Chapter Text
The house was a warren. That was the word for it, though no one in the family would have used it too literally, too careful, it's not the language of people who built additions when they needed them and shrugged at the small cracks in the foundation where the desert had shifted underneath. But Quin thought it sometimes, lying in his bed in the back corner where the original structure had been extended twice, once for Felisha when she was born and again when she came home mated with a husband and a belly already swelling. The Rorich house sprawled low and stubborn across its plot of packed red dirt, single-story but deep, rooms tacked onto rooms in a logic that made sense only if you'd grown up here and knew that the large bathroom off the kitchen used to be a closet, and the closet where they kept the coats used to be the back door before Wallace closed it in and cut a new one six feet over because Alisiah said the old door let in too much wind.
The yard was bare earth, hard as pavement in summer, dust that rose in clouds when the wind came through. A few scrubby plants that refused to die. The truck parked at an angle because the driveway had never been poured level. The clothesline sagging between two posts. The whole place looked like it had been dropped there by accident and decided to stay out of spite, which was more or less the family ethos, and Quin loved it the way you love a thing that has always been exactly what it is without apology.
His room was the smallest without any expansion. A bed shoved against one wall, a tall narrow dresser against the other, a single window that looked out onto the side of the house where the air conditioning unit dripped onto the dirt in a permanent dark stain. The walls were thin enough that he could hear everything. Felisha's toddler babbling in the pre-dawn dark, the infant's wet, gasping cries that meant another night of no sleep for his sister, Isiah's low murmur as he took the baby from her so she could collapse back into bed for twenty more minutes. On the other side, Jemma and Jake no kids yet, but loud in their own right, always fighting about something or laughing about something or, occasionally, making enough noise that young couples often do that Quin had learned to turn his music up and pretend he couldn't hear.
This morning it was his father Wallace who woke him. Not intentionally. Wallace didn't do anything intentionally quiet. His voice came booming from the kitchen, cutting through the walls like they were paper, demanding to know where the hell anyone had put the truck keys, he needed them ten minutes ago, someone must have moved them because they weren't where he left them and they were always where he left them. Quin lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, listening to his father's voice ricochet off every surface in the house.
Alisiah's response came quieter, but it cut through anyway. That was his mothers gift. She never raised her voice. She just spoke, and somehow the whole house heard her. "They're on the counter, Wallace. Where you left them. Under the mail."
A pause. Then Wallace again, sheepish but not apologetic: "Well, how was I supposed to see them under the mail?"
"By looking, honey."
Quin closed his eyes and felt the faint pull of a smile at the corner of his mouth. This was every morning. This was the sound of home. His father's bluster, his mother's unshakable calm, the two of them operating as they always had, Wallace loud enough for both of them and Alisiah quiet enough to make the loudness irrelevant. He should get up. He had work in an hour. But the bed was warm, the room cool, and the ceiling was familiar and there was a pressure sitting on his chest that he didn't want to think about, so he lay there a little longer, listening to the baby cry and Felisha's exhausted shushing and the clatter of someone probably Jake dropping a pan in the kitchen.
The future pressed against him from all sides. He didn't look at it directly. He just felt it, the way you feel a storm coming before the sky changes.
He got up.
The kitchen always felt too small for nine people, but nine people used it anyway. The table could seat six if everyone squeezed, which meant three people were always eating standing up or perched on the counter or leaning against the wall with a plate balanced in one hand. This morning it was Quin at the counter, Jake at the stove shoveling eggs into his mouth between flipping more eggs for someone else, and Wallace already halfway out the door, still talking, keys finally in hand.
Alisiah sat at the table with her paperwork spread in front of her, a mug of coffee at her elbow, her reading glasses perched on her nose. She was dressed for the alpha's office in neat slacks, a patterend blouse the color of desert sand, her hair pulled back in the low knot she wore when she meant business. She didn't look up as Wallace kissed the top of her head in passing, didn't look up as he bellowed something about being back by noon to help watch the grandkids, didn't look up as the door slammed behind him. She just turned a page, made a note in the margin, and took another sip of coffee.
Felisha was at the table too, or trying to be. The toddler was in the high chair beside her, a small tyrant of a child with Felisha's dark hair and Isiah's quiet, unblinking stare, and he was refusing breakfast with the kind of commitment that suggested a future in politics. Felisha looked like she hadn't slept in a year. Probably she hadn't. The baby was four months old and colicky, and the toddler had recently discovered that bedtime was optional if you screamed long enough. Her face was pale, shadows under her eyes deep enough to bruise, her hair pulled into a messy knot at the back of her head. She was trying to coax a spoonful of something orange and unidentifiable into the toddler's mouth. The toddler was having none of it.
"Come on, baby," Felisha murmured, her voice soft and frayed at the edges. "Just one bite. Just one."
The toddler turned his head away, mouth clamped shut, and swatted at the spoon with one chubby hand. Orange mush splattered across the tray.
Quin grinned from his spot at the counter, toast in hand. "Kid's got standards. Can't blame him. What is that, anyway?"
Felisha shot him a look that might have been a glare if she'd had the energy. "Sweet potato. It's good for him."
"Looks like something that came out of a swamp."
"Quin..."
"I'm just saying. Maybe he's holding out for pancakes. I would."
Jemma snorted from the other end of the table, not looking up from her phone. "You'd hold out for literally anything that isn't vegetables. Don't project your garbage diet onto a toddler."
"My diet is fine."
"Your diet is motor oil and whatever you can buy at a gas station."
"That's not true. I also eat tacos."
"Wow... Groundbreaking..."
Jake laughed from the stove, mouth full of eggs. Felisha sighed and set the spoon down, giving up for the moment. The baby started crying from the other room thin, reedy wails that climbed in pitch until they were almost unbearable. Felisha closed her eyes. Quin watched her face go very still, the way it did when she was trying not to break.
Isiah appeared in the doorway. He didn't say anything. He never did. He just crossed the kitchen in a few long strides, scooped the baby out of the bassinet in the corner. When had that gotten moved to the kitchen? Quin hadn't even noticed and watched as he started the gentle rocking-walking motion that every parent in the world learned by necessity. The baby quieted slightly, still fussing but no longer screaming, and Felisha opened her eyes and looked at her husband with something that might have been love or might have been gratitude or might have just been the relief of not having to stand up again.
"Thank you," she said, so quietly Quin almost didn't hear it.
Isiah nodded. Didn't smile. Didn't speak. Just kept walking, back and forth along the length of the kitchen, the baby tucked against his chest. He was tall and lean and moved like someone who was used to carrying weight without complaint. Quin liked him. Always had. Isiah didn't try to compete with the Rorich volume, didn't try to make himself heard over Wallace's bluster or Jemma's sharp tongue. He just existed, steady and quiet, and somehow that was what worked. Felisha had known what she was doing when she brought him home as her one of her possible mate paths.
Quin bit into his toast and watched his sister slump back in her chair, one hand pressed to her forehead. She looked so young. She was twenty. She had two kids. She'd been mated at sixteen and had her first baby at eighteen and her second at nineteen, and somewhere in there the girl Quin used to get into trouble with had disappeared and been replaced by this exhausted woman who smiled less and cried more and still, somehow, held it all together with the help of family.
He wanted to say something. Wanted to ask if she was okay. But he didn't, because asking would make it real, and making it real would mean sitting with the answer, and Quin didn't know how to sit with anyone's grief. So he cracked a joke instead.
"Hey, Felisha. Your kid's got terrible taste. Just like you."
She looked at him. For a second he thought she might actually throw a fork at him. But then her mouth twitched, just barely, and she snorted a laugh that sounded more like a sigh.
"Shut up, Quin."
"I'm serious. Marrying Isiah? Questionable choice. This one's clearly got your judgment."
Isiah, still walking, glanced over his shoulder at Quin. Didn't smile. But there was something in his eyes that might have been amusement.
Jemma finally looked up from her phone, eyebrows raised. "You're one to talk. You're still trying to grow that beard."
Quin's hand went to his jaw automatically, fingers brushing over the prickly, uneven stubble that had been his constant companion for four years now. It was supposed to come in thick and bushy like Wallace's. It had not obliged. It was patchy and sparse and made him look, as Jemma had once informed him, like a teenager who'd glued hair to his face as a prank.
"It's coming in," he said, grinning despite himself.
"It's not."
"Give it time."
"Quin, it's been four years."
"Yeah, and it's getting there."
"It's really not."
Jake laughed again, louder this time, and even Alisiah's mouth twitched at the corner, though she still didn't look up from her paperwork. Quin grinned wider, let the joke sit between them, let it do what jokes always did fill the space, smooth the edges, keep everything light. The baby fussed. The toddler banged his fist on the high chair tray. Jemma went back to scrolling. Felisha picked up the spoon again, tried again, failed again.
This was the Rorich house. This was every morning. Chaos and warmth and too many people in too small a space, and Quin stood at the counter with his toast and felt it all around him like a sound he'd been hearing his whole life, so familiar he didn't know how to hear it as anything other than normal.
He didn't know yet that he was storing it. Didn't know that in a few weeks he'd be gone and the sound of this kitchen would be the thing he reached for in the middle of the night when the road felt too long and the silence felt too loud. He just ate his toast and listened to his family and let the morning move around him, easy and warm and entirely unaware that it was already turning into memory.
The shop was open-air on one side, a long garage bay with the rolling door wedged permanently halfway up, dust blowing through in ribbons every time the wind kicked up. The floor was stained black with old oil, the kind of staining that had soaked so deep into the concrete that no amount of degreaser would ever pull it out. The air smelled like gasoline and hot metal and the burnt-rubber stink of brake pads that had been ridden too hard for too long. Quin loved it. He'd been working here since he was eighteen, learning from the older mechanis first broad strokes, the philosophy of engines, the way a good mechanic listened with his whole body and then from Gene, the head mechanic, who'd taught him the specifics. How to diagnose a misfire by ear. How to tell when a transmission was about to go just by the way it shifted. How to rebuild a carburetor blindfolded, which Gene claimed he could do and Quin had never actually seen him attempt but believed anyway.
This morning Quin was under a truck, lying on his back on a rolling creeper, staring up at the undercarriage of a Chevy Silverado that had been making a rattle the owner swore was going to kill him in his sleep. The rattle was coming from the exhaust system a loose heat shield, probably, something that had worked itself free from its mounting bracket and was now vibrating against the pipe every time the engine ran. Easy fix. Ten minutes, maybe less.
He reached up, fingers finding the bracket by feel, and gave it a tug. The whole assembly shifted. Yeah. Loose. He'd need to pull it down, re-weld the bracket, bolt it back up. He rolled out from under the truck, sat up, and wiped his hands on a rag that was already black with grease.
"Heat shield," he called across the bay to Gene, who was elbow-deep in the engine of a sedan that had blown a head gasket two days ago. "Bracket's shot. I'll pull it and weld it."
Gene grunted, which was as close to approval as Gene ever got. He was a man of few words, most of them profane, and Quin had learned early that silence from Gene meant you were doing it right.
The other mechanic, a guy named Rory who was about Quin's age and had been working here for six months, leaned against the workbench and grinned at Quin. "Hey. Saw you at The Cantina with Kaia last week. You two a thing now, or what?"
Quin grinned back, easy, the grin that deflected everything. "Man, I don't know what you're talking about."
"Bullshit. You were all over each other."
"Was I?"
"Yeah, you were. Half the bar saw you leave together."
"Huh. Must've been someone else."
Rory laughed. "Sure. Someone else with your exact face and your exact shitty truck."
Gene looked up from the engine, one eyebrow raised. "Kaia Drummond?"
"Maybe," Quin said, still grinning.
"She's a good kid. Don't fuck her over."
"I'm not fucking her over. We're just hanging out."
"Hanging out," Gene repeated, flat, like he was tasting the words and finding them insufficient.
"Yeah. You know. Casual."
"She know it's casual?"
"She's the one who said it should be casual."
Gene grunted again and went back to the head gasket. Rory was still grinning, leaning on the workbench like he'd just won something. "So how many unmated she-wolves in this pack have you 'casually hung out with' at this point? I'm losing count."
Quin stood, brushing dust off his jeans, still grinning. "I don't keep count, man. That'd be weird."
"I bet Jemma keeps count."
"Jemma keeps count of everything. It's her hobby."
Rory laughed again. Gene didn't. Gene just shook his head slightly, the gesture of a man who'd seen this exact story play out a hundred times and knew how it ended. But he didn't say anything else, and Quin took that as permission to drop the subject. He grabbed the welder, pulled his mask down, and got to work.
Lunch was tacos. Always tacos. There was a stand on the edge of town, run by an older woman named Carla who'd been feeding the pack for as long as Quin had been alive. She made them the same way every time with buttery flour tortillas, slow-cooked pork, onions and cilantro, lime wedges on the side, hot sauce in three levels of intensity. Quin always got the medium. He wasn't trying to prove anything.
He sat on the tailgate of someone's truck in the parking lot, feet dangling, eating with his hands and letting the grease drip onto the paper plate in his lap. Two other guys from the pack were there Marco and Dev, both his age, both unmated, both in the same holding pattern Quin was in. Waiting. Living. Not thinking too hard about the fact that they were waiting.
Marco was talking about a party this weekend. Someone's cousin was visiting from another pack on a path search, there'd be a bonfire out in the plateaus, someone was bringing a keg, it'd be a whole thing. Did Quin want to come?
"Yeah, maybe," Quin said, mouth full of pork. "Depends on what shift I'm working."
"You're always working."
"I'm not always working."
"You're working right now."
"I'm eating lunch."
"You're eating lunch at work."
Quin grinned. "Okay, fair."
Dev leaned back against the truck bed, arms crossed, squinting into the sun. "Full moon's coming up. Friday, I think. You running with the pack or going solo?"
Quin shrugged. "Haven't decided. Probably solo. You know how I am."
"Yeah, I know how you are. You're a weird loner who climbs hot rocks by himself."
"It's called having hobbies, Dev."
"It's called being antisocial."
"I'm extremely social. I'm socializing with you right now."
"You're eating tacos and barely talking."
"That's peak socializing."
Marco laughed. Dev shook his head, grinning. The conversation drifted, easy and aimless, the kind of talk that didn't go anywhere because it didn't need to. Someone mentioned that Kaia had been seen with some other guy earlier in the week, maybe that guy from the trucking crew, the one with the truck that was too nice for someone who worked with his hands. Did Quin know about that?
Quin shrugged again, biting into his second taco. "We're not exclusive, man. She can do whatever she wants."
"You're not jealous?"
"Why would I be jealous?"
"Because she's hot."
"She is hot. And she's also not my girlfriend. So."
Marco studied him for a second, then shrugged. "Fair enough. You gonna settle down with anyone, or you just gonna keep doing this until you're forty?"
The question landed harder than Marco probably meant it to. Quin felt it in his chest, the tightness that came when someone got too close to the thing he didn't like inside. He grinned, deflecting automatically. "Yeah, no, I'm definitely gonna keep doing this until I'm forty. It's a solid plan."
"Your mom's gonna kill you."
"My mom's fine with it."
"Your mom is not fine with it."
"She hasn't said anything."
"Because she's your mom. She's waiting for you to figure it out yourself, idiot."
Dev snorted. "Good luck with that. Quin doesn't figure anything out. He just makes jokes until the problem goes away."
Quin pointed at him with the taco, grinning wider. "See? Dev gets it."
They laughed. Quin laughed with them. The sun was hot overhead, the kind of dry Nevada heat that baked into your skin and stayed there. He finished his tacos, crumpled the paper plate, tossed it into the bed of the truck. The conversation moved on. Someone mentioned hockey. Someone else mentioned a fight that had broken out at The Cantina last weekend, nothing serious, just two wolves who'd had too much to drink and too much to prove. Quin listened, contributed when it felt right, let the words wash over him when it didn't.
He didn't think about the fact that Marco's question "you gonna settle down with anyone' was the same question Wallace had been asking for the past year. He didn't think about the fact that his answer "I'm fine, it's fine, everything's fine" was starting to sound hollow even to him.
He just sat there in the sun and let the afternoon come, easy and undemanding, the way all his afternoons had come for as long as he could remember.
The plateau was his. That was how he thought of it, even though it wasn't, even though it belonged to the pack and the pack belonged to the desert and the desert belonged to no one. But this particular face of red rock, this vertical slice of stone that rose a hundred feet out of the flatland and caught the afternoon light like it was on fire this was his. He'd been climbing it since he was sixteen. First with ropes and gear, the way a human would, learning the physics of weight and friction and the angle at which your body had to cant to keep from peeling off the wall. Later as a wolf, claws sinking into holds that hadn't existed before, the stone yielding just enough to let him dig in and pull himself upward. Now he did both, depending on the mood, depending on what the climb needed.
Today he climbed as a man.
He parked the truck at the base, the engine ticking as it cooled, and stood for a moment looking up at the face. The holds were worn smooth in places from his repeated use, small divots where his fingers had pressed a thousand times, edges rounded by the friction of skin and chalk and time. He didn't use chalk anymore. Didn't need it. His hands knew this rock the way another person might know the layout of their childhood home automatic, unconscious, the kind of knowledge that lived in the body and didn't require thought.
He started up.
The first twenty feet were easy. Jughandles and ledges, places where the rock had cracked and eroded into something almost like stairs. He moved quickly, efficiently, hands finding holds without looking, feet stepping into the exact spots they'd stepped into a hundred times before. The rock was warm under his palms. The air was still. Below him the desert stretched flat and red and endless, the town a smudge of buildings in the distance, too far to matter.
At thirty feet the holds got smaller. He slowed, testing each one before committing his weight, fingers crimping onto edges that were barely there, toes pressing into dimples that wouldn't have held a child's weight if the angle had been any steeper. His forearms started to burn. His breathing deepened. The world narrowed to the next hold, the next move, the specific geometry of his body against the stone.
At fifty feet he hit the blank section. This was where the route always stopped him when he climbed as a human. The rock here was smooth, featureless, no cracks or edges or anything that fingers could grip. The first time he'd climbed this face he'd stared at this section for twenty minutes, trying to work out a sequence that would get him past it. There wasn't one. Not for a human.
He shifted.
It wasn't a full shift. Just his hands and forearms, the bones thickening, the skin splitting and reforming into fur, claws sliding out of his fingertips like knives. The shift hurt the way it always hurt a bright, tearing ache that ran from his wrists to his elbows but it was quick, and the pain faded almost immediately into the dull background hum of a body that was doing something it wasn't quite built for.
He sank his claws into the rock. The stone resisted for half a second, then yielded, cracking just enough to let him dig in. He pulled himself upward, claws finding purchase where human hands couldn't, and climbed the blank section in four hard moves, muscles screaming, breath coming fast and harsh.
At seventy feet he shifted back. His hands were his own again, pink and raw where the fur had receded, fingernails intact but aching. He flexed his fingers, testing them, then kept climbing.
The top came at a hundred feet. He pulled himself over the edge, rolled onto his back on the flat plateau summit, and lay there staring at the sky. His heart was pounding. His forearms were on fire. His hands were shaking slightly, the aftermath of the shift and the climb both. He didn't move. He just lay there, chest heaving, sky enormous overhead.
This was the thing he did when he needed to not be around people. When the house felt too small and the family felt too loud and the future pressed against him in ways he couldn't deal with. He came here. He climbed. He sat at the top and looked out over the desert and didn't think about anything.
Except he was thinking now. He couldn't help it. The conversation at breakfast had been sitting in his chest all day, a weight he couldn't shift. "When are you actually going to do something about finding a mate path?" Wallace's voice, loud and blunt and not unkind. "He should go. It's time." Alisiah's voice, quieter, but heavier for it.
They were right. He knew they were right. He was twenty-two. Jemma had been nineteen when she mated, and Felisha had been sixteen, and most of the wolves his age in the pack had either found their paths or were actively traveling to find them. And here he was, still in Takishvill, still working at the garage, still sleeping with unmated she-wolves in a way that felt less like living and more like waiting, except he didn't know what he was waiting for.
The path was supposed to come. That was what everyone said. You'd know. You'd feel it. Some pull, some certainty, some internal compass that swung towards a possible person you were meant for, and once it activated you followed it and you found them and that was it. Done. Mated. Home.
Quin had never felt it.
Not with Kaia. Not with any of the others. Not with anyone. And the longer he went without feeling it, the louder the question got... What if it doesn't come? What if I'm the exception? What if I'm the one wolf in the family who doesn't get one?
He didn't let himself think that question most days. He buried it under jokes and deflection and the easy surface-level of his life. But up here, alone, lying on his back on the plateau with the desert spread out below him and no one to perform for, the question sat on his chest like a stone.
He sat up. Pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and looked out at the horizon. The sun was starting its descent, the light going gold and orange, the shadows lengthening across the flatland. Takishvill was small in the distance. His family was there. His whole life was there. And soon he'd be leaving it, because father Wallace was right and mother Alisiah was right and staying here wasn't going to change anything.
He'd go. He'd travel. He'd look for his paths the way Jake had looked for his, the way half the mated wolves in the pack had looked for theirs. Maybe he'd find it. Maybe he wouldn't. But at least he'd know he tried.
The thought didn't make him feel better. It just made the weight on his chest a little heavier.
He sat there until the sun touched the horizon, then climbed down in the failing light, shifted hands at the blank section, and drove home.
The house was already loud when he walked in. Dinner prep was in full swing, which meant Alisiah had taken over the kitchen with the quiet authority she brought to everything, and everyone else was either helping or staying out of her way. Wallace was back from the pawn shop, sprawled in his chair in the living room, telling some story at full volume about a customer who'd tried to sell him a television that didn't work, claimed it just needed new batteries, as if a TV ran on batteries, and Wallace had spent twenty minutes explaining the basics of electrical current to a man who clearly didn't want to hear it. Jemma was setting the table, Jake helping, the two of them bickering about something Quin didn't catch as he passed through the living room. Felisha was in the kitchen with Alisiah, the toddler finally napping, the baby fussing in the bassinet. Isiah was nowhere to be seen, probably in their room, taking advantage of the brief window of quiet for a nap.
Quin grabbed a beer from the fridge, leaned against the counter, and watched his mother work. She moved through the kitchen like she moved through everything efficiently, without wasted motion, her hands sure and quick. She was making something with chicken, pasta shells, and rice, the kind of thing that would feed nine people and still have leftovers. She didn't look at him when he came in. She didn't need to. She always knew where everyone was.
"You're late," she said, not looking up from the cutting board.
"I went climbing."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Because you always go climbing when you're avoiding something."
Quin grinned despite himself. "I'm not avoiding anything."
"Mm."
She didn't push. She never did. That was Alisiah's way she saw everything, said nothing, and waited for you to come to her. Quin took a drink of his beer and watched her chop onions, the knife moving in quick, precise strokes. Felisha was at the stove, stirring something, her face drawn and tired. The baby fussed louder. Felisha closed her eyes, took a breath, kept stirring.
"I'll get him," Quin said, setting the beer down.
Felisha looked at him, surprised. "You don't have to."
"I know. I want to."
He crossed to the bassinet, scooped the baby up before the fussing could turn into a full cry, and tucked the small, warm weight against his chest. The baby quieted immediately, the way babies did when they were held, and Quin started the automatic rocking-walking motion he'd watched Isiah do a hundred times. It worked. The baby settled, eyes drifting closed, tiny fists curling against Quin's shirt.
Felisha watched him, something unreadable in her face. "You're good at that."
"I've had practice. You've had two kids."
"Yeah, but you're not their dad. You don't have to help."
"I'm their uncle. That's close enough."
She smiled, faint and tired, and went back to stirring. Alisiah didn't look up, but Quin saw her mouth twitch at the corner, the smallest acknowledgment that she'd heard and approved.
He walked the length of the kitchen, baby in his arms, and felt the warmth of the house around him the smell of cooking, the sound of Wallace's laughter from the other room, Jemma's voice rising in mock outrage at something Jake had said, the baby's soft breathing against his chest. This was home. This was what he'd grown up in. This was what he was about to leave.
The thought sat in his chest like the weight from the plateau, heavy and undeniable.
Dinner was the whole family crammed around the table that was too small, plates overlapping, elbows bumping, someone always reaching across someone else for the serving dish. Alisiah had made chicken, shell, and rice, and it was good the way her cooking was always good warm and filling and exactly what the family needed without anyone having to ask for it. The toddler was awake again, banging his spoon on the high chair tray in a rhythm that was almost musical. The baby was back in the bassinet, miraculously still asleep through all the noise. Isiah had emerged from the back of the house, quiet as always, and taken his seat beside Felisha without a word.
Quin sat between Jemma and Jake, across from his parents, and let the noise wash over him. Wallace was still telling the TV story, embellishing it now, making it funnier than it probably was, and Alisiah was smiling despite herself, the way she always did when Wallace got going. Jemma and Jake were arguing about something stupid who'd won the last poker game, maybe, or whether Jake had actually fixed the sink in their bathroom or just made it worse. Felisha was trying to get the toddler to eat, which was a losing battle, and Isiah was eating in silence, steady and unhurried, the eye of the storm.
It was good. It was loud and chaotic and good, and Quin felt the warmth of it the way he always did, the way he'd felt it his whole life. He cracked a joke about the toddler's aim when the kid flung a spoonful of rice onto the floor. Jemma fired back something about Quin's beard. He touched his jaw, grinning, and said something about patience being a virtue. Wallace laughed. Jake laughed. Even Felisha smiled.
And then his father Wallace said it.
"So when are you actually going to do something about finding a mate path, Quin?"
The table went quiet. Not silent Felisha was still murmuring to the toddler, and the baby was making soft snuffling sounds in the bassinet but quiet in the way that mattered. Everyone stopped talking. Everyone was looking at him.
Wallace wasn't angry. He never was. He was just blunt, loud, the kind of father who said what he thought with love and at volume and expected his kids to deal with it. "You're twenty-two. Your sisters were younger."
Quin felt his grin freeze on his face. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to deflect this one, because he'd been deflecting it for months. Years really... and everyone at the table knew it.
Alisiah's voice came quiet, cutting through without raising. "He should go. It's time."
The weight in Quin's chest doubled. He looked at his mother, and she was looking at him, and there was something in her face that he couldn't quite read worry, maybe, or certainty, or both. She didn't say anything else. His mother didn't need to. When Alisiah said something, it landed, and everyone at the table knew it.
Quin opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried for the joke, the deflection, the thing that would make everyone laugh and move on. "I mean, I'm doing fine with the she-wolves right here in Takishvill. Maybe my path's just taking its time, you know? Maybe."
He stopped. Because no one was laughing. Wallace was looking at him, steady and calm, not pushing but not letting go either. Alisiah was still watching him with that quiet, unreadable expression. Jemma was quiet for once, her eyes on her plate. Felisha was looking at him with something that might have been sympathy. Jake wasn't mirroring him this time. Isiah was just eating, but even his silence felt heavy.
The grin faded from Quin's face. He looked down at his plate, touched his jaw in that automatic gesture he did when he was uncomfortable, and said nothing.
Because what was there to say? He wasn't ready? He didn't want this? All would have been lies in some form.
He knew. He knew Wallace was right. He knew Alisiah was right. He knew the joke about she-wolves had stopped being funny months ago and had become the thing he said to avoid admitting he was scared, genuinely scared, that maybe his paths weren't coming. That maybe he really was the exception. That maybe he was the one Rorich kid who didn't get one.
The silence stretched. The baby whimpered. The toddler banged his spoon. And then Wallace cleared his throat and said something about work, the pawn shop, the inventory he needed to do this week, and the conversation just... moved on.
But everyone at the table knew what had just happened. The decision had been made. Not out loud. But made nonetheless. Quin would go. He would leave Takishvill. Leave Nevada. He would travel, the way Jake had traveled, the way half the mated wolves in the pack had traveled before they found a path if none were local.
He didn't say it. He didn't need to.
His mother caught his eye once across the table, and there was something in her face that looked like approval and grief at the same time, and Quin looked away first. He finished his dinner. He helped clear the table. He dried dishes while Jemma washed, Jake putting leftovers away, the baby crying again in the other room, the toddler running pantsless underfoot.
The house was loud and full and familiar, and Quin was already halfway to missing it in a way he didn't let himself feel.
He excused himself early. Said something about being tired. Went to his room. Closed the door. Lay on his bed fully clothed, boots still on, staring at the ceiling.
The walls were thin. He could hear everything. The baby crying through the wall on one side, Felisha's soft voice trying to soothe. Jemma and Jake's low murmur through the wall on the other side, the rhythm of a conversation he couldn't make out but knew by heart. Wallace's booming laugh from the living room. Alisiah's quieter response.
The sounds of home... The sounds of the life he was about to leave...
He lay there and listened, and the future pressed against him from every direction the road, the strange towns, the strange packs, the path he was supposed to find, the mates he wasn't sure existed. All of it sitting on his chest like the stone from the plateau, hot, heavy and undeniable and impossible to name.
He didn't have the tools to process it. Didn't have the language. So he just lay there and listened to his family through the walls and felt the house around him like something he was about to lose. The decision had been made. The journey was coming. And Quin stared at the ceiling in the dark and didn't know how to feel anything except the weight of what he couldn't say.