Get It 17

Her hand closes around my wrist before Max’s footsteps fade from the hallway. Mom doesn’t speak—she pulls, and I follow, because the alternative is a sound that carries through walls where her husband sleeps.

Her bedroom door shuts and the lock turns. She releases my wrist and stands between me and the exit, still in her dinner dress, pearl earrings catching the lamplight. The performance of the perfect Luna hasn’t come off yet, but her eyes have.

“I watched him walk out of your room.” Her voice is low, every syllable placed with the care of someone sealing a verdict. “Two in the morning, barefoot, carrying his shirt. So don’t waste my time, Kylie.”

My mouth opens on a denial that dies before it reaches air. She doesn’t need confirmation—she needs me to know she saw, and that seeing is a weapon she’s already loaded.

“The glamour. The suppression. My marriage to Richard.” She steps closer, and the room contracts around us both. “Fifteen years of keeping us alive in a pack that would bury us if they knew what we are. And you’re dismantling it because you can’t keep your hands off a boy.”

“He’s not just a boy.” The words rip out before the fear can swallow them, and my own voice sounds foreign—louder, rawer, something that’s been locked underground and just found the stairs. “You know what he is to me. You’ve always known.”

“I know what you’ve decided he is.” Her eyebrow lifts a fraction. “A crush you’ve promoted to a catastrophe.”

“Pretending the bond doesn’t exist hasn’t made it weaker.” My hands ball into fists at my sides because if she sees the tremor she’ll read it as leverage. “It’s made me less alive. Every year I spend invisible, I lose another piece of myself, and you hand me the knife and call it love.”

Something crosses her face—fast, fractured, gone before I can catch it. Her composure cracks for one breath, and underneath I glimpse raw alarm—a woman watching her home fail. Then it reassembles, harder, the mask rebuilt with reinforced walls.

“Less alive.” She strips my words to syllables she can weigh and discard. “You want alive? Let’s talk about options.”

She paces—three steps left, three steps right, heels silent on the carpet. “Option one: I tell Richard his son has been sleeping with his stepdaughter. You become the girl who seduced her way into the alpha’s household.”

My ribs compress around my lungs and every breath comes at a cost I can count. She’s not threatening—she’s reading a menu, calm and thorough, deciding between appetizers.

“Option two: I arrange a transfer. Packs in the northern territories take in strays—by tomorrow morning you’re someone else’s problem.” She stops pacing and faces me, hands clasped at her waist. “Or option three: I let the suppression drop and let this pack discover what you really are.”

Every option opens onto the same empty room—one where Max doesn’t exist, where the girl who stood in that corridor two minutes ago with his warmth still on her skin vanishes into her mother’s choices. My nails find my palms and press until the sting answers back.

“Dropping the suppression exposes you too.” My voice comes out thin, a thread stretched between us. “You’d lose everything you built.”

“I’d survive it.” Her chin lifts, and the certainty in her posture isn’t performance—it’s bedrock. “I’ve survived worse than this pack. You haven’t.”

I open my mouth to push back—and then she does something new. Her hand extends toward my chest, hovering three inches above my sternum, and the air between her palm and my skin thickens into something heavy and deliberate and wrong.

My wolf screams. Not a surge—a howl that reverberates through every bone, vibrating my teeth, blurring my vision gold before the color whites out entirely. My knees buckle and I catch myself on the dresser, fingers scrambling across wood while my chest caves around the tightening.

“Stop—” The word barely forms. My lungs are fighting for space inside a ribcage that keeps shrinking, and the sound my wolf makes as she’s crushed deeper is something I’ll carry into every quiet room for the rest of my life.

Mom holds the magic three more seconds. Then she drops her hand, flexes her fingers, and the pressure releases—not fully, not back to normal, but enough that I can drag in a breath that tastes like copper and static.

I stay bent over the dresser, gasping. Where my wolf used to press behind my ribs there’s almost nothing—a faint pulse, dim and distant, like hearing a heartbeat through concrete.

She didn’t reinforce the cage. She buried it under another one, and the silence inside me is so total my ears ring with it.

“You have no idea what I do for you.” Mom sits on the edge of her bed and crosses her ankles, composed, like she didn’t just reach inside her daughter and crush something living. “The fires I put out while you’re busy feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Instructor Hale.” She counts on her fingers, casual as a grocery list. “Noticed you healed a sprained ankle in two days instead of two weeks. Curious man—asked questions, made notes. I had coffee with him on a Thursday, and by Friday his notes said something different.”

My hands grip the dresser edge while the room tilts and settles. Each name she drops is another stone added to the pile between us, and my knuckles drain white around the wood.

“Mrs. Walker, next door at the old house.” Mom examines her nails in the lamplight. “Heard something through the walls—your wolf surging during a nightmare, sounds no human girl makes. One afternoon visit, one conversation. She remembers a lovely evening of nothing unusual.”

She says it the way she’d read a performance review—look how many fires I’ve put out while you slept. Individual people, individual fixes. One cup of coffee, one rewritten memory, one person at a time.

“People’s memories are fragile things, Kylie.” Her voice drops into something almost tender, and the combination makes my skin crawl and my throat close around itself. “One afternoon, one conversation, and what they saw becomes what I need them to have seen.”

I should be horrified. Part of me is—the part still gasping, still reaching for a wolf she can barely feel. But the rest hears what she wants me to hear: devotion, sacrifice, a mother who rewrites reality so her daughter survives another week. The invoice for my existence, and the total is her life.

“Okay.” The word scrapes out hollow, and I release the dresser one finger at a time because my hands have forgotten how to unclench on their own. “I hear you, Mom.”

She stands, smooths her dress, crosses to where I’m still swaying on unsteady legs. Her hand cups my face the way it always does—gentle, steady, the touch of a woman who loves you exactly enough to take you apart and call it maintenance.

“I made you invisible to protect you.” Her thumb traces my cheekbone, her voice so soft it barely disturbs the air between us. “Don’t make me make you disappear.”