“Then don’t. Who says you have to?” I tried to smile, but the best I could manage was a not-frown. “There are no rules, Mom. There’s no grief timeline.” Other than the five-day Alpha deadline I still hadn’t told her about.

“You’re right.” She took a long, deep breath, then turned back to the barn. “I’m ready.”

We went in through the normal-size side door, and my mother froze two feet into the barn. Marc stood beside a platform made of leftover hay bales, upon which a dark blanket covered my father’s still form. I wasn’t sure where they’d found the blanket, but I was grateful. It felt much less cold and sterile than sheet plastic.

When my mother finally approached, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs, he folded the top of the blanket back to my father’s neck. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t stop myself.

I’d seen a lot of death, of both friends and enemies, but seeing it on my father was an entirely different experience. His face had grayed since I’d last seen it, and he no longer looked alive enough for me to pretend he was only sleeping.

My mother shrugged out from under my arm and approached him slowly. Marc backed away to give her some privacy, and we joined Vic near the first long-empty horse stall, where he stared down at his own worn black hiking boots. His face was red, his eyes swollen.

Marc looked much the same. I wrapped my arms around him for a moment, then twisted in his hold to press my back against his chest.

My mom dropped onto her knees on the dirty barn floor. She put one hand on my father’s cold chest and pressed the other against her own mouth, like she could stop the whole thing from being real if she could only hold back the words.

But she couldn’t.

I didn’t hear what she whispered, and I didn’t want to. Some things are private. Some things needed to be said, even when the person who needed to hear them couldn’t hear anything. Ever again.

Thoughts ran through my head so fast I couldn’t truly focus on any of them. So much to be done. So little I knew how to do. So very much pain I didn’t have time to deal with.

The funeral. The fight. Planning for both. Maybe I could funnel my anger over the necessity of burying my father into the plot to assassinate Malone and ruthlessly gut my father’s murderer. You know, two birds, one big, bloody stone? That’s an efficient use of anger motivation, right?

And Kaci. Somehow I’d have to find a way to talk to her about the fact that she’d just lost someone else. The man who had taken her in and protected her with everything he had—including his youngest son’s life—after she’d lost her own family. Kaci couldn’t take much more loss, and I couldn’t in good conscience tell her that my father’s death would be the last.

Chances were good that we would lose someone else. Maybe several someones.

No. I went stiff in Marc’s grip, and his arms tightened around me, wordlessly comforting me even though he didn’t understand what had upset me.

Planning the fight was one thing, but anticipating the tragic outcome was another entirely. I couldn’t think about who those potential casualties might be. Except for me. One of them might be me, and then what would happen to the Pride when I was gone?

“It doesn’t feel like thirty-three years,” my mother said, and I looked up from my own thoughts to see her still kneeling, still facing my father, but obviously speaking to us. “I would never have thought three decades could possibly feel so fleeting, but it feels like I slid my hand into his last week and promised to love him forever. And I’ve never regretted a single moment of it. Not even when he left the bathroom light on or when he fell asleep at his desk at two in the morning.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to stop my silent tears, or how best to dry hers.

“We used to run together, you know. Just the two of us, out in the woods, euphoric over the wind, and the smells, and each other. We never needed anything else, but we were blessed with so very much more.” She twisted to look at me then, and the pain etched into her face brought me to my knees, the ache in my heart an endless, nameless oblivion.

Marc let me go and I crossed the floor toward her.

“We were blessed with you, and with your brothers. As you grew up, I felt so helpless, like I could do little more than watch as you became your own people, all five of you. It was like witnessing a miracle, and it happened so quickly. One day we were fascinated by how tiny Michael’s newborn feet were in those little booties, and the next, you took off for college without a backward glance. I don’t know where the time went, but I spent it all with him, and it slipped away so fast.”

I sat next to her on the floor, the straw scratching my back through my shirt, and pressed as close to my mother as I could get. Touch was the only comfort I knew how to give; words had abandoned me entirely.

“I don’t know how to live now, Faythe,” she whispered. “They say you never know what you have until it’s gone, but I knew. I knew every moment, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now, with him gone.”

“You still have us,” I said, well aware that we weren’t enough. Having grown children wasn’t the same as having the love of your life. The other half of your own soul. But I had nothing else to offer her.

Except his last words.

“He gave me a message for you,” I said, and she turned to face me, her blue eyes red with tears and wide with hope. “He said to tell you that you’re his whole life, and have been since the moment he met you. He said that you’re in his heart, and in his soul, and even death will never really separate you.”