"That sounds comforting," Cal murmured, his voice dripping with icy sarcasm.
"Lily, your mother sent me," Darren urged, his voice cracking with urgency.
"No!" Lily cried out, violently shaking her head. "No, she didn't!"
"I can explain—"
Lily’s small fingers dug so fiercely into Mason’s vest that he could feel them vibrating against his collarbone. Mason held up a hand, silencing Darren instantly, and asked the child in a soft, rumbling whisper, "Why did you come to me?"
Tears finally breached the rims of Lily's eyes, spilling through the dirt on her cheeks. "My mommy told me."
Mason's heavy brow furrowed. "Told you what?"
Lily looked up at the massive, intricate gray wolf stitched into the leather above her. When she spoke, her voice was so frail it almost vanished into the diner's thick air.
"She said if I ever saw the wolf... I should ask him for help."
The breath left Mason Callahan’s lungs in a single, devastating rush. For one surreal, suspended moment, the grimy walls of the diner, the smell of grease, the heavy stares of his brothers, and the desperate man in the doorway simply ceased to exist.
If you ever see the wolf.
It was an echo from a lifetime ago. A ghost speaking through a nine-year-old child.
Mason stared down at her, his voice rough. "Who is your mother?"
Instead of answering, Lily reached into the pocket of her torn jeans. Her tiny, dirt-stained fingers emerged, uncurling to reveal a flash of dull silver resting against her palm.
Mason looked down, and the solid ground beneath his boots felt as if it had given way to an endless, plunging abyss.
It was a pendant. An old, tarnished piece of silver shaped into a gray wolf howling beneath a razor-thin crescent moon. The metal was heavily scratched. The delicate chain had been visibly soldered and repaired in two distinct places.
Mason didn't just recognize it; he knew the exact topography of the metal. He knew the microscopic fault line near the wolf's left ear. He knew the tiny, imperceptible dent just beside the curve of the moon. He knew it because twenty-eight years ago, a much younger Mason Callahan had emptied his pockets of every wrinkled bill and heavy coin he owned to buy that exact piece of silver for the only woman he had ever intended to marry.