe he’s my daddy?

“Rachel.” He takes the woman’s arm and pulls her back.

And even though he keeps his voice quiet, and he’s a long way away, I still hear him. “No, Rachel. We have to find out where she ? —”

“She’s out here on her own. Whoever was watching her doesn't deserve her. She could have been killed.”

“She’s not ours.”

The woman with the pretty brown hair and the green eyes grabs the front of his coat. “But we’ve always wanted a child, and this… this feels like it was meant to be. She came to us when we needed her the most.”

“Someone will miss her.”

“They won’t. And we’ve been out here for days. There’s no one here but us. Someone probably dumped her here.”

“Momma?” I try to sit up, but my head aches and my tummy feels strange.

She rushes over. “It’s okay, sweetie. Don’t try to stand. You’re still shaky. Let me carry you. Were you out here alone?”

I try to remember where I came from. “There was a bear. It chased me.”

Her arms tighten around me. “Evan, we have to help her.”

The man frowns down at me. “Were you with any other people?”

I think as hard as I can, but my head starts to hurt, so I stop. “No.”

The woman looks at the man.

He sighs. “I’ll start packing our things.”

The city is loud and strange and I don’t like it.

“I don’t like it here, Momma,” I whisper, hating the cars outside and the smelly streets. “I want to go home.”

She crouches in front of me. “You are home, sweetie.”

The apartment feels small. I want grass and blue skies, not stinky stairs and someone banging something downstairs.

The world feels too small.

“I don’t like it.”

“You will, Rylie,” Momma says.

My name.

She told me in the car in case the fall in the forest made me forget.

Rylie Cooper.

It feels as strange as this apartment, but Momma is happy.

She bought me so many new things: pink dresses, yellow skirts, and even a doll with long, blond hair. I asked her what happened to everything I had before, and she said it was old, so she threw it away.

I don’t want to tell her I don’t like the doll with the yellow hair, so I smile instead.

“Okay, Momma. I’ll try to like it better.”

She smiles and kisses my forehead. Then she shows me to my room Daddy spent all day decorating just for me.

“Daddy will take care of you.” Momma coughs.

Her face is white, and she smells sick.

Her hand is thin when she squeezes mine.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The man in black throws dirt into the hole in the ground, and Daddy is crying.

He’s holding my hand too tight, and I don’t like it.

I pull my hand free and look at all the people I don’t know.

Everyone is sniffing and wiping their faces.

“I want to go home, Daddy,” I tell him.

But he doesn’t hear me.

I bang on the door. “Daddy, let me out!”

And I wait, but he won’t come. He never comes when I cry.

I sit on the top step in the basement and wipe tears from my cheeks.

I didn’t mean to growl at him, but I have a wolf inside of me, and she sometimes growls when he glares at me. He blames me for Momma dying.

It wasn’t my fault that she got sick. But he says that if Rachel hadn’t taken me, God wouldn’t have punished her.

When I ask him what he means, he yells at me to shut up, and he drinks more of the stuff that smells bad.

The men came again today.

“You sure she’s a werewolf?” One man stares, and his eyes are hungry. He’s wearing a smart blue suit and a black tie. “That would be worth a lot of money. Maybe in a circus.”

“She growled, and I think she has claws sometimes.”

They all stare harder, and I huddle in the corner of the basement, wanting them to go away.

“We’ll have to see her do something,” another man says. “We need to know she’s worth something.”

“We’ll need to provoke a response,” Daddy says.

His eyes are hard now. Always hard and cold. He doesn’t look at me unless it’s when he brings strange men down to stare at me and poke my arm with their bony fingers.

I yelp when a man jabs me in my belly with his walking stick.

They stare at me, disappointed.

He jabs again.

I cry out, pushing his stick away. “Stop it.”

Thwack!

The stick bounces off my shoulder, and he moves to do it again, but my wolf doesn’t like it.

She growls.

The men look pleased.

The man in the blue suit nods. “I’ll take her. Have her ready to go. I’ll be back in the morning with a cage.”

They walk up the basement stairs, and Daddy closes the door.

I hear him lock it with the padlock.

Cage.

My wolf growls in my head at the word. She doesn’t like it.

I don’t know what it means, but if it’s like the basement, I don’t like it either.

Daddy drops the tray in front of me. “Eat.”

The macaroni and cheese is burned on the bottom, and the fish sticks are dry.

“I don’t want to go in a cage, Daddy,” I whisper.

He glares at me. “I told you not to call me that.” He stabs a finger at me, and I recoil. “It’s your fault. This is all your fault. Rachel…” His eyes fill with tears. He blinks them, and they turn hard again. “This is your punishment for killing Rachel.”

He walks away, but now I know the cage is something bad. Maybe even worse than the basement.

I chase after him. “No! Don’t leave me here.”

My bare feet are loud on the basement steps.

Slap, slap, slap.

He whirls around, tries to close the door, but I push past him. I’m stronger than he is, even though I’m small. His eyes are wide as he loses his balance, and he reaches out to grab something, but he’s already falling.

Thud, thud.

CRACK.

There’s a circle of red around his head, and I watch it get bigger as his eyes stare at nothing.

Hate the smell.

But it makes me hungry.

I run to the front door and pull it open. It’s cold and I don’t have shoes, but I don’t get a coat. The men with the cage might come back and punish me.

I didn’t kill Momma, but they’ll blame me for this.

And I run and run until I don’t know where I am.

Hungry.

Cold.

Tired.

“Hey, little girl. It’s okay; you can come out of there. We won’t hurt you.” The two men crouch in front of me.

I stay right where I am, squished in the corner of a smelly dumpster, staring at the men’s dark blue uniforms and wondering how I can get past them.

“Kat!”

My eyes snap open.

I’m in bed with no memory of having gotten into it, and I’m naked under the sheet.

Aren is wearing sweats, lying on his side, inches from me.

His hand is on my head, and after a pause, he resumes stroking the hair back from my face. “How are you feeling?”

A deep line brackets his eyebrows. He looks so worried. I think that’s the only reason I don’t shove him off the bed or get out myself is because of how worried he looks.

“What happened?” My voice is hoarse.

He shakes his head slightly. “I don’t know. You fell.” He swallows. “I thought someone shot you.”

The memory of that sharp, ringing sound makes me feel cold. “What was it?”

“Hunters. Off our property.” He gives me a searching look, then slides his fingers into my hair and draws me against him, my face against his chest. “I remembered what happened to you before.”

He thought Cristofer had come back to shoot me again, this time with a bullet instead of a crossbow bolt.

I should move away, but I don’t want to.

He studies me, frowning. “You shifted and I didn’t know why.”

“I had a memory.” I swallow. “It was bad.”

“That makes sense.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “It’s what pups will do when they feel threatened. Immediately shift.” He kisses my forehead. “And your wolf was trying to protect you.”

I close my eyes and let his scent ground me in the present.

I don’t realize I’m shaking until he draws the sheet up higher over me and tucks me more firmly against him. “Can I get you something? Food water? You’ve been out for a while.”

I shake my head. “My parents?”

He releases an odd chuckle. “They checked in on you and said it looked like I was managing okay.”

“My dad hates you.”

“Yup,” he concedes. “Which is why I found it so strange he didn’t kick me out of my own room.”

“I was trapped in the worst nightmare ever.” My eyes burn. “But it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. All the things I could never remember.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I thought I would want to be alone. To mull over everything I learned about myself. To be with the family I now remember. And I do want those things. But right now, I think I want to be held.

“I remember everything,” I say quietly. “I was running down the porch steps with Sophia…”

It takes a while to tell him everything. I can’t believe I remembered so much. Then I remind myself it isn’t a dream or a nightmare that will fade away the longer I’m awake.

This is real.

Memory .

Several minutes later, I wipe tears from my eyes. “They took me. They knew I wasn’t theirs, that I belonged with someone else, and they took me away from my family and my home because what they wanted was more important than me.”

They could have gone to the cops if they thought someone had abandoned me in the middle of nowhere. Instead, they gave me a new name, new clothes, and made me into their child. Rylie Cooper. And they lied. They lied to me about everything.

A few weeks ago, I was certain that I would work a stable job in the city and have a fancy apartment. I thought it was everything I always wanted, but it wasn’t.

Family. A home.

I’ve put together all the pieces of my past that never seemed to fit.

“I have my family back,” I whisper.