He Destroyed My Youth, Killed My Child, Now He Begs, But I Am Gone Forever novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: No One
In a tattoo studio, Yvaine meets the Alpha she left and the little boy who calls him Daddy. He tells the boy she is no one. Afterward her friend reads the stencil on his chest: it says Yvaine.
Dot had my left wrist under the lamp when the bell over her studio door rang.
"Hold still," she said. "Silver-safe ink fights you enough already."
I looked up, and Hamish was standing in the doorway.
He was taller than I remembered, and his shoulders filled the frame.
The last time I saw him, I was cutting our mate bond with a moon blade in front of his whole pack council.
That was five years ago, and I had not said his name out loud since.
A small boy stood beside him with one hand wrapped around two of his fingers.
Dot's pen stopped moving.
"Morning," she said to Hamish, and her face gave nothing away. "You must be my ten o'clock."
"That's me."
His voice hadn't changed.
He had not looked at me yet.
"Chest piece," he said to Dot. "The lettering needs touching up. It's been five years and it's fading."
"Sit anywhere. I'll be with you in a minute."
He turned to take the chair by the window, and he saw me.
Everything in his face went still.
I had practiced this moment for years in the shower and in the truck and at night with the lights off.
In every version I said something sharp.
What I actually did was sit there with my wrist in my friend's hand and my mouth shut.
The scars on that wrist were a ring of white lines, and his eyes went straight to them.
His mother's silver cuffs had made them the night I gave birth.
He had stood in the hallway outside the door and let her lock them on.
"Yvaine," he said.
"Please sit down," I said.
"I didn't know you lived here. I'm only here for the ink, I swear it. I'd never have come if I'd known."
That was a very smooth thing to say.
I noticed that he said it too fast.
The little boy tugged on the hem of Hamish's shirt.
"Daddy."
Hamish flinched, then looked down.
The boy was about five, with dark brown hair and a cowlick at the left side of his crown that stuck straight up.
He pushed it flat with his palm, and it sprang back, and he pushed it flat again.
I do that.
I have done it my whole life, and a stranger's child was doing it three feet away from me.
I put it out of my head, because the boy had started talking.
He looked at me with wide gray-green eyes, curious and not shy at all.
"Daddy, who is she?"
Nobody in the studio moved.
Dot set her pen down.
I waited, because I wanted to know what Hamish would say.
I had waited five years for that, whether I admitted it or not.
The last time I begged him for anything, he told me to let it rest.
Now he put his hand on the boy's head and gave me the same kind of answer.
"No one, Finlay," he said. "She's no one."
So the boy had a name, and Hamish had decided what I was.
I gave a small nod.
Then I pulled my wrist out of Dot's hand, even though the outline wasn't finished.
"Yvaine," Dot said quietly.
"It's fine. I'll pay for the half hour."
"Yvaine, wait."
"No."
I took my jacket off the hook.
Hamish took a step toward me, and I looked at him, only once.
"Don't," I said.
He stopped.
Finlay watched all of it with his head tilted, and he pushed his cowlick down once more.
Hamish swallowed.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I should have said it years ago, and I know it's useless now."
"Yes," I said. "It is."
So I stepped out into the cold, and the bell rang behind me.
I got as far as the corner of the building before I had to lean on the brick.
My hands were shaking so hard I couldn't get my keys out of my pocket.
The door opened and shut again behind me, and Dot came out with her jacket over her tattooed arms and a paper in her hand.
She was white around the mouth.
"I need you to see this," she said.
"I'm not going back in there."
"You don't have to. He sent me a photo of the old lettering when he booked, and I traced it onto stencil paper last night."
She held the paper out to me.
It was the lettering from his chest, copied in her careful blue line.
It was a single name in tall plain capitals.
It said YVAINE.
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