Chapter 227

227 Brothers and Ghosts

Darian

Lucian was finally back.

I had seriously considered going to Mistwood to find him, but then my father dropped the Alpha mantle on me like a bomb. After that, there was no way I could leave. Everything was unraveling faster than I could fix it, and truthfully-I didn’t know what would have happened if Lucian hadn’t returned. We were all holding our breath, waiting for some kind of hope.

He was it.

Mara wasn’t handling it well. She tried to keep it together, but the pregnancy made it harder for her to mask what she was feeling. Normally, she was good at building walls. But Lucian had torn them down completely. And I got it. I was the reason those walls were there in the first place-because of my own selfish mistakes.

I still thought about what could’ve been between us sometimes. That quiet ache never completely disappeared. What I told her at the lake, I meant with every part of me. But things had changed. I had Tiffany now. I had Emma. They weren’t just people in my life-they were my life.