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Hudson

“And why can’t we force ourselves in again?” I asked, growing gradually more frustrated and tired of waiting. It’d been close to five hours since Oliver had gone and shut himself in one of our rooms upstairs, which didn’t have a way to unlock it from the outside.

“Grey said that we should wait for him to come to us,” Hayes replied as his jaw clenched, showing me that he was almost at the end of his rope.

I groaned, “Listen, I’m not sure we should be getting advice from him even if he is a therapist. I mean, come on, he fucked his patient. Doesn’t that like disqualify you from practicing or something?”

“Just because he shouldn’t be a therapist doesn’t mean he didn’t go to school and shit.”

“Okay, but do you seriously believe that if Lane had locked himself in a room, that Grey wouldn’t break the lock?” I sighed.

Hayes scrubbed his hands down his face. He blew out a harsh breath, swinging his legs off the couch. I quirked a brow in silent question; he nodded.

“Thank fuck,” I muttered, getting up to follow my brother up the stairs.

As we reached the door to the guest bedroom, Hayes called out, “Oliver, you have ten seconds to unlock this door, or we’re going to break it down. I figure you understand which would be the best option.”

We heard no movement from behind the door as we counted down. I shouldered the door at the count of one, putting my full strength behind it. The wood splintered as the door swung open to hit a dresser with which Oliver must’ve used to barricade the door. It was easily pushed out of the way, giving us access.

It took no less than a few seconds to see that the room was empty.

Hayes stood in the doorway behind me, breathing like he’d been gut-punched.

“He’s gone,” I said, something twisting in my gut. Not rage. Not heartbreak. Something uglier —because it felt so much like being denied . And I hated being denied.

“He is,” Hayes said finally, like he couldn’t believe the words. “Where the fuck did he go? Shit. Do those windows open?” He pointed to the large windows lining the far end of the room.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” I shouted as I rushed forward, finding that one was unlatched. I pushed the glass up, noticing what were probably Oliver’s fingerprints.

“This is the second floor. How did he get down without killing himself?” Hayes mumbled, poking his head out of the open window. “Maybe he crawled to the roof’s edge here and hung down?” Yeah, I wasn’t picturing that. “He would’ve still had like a ten-foot drop.”

“I don’t think that’s what we need to be focusing on, brother.”

Hayes pulled back inside and glared at me. “I’m trying to determine if he’s injured or not, asshole.”

“Probably, right? But he’s not dead on the grass down there. Check the backyard cameras. He could’ve done this hours ago.”

Hayes grabbed his phone from his back pocket, quickly bringing up our home security app.

I looked around the room again while Hayes tried to find our little runaway.

No note.

Not even a goodbye.

Not that we would’ve let him go if he’d tried to say goodbye, but still.

“Can’t you check them faster? Come on,” I snarled, hating how uncomfortable I was. Fucking feelings. Who knew?

“Give me a fucking minute, be grateful I haven’t found him yet. I started at the time he would—” Hayes’s eyes narrowed at the small screen.

“What? Find him?” I ripped the phone out of his hand, scanning the frame until I locked onto fluffy brown hair.

Bolting across the backyard, with a slight limp in his gait, Oliver slipped through the gap in the treeline like a shadow in flight. I was both relieved and angered. Relieved that he hadn’t gone to the road at the front of the property, but also angered that he hadn’t. Why had he chosen to run into the fucking forest and not to the road to either get picked up or walk in the general direction of civilization? But no, our tiny, five-foot-four escapee had ventured into the woods of Washington. Either he hadn’t been thinking clearly, or he had experience with the outdoors that we didn’t know about.

“That was just a little over ten minutes ago,” I said, a rush of relief flowing through me as I looked at the timestamp.

Hayes and I didn’t speak as we bounded down the stairs, running to the back of the house, and shoving the door open. The cold early morning air all about slapped my face, but I didn’t feel it. Adrenaline smothered everything. I could hear the forest breathing in front of us—branches shaking, leaves stirring. He was so close.

Hopefully, he was prepared to be hunted.

We gave chase.

The woods weren’t tame. They were wild, raw, thorn-laced. I pushed through without hesitation, ducking under branches, boots tearing into soft soil. Hayes stayed at my side, matching pace like he always did, eyes sparkling at the trail of broken ferns and snapped twigs before us.

The air was sharp with pine and panic, the sun not yet risen. He’d gone in without light. No supplies. No plan. No shoes.

He didn’t have a chance.

“Where do you think you’re going, pet?” Hayes muttered low beside me, not expecting an answer. He was smiling—barely. The kind that came with fangs.

I should’ve been furious still at his escape. Maybe that was what Oliver was expecting—it did make logical sense; running away from your captors would make them mad. Usually.

What Oliver hadn’t known was how much we fucking loved primal play.

“Did he think we’d just let him go?” I asked, not even to Hayes, maybe just to the trees.

We found a spot where it looked like he’d slipped—a patch of churned earth where he must’ve lost his footing. Hayes crouched and brushed his fingers through the disturbed dirt, then nodded forward. “Come on, obviously he got up. Let’s find him before he manages to hurt himself any more than he already has.”

My chest ached, and not from the brisk air scraping my lungs. I didn’t get it. Well, not completely. We hadn’t hurt him—not really . We’d held back, hadn’t we? And the little brat liked pain anyway.

I dodged a low-hanging branch and gritted my teeth. Something inside me pulsed louder than the sound of my footsteps—something like frustration, or maybe guilt, though I hated that word. I wasn’t built for shame.

But I was starting to realize Oliver could make me feel it.

Why the fuck did he run? We’d given him space, hadn’t we? We tried to be patient and care in the only way we knew how. We didn’t punish him when he pulled away. We backed off. That counted for something. That was restraint.

And yet he still had jumped off a roof to get away from us. What did he think of us as? Monsters?

Maybe we were, but he didn’t have to run. He could’ve talked to us and told us what was wrong. If he had just said it— whatever it was —we would’ve fixed it. We were new with feelings, but we’d figure it all out for him.

I wanted to scream. Not at Oliver, but at the fact that something in us kept breaking around him. Every word he said had weight. Every silence even heavier.

He made us care . And now he was out here, alone, terrified, hurt, probably freezing—and it was our fault, even if I didn’t know how or why.

But we’d find him, save him. And when we did, he was going to talk. He was going to look me in the eye and tell me why he ran—why he didn’t trust us. And then, no matter how broken or dumb the reasons were, we’d find a way to fix it.

Because letting him go wasn’t an option. It never had been.

Hayes stopped so suddenly that I nearly collided with him.

He knelt again, brushing aside a patch of brittle leaves with the back of his hand. “There.” He pointed to a strip of fabric snagged on a thorny bush. A thread clung to the branch like it didn’t want to let go.

I grabbed the branch and snapped it clean off. “He’s bleeding,” I muttered, seeing the faint rust color on the thorns. Hayes’s jaw tightened beside me. We didn’t say it, but the same thought was eating both of us.

He was hurt. Again. Without us there to make it better. Hadn’t he listened all those times we’d told him that he couldn’t survive without us? That he needed us to take care of him and keep him safe?

We kept moving, quieter now, following the trail of broken twigs and crushed emerald moss. Hayes kept glancing toward the treetops, as if expecting to see him up there like a spooked bird. I watched the ground, looking for the next sign—a shoe print, another scrap of fabric, a drop of red.

Every second stretched. My thoughts frayed.

Was he crying? Did he think we’d kill him for running off?

I didn’t want him to be afraid of us like that. That wasn’t the point. That was never the point. Sure, I wanted him afraid sometimes, but not afraid we’d fucking slaughter him.

He was supposed to belong with us.

He was ours.

And somehow, he’d gone from seemingly understanding that, enjoying it, to whatever this was.

He wasn’t allowed to leave us.

We needed him. Oh.

Was that it? The word.

“I think he left because we didn’t say it back,” I said.

“What are you talking about? Say what back?”

“Love. He said he loved us. That’s an important word to him, and maybe when he said it and we didn’t, he got so upset he ran?”

“One word? Really?”

“Think about it, Hayes. He was perfectly fine up until Lane fucking proposed. And then he got all worked up, said he loved us, and now he’s gone.”

Hayes grunted, “Fuckin—Okay, yeah. I think you’re probably right. So do we just need to make a point of saying it to him? Problem solved?”

“I think? Grey says it to his boy.”

“Course he does. He should’ve told us that it was important. He really is awful at the therapy stuff.”

A strong gust of wind shifted the trees, and for a second, I thought I heard something—twigs snapping, hurried breathing. I froze, hand shooting out to stop Hayes beside me. We both went silent, listening intently.

Another crunch. Ahead and to the left.

My heart thudded painfully. “That way,” I whispered, and we started moving again, slower now, more deliberate. I didn’t want to spook him again—not when he was this close.

We crested a low ridge and spotted a deeper indentation in the forest floor. Oliver had skidded here, sliding down through wet leaves and mud.

Hayes bent low to examine the spot, then looked up at me, something unfamiliar in his eyes. It was the same look he had when he found a dying bird once, curled in a nest of barbed wire behind our old apartment complex. We’d both stood there too long, neither of us knowing what to do with something fragile. We weren’t made for gentle things.

Except we wanted to be for Oliver—we wanted to try.

Hayes muttered, “He’s slowing down by a lot.”

A branch cracked up ahead, sharp and close.

We both stilled.

The forest around us had gone silent. Then… the unmistakable sound of feet scrambling, slipping against roots. My eyes surely lit up from excitement. I licked my lips.

Hello, Oliver.