to set up some breeding exchanges with the Silas pack. Now, I know you’re not a current member,” he tells Torrez, “but you left in good standing, and if you’d make the introductions between me and Alpha Silas, I would be very grateful. I have a number of unmated females, and the packs nearby aren’t producing the same quality of shifter that clearly the Silas pack is,” he adds.
I fight the smile that wants to creep across my face and work hard not to laugh. I picture a whole van full of Brun look-alikes chasing the Silas pack wolves around, and I can’t wait to do everything in my power to make that happen. “Absolutely,” I assure Alpha Volkov. “As soon as we get back to Solace, we’ll speak with Alpha Silas and get things rolling.”
He pulls Torrez into another rough hug, and I don’t miss the look of irritation that Torrez sends me over his shoulder. I chuckle and then spot a familiar blond head of hair. I thank Fedor again and ask him to pass it along to Manya, and then I excuse myself from Fedor’s description of all of his eligible bachelorettes, to slowly make my way to where Sorik is sitting in a chair next to Vaughn. Seeing my dad again makes my whole chest ache, and I take some deep breaths as I approach them.
“Hey,” I greet Sorik when I get closer, and he pauses whatever he was saying and looks over at me with a smile.
“Hey there. How are you feeling?” he asks me, and I return his smile.
“I’m good, I should be asking you the same thing. Siah said you were hurt.”
Sorik waves away my concern. “It was nothing a little magic couldn’t fix,” he teases with a wink, and he turns to watch Siah make his way towards us. Sorik’s smile turns beaming as he takes in the runes all over Siah’s arms and hands, and he turns to me, radiating pure happiness.
“It looks like congratulations are in order,” he tells us, and I chuckle at the bashful smile that sneaks across Siah’s face.
He clears his throat. “Thank you,” Siah finally tells him, and he reaches over and takes my hand.
“Chosen, and by Grier’s daughter.” Sorik shakes his head in happy disbelief, but I see a hint of sadness in his eyes. “I’m overjoyed for you, friend, and I’m grateful to see some good come from all the bad.” Sorik looks away for a moment, and I can practically feel the loss and loneliness that covers him like a cloak.
I feel like I’m intruding on his pain uninvited, so I pull my gaze away and let Sorik be alone with his emotions for a minute. I focus my attention on Vaughn and work to ignore the stab of sadness in my chest when I take in his vacant look. I’m not sure what to do, so I just stare at him as he stares at nothing.
“He follows commands, oddly enough,” Sorik announces, and I look over to find him watching Vaughn. “If you tell him to eat, he will. If you tell him to walk, he will. But he doesn’t respond or show any indication that he can hear me or knows who I am. I activated the runes behind my ear to talk in his head, but he doesn’t talk back. When I share how I feel with the runes on my chest, he stays exactly as he is now.”
Listening to Sorik talk about Vaughn as his compeer, someone he’s connected to through runes and magic and love, hits me deeply. I picture any of my Chosen in this position, one of them lost while the others try to find him, and it breaks my fucking heart. It makes Vaughn as a person so much more real to me and not just this figment in my head with Lachlan’s face and my eyes.
I look at him and know he’s my dad, but that’s just an empty title to me at this point. I don’t really know what it is to have a dad, and so there’s no emotion other than maybe loss that I can really associate with the lost man in the chair in front of me. I know he’s Lachlan’s twin, but I don’t know what his personality was like. Would he have resented my existence like Lachlan did? Would he have looked at me and felt the absence of his mate? Or would he have seen me, his