Get It 24

The front door gives under my hand and Mom is at the kitchen table. She sits there with her tea and that expression, mouth soft, eyes already finished with whatever conversation she’s decided we’re having.

She knows. The posture says everything: spine straight, hands loosely wrapped around the mug, chin tipped at the angle she uses when the verdict has been delivered and all that’s left is sentencing.

“Sit down, sweetheart.” Her voice is warm in that specific way—the warmth that precedes surgery. “We should talk about what Max has been doing.”

I don’t sit. My bag hits the floor and my fingers curl around the back of the nearest chair because standing is the only power I have in this room. “What do you know?”

“I know he went to Richard. Asked about your father, the Eastern Ridge.” She takes a sip, unhurried. “And I know you sat there listening without coming to me first.”

“Coming to you first.” I repeat it back like tasting something rotten. “So you could tell me what to think before I had a chance to think at all.”

“I would have prepared you.” Her eyes flicker—the machine behind the mother adjusting its approach. “That story is painful, Kylie. You shouldn’t have heard it from him.”

“Painful for who?” The question drops between us and she doesn’t flinch, which tells me more than any answer would.

She sets the mug down and folds her hands. Here it comes—the playbook, the sequence I’ve lived inside for thirteen years: guilt first, then fear, then the memory.

“Every sacrifice, every spell, every year of hiding inside a pack that would kill us both—” Her voice catches. “I did it to keep you alive. You know that.”

My knuckles go white on the chair back. The guilt lever—she pulls it and my chest tightens on cue, Pavlovian and pathetic.

“If the pack finds out what you are, they’ll put you down, Kylie.” She leans forward, and the softness in her voice presses against my windpipe. “A hybrid with an unstable wolf—you don’t survive that.”

“So you keep telling me.” My stomach drops, right on schedule. The fear lever, also functional, also working exactly as designed.

Then she reaches for the third lock—the one that has never once failed to shut me down completely. Her face softens into something resembling grief. “You know what happened last time. You remember what your wolf did to your father.”

And this time—with Max’s voice still turning in my head, six names in order, six men carrying the same memory in their bodies—my brain does something it was never built to do. It does the math.

My mother alters memories one person at a time. She told me herself—Darlene at the market, the combat instructor, the neighbor. Precise, individual work—one mind, one sitting.

But Dad’s death at the Eastern Ridge requires six soldiers to carry the same detailed, scar-verified memory of watching a man die the way he didn’t die. Thomas lost his arm and Mark still limps—these aren’t planted details, these are men who bled beside my father.

She can’t do that. She can’t rewrite six independent minds with matching wounds and matching grief. The only memory she needed to fabricate was one—a single false image placed inside an eight-year-old girl who loved her mother enough to believe anything.

The kitchen tilts. My vision narrows to Mom’s hands around the mug—steady, manicured—the hands that held my face while she fed me a murder and called it the truth.

“It’s fake.” My voice comes out scraped raw. “The memory—my father dying under my hands—you made that up.”

“Kylie, listen to me—” She reaches across the table but I’m already past her hand, already gone.

“Six witnesses, Mom.” My grip on the chair is the only thing keeping me vertical. “Six wolves who bled beside him and carry that day in their skin. You can’t rewrite six people—you told me yourself, one at a time.”

“Everything I did was to protect you.” She stands, the mug abandoned, palms out—surrender posture she deploys when patience is the real weapon. “You have to understand the full—”

“Protect me?” A sound rips out of my throat that doesn’t qualify as a laugh. “You put a fake murder inside your daughter’s head. You let me believe I killed my own father so I’d never let my wolf out.”

“That is not what happened.” Her voice stays level but something shifts behind her eyes—a recalculation, old architecture adjusting to new weight. “You are simplifying something you don’t understand.”

“Then explain it.” I step forward and my legs are shaking but they hold. “Tell me the memory is real. Look me in the eye and tell me an eight-year-old girl killed her father.”

Silence. The kitchen clock ticks three times and each one drops into the space between us like a stone into a well.

“That’s what I thought.” My throat burns and I swallow against it. “Thirteen years I’ve been dragging that memory around like a corpse tied to my ankle, and you tied the knot.”

The softness drains from her face. What replaces it is older, colder—a version I’ve glimpsed but never seen hold still long enough to study. She doesn’t confirm the memory is fake. She doesn’t deny it.

“There are things about your father’s death—about what Callum found, what he was going to do—that you have no concept of.” Each word deliberate, a door left barely open on a room I’m not invited into. “You think this is simple. It isn’t.”

“I don’t care what it is.” My voice shakes but the words hold their shape. “I’m done running, I’m done hiding, and I am never letting you inside my head again.”

“If you walk out that door without hearing what I know—” She pauses, and the pause itself is calculated, engineered to make me stay. “You’ll be making decisions based on half a story.”

“I’ve been making decisions based on a lie for thirteen years.” I pick my bag off the floor, my hands shaking so badly the strap slides twice before I grip it. “Half a story is an upgrade.”

I walk toward the door. No footsteps follow, no soft voice chasing me, no final manipulation dressed as tenderness. At the threshold I turn, because some part of me needs to see what’s left of my mother when the last lever breaks.

Hope stands where I left her, hands at her sides. The expression on her face is something I have never seen in twenty-one years of reading her every shift for survival—not anger, not calculation, not the smooth reorganization that suggests she always has another play.

Something closer to fear. Not pointed at me—pointed past me, at whatever door I just kicked open, at whatever comes next now that the cage is empty. My mother is terrified of what I’m about to set in motion, and for the first time in my life, she can’t stop it.

The latch clicks behind me, and the sound carries the weight of every lock she ever put on me finally breaking at once.