Page 87 of Moonlit Fate

As we crossed the threshold, a quick glance revealed my den mates, their expressions ranging from curiosity to worry as they took in the sight of Caius. But they were attuned to the nuances of my mood, and with silent understanding, they melted away into the back, leaving us alone.

“Speak, then,” I said to my father, finding an ounce of steadiness. “What words have you carried all this way?”

“I’ve made mistakes,” he said. “I know that now.”

I searched for deceit in his stance, in the lines on his face, but found none. In a silent challenge to the man who once cast me out, I reached out with my mind, probing for a crack in his defenses. I discerned the familiar resistance, the mind shieldshe’d fortified against me since my youth. Yet, I pressed on, needing to understand, to see if time had eroded his barriers.

For a fleeting second, there was a tremble in his mental fortress, a sign of weakness perhaps, but it might have been wishful thinking. My abilities were formidable, but so was his determination to keep me out, even now.

“Enough,” he said. “We have much to discuss, and your parlor tricks won’t change that.”

Frustration flared through me, yet it was underscored by a reluctant respect for this man, my father, who still managed to hold strong against me. Our eyes locked, two wills clashing in a silent battlefield, before we both sighed, an unspoken truce settling over the tension-filled space.

“Still up to your old tricks, I see,” he said, amusement lacing his tone. “I have no ulterior motives. I am simply here to talk.”

The muscles in my jaw tensed with the effort to keep my composure. “Now, after all these years, you decide you want to talk? When words were the very weapons you used to cast me aside? Did you think time would erode the memory? Or did you presume I’d simply roll over and bare my throat, welcoming back the man who deemed me a threat to his people—mypeople—and unfit for his legacy?”

There was a suffocating beat of silence as the memory of my exile haunted us. It was a cage of my own making, wrought from the rejection he had served me on a tarnished platter.

“Gravely mistaken,” I continued, and the burn of betrayal seared through my veins once more. “That’s what you are if you believe there’s a path that leads back into my life. Exile wasn’t the sentence you believed it would be. It was a rebirth, a forging of self from the raw, jagged pieces you left behind.”

His expression faltered, just for a second, but it was enough to tell me that my words had struck true. I stood before him notas the outcast son, but as the rogue wolf and master of his own destiny.

“Atticus, my son?—”

“Don’t,” I said. “You forfeited the right to claim that bond when you cast me aside.”

In the depths of my being, where instinct wrestled with reason, I yearned for the approval I was denied as a child. That longing, though buried under layers of defiance, tempted me with the ghost of a life unbroken by exile. But it clashed violently with the pride of the man I had become, self-made and resilient, shaped by the very rejection that now scorched through me.

“Was it worth it?” I asked. “Casting out your only son for daring to be different? For fearing something you didn’t understand? Something I was born with?”

His silence was an accusation, a mirror reflecting the uncertainty that haunted my soul’s recesses. The years had put lines of regret onto his face, but they could not rewrite history.

“Speak!” My snarl echoed off the walls, reverberating with the pain of a love forsaken.

“I see now the error of my ways,” he said. “You’ve grown into more than I could have ever hoped, even beyond the confines of our traditions.”

I wanted to dismiss his words as the machinations of a mind too long entrenched in power plays. Yet, the fractured part of me, the one that still craved a father’s nod of pride, clung to the possibility of sincerity in his admission.

“Your hopes,” I said bitterly, “were a cage. One that I have since melted down and reforged into a life of my own design.”

He stepped forward cautiously, as if approaching a wild creature. I tensed, every muscle primed for flight or fight, the eternal dance of a rogue.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but it is not too late for us. Not too late to heal.”

The offer was so tempting, ripe with the potential of mending fissures that had defined my existence. Yet, the independence I’d carved from the wilderness of betrayal was a prize too precious to surrender lightly.

“Not too late?” I said. “It has been a lifetime. A lifetime of learning that the only approval worth having is my own.”

His gaze held steady, but I saw a hint of something akin to understanding. “Then let that suffice,” he said with a finality that seemed to close the chapter we had reopened.

I walked over to an alcove where an assortment of bottles sat on a rugged shelf carved into the stone wall. My hands found a familiar bottle, and as I poured the amber liquid into two glasses, the sound was a soothing counterpoint to the ragged pulse throbbing in my ears.

“Drink?” I held out one of the glasses to him. He watched me with a wariness that was mirrored in my stance.

“Thank you,” Caius said, accepting the glass.

I knocked mine against his, the clink of our glasses a tentative truce in the making. My father leaned against the cool stone, his posture reflecting a weariness that came from deep in his bones. I remained standing, unwilling to let my guard down completely, yet fighting the desire to understand the man before me.

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