Chapter 101: Two Sons, One Mother

POV: Georgia

I close the notebook with the word *Werewolf* still staring up at me, the howl from the forest still echoing somewhere in the back of my skull, but my hands don’t shake. That’s the strange part. I found the connection at 2 a.m. and didn’t sleep again that night. I sit on the edge of my bed, my bad knee propped on a pillow, my cane leaning against the nightstand like a sentinel, and I wait for the fear to crawl up my spine the way it always does. It doesn’t come. Instead, a question surfaces, one I’ve been drowning for days.

*If Darcy has a reason, what is it?*

The werewolf part is done. I wrote the word. I’m not crossing it out, not second-guessing it in the gray hours before dawn the way I would have a week ago. But knowing what they are doesn’t tell me why Darcy came for me, why he chose this school, this year, this version of my life to walk into. Acceptance was the easy part, it turns out. Now I need a plan.

Across the room, Mandi sleeps curled tight, still folded in on herself after everything that broke her yesterday, her face smashed into her pillow, one sequined sleeve dangling off the mattress like a dead thing. She doesn’t stir when I drag my laptop onto my lap. I dim the brightness until the screen is barely a whisper of light, a secret glowing in the dark.

I already know Dominic Valentine is Darcy’s brother. I’ve known for a while. But knowing a fact and understanding it live in different rooms of the same house, and I’ve been treating this one like a sticker slapped on a page. *Brother. Hockey injury. Puck. Done.*

That’s not enough anymore. My fingers move before I let myself hesitate, typing *Valentine family Connecticut* into the search bar.

The first pages bore me instantly. A law firm. A real estate company. A donation to a children’s hospital, smiling doctors holding an oversized check. I keep scrolling, because boring is exactly how rich people bury the truth, and I grew up in a rink full of parents who smiled for cameras and lied like it was an Olympic sport. I know what a polished surface looks like. I know how to find the cracks underneath.

By page six, my eyes burn. By page eight, I almost slam the laptop shut.

Then I find it. A photo from a charity gala, old, maybe ten years, the kind of picture where everyone stands too straight, like puppets on invisible strings. A woman anchors the center of the frame, silver-blonde hair swept into a flawless twist, her smile stretched tight and practiced. Two boys stand in front of her, swallowed by tiny suits. The caption names her, then adds, *with her sons, Dominic and Darcy.*

Darcy looks maybe seven in the photo. He’s already smiling like he knows precisely where the lens is pointed, like charm is something he was born fluent in.

I zoom in until the pixels blur, then force myself to do what I should have done weeks ago: look past the mother and study the boys instead. They don’t match. Dominic is broader, his jaw heavier, built like a wall. Darcy is lean, sharp-featured, built like a blade. *Brothers don’t have to match,* I tell myself, but the thought refuses to settle, scratching at the inside of my skull like a trapped moth.

So I keep digging.

I search the mother’s name next. Forty minutes crawl by through ugly websites and dead links, my knee aching in that low, grumbling way it does when I sit too still for too long. I shift my leg, wince, and keep going anyway. Finally, a scanned page from an old local newspaper loads, birth announcements squeezed between car dealership ads like an afterthought.

Two announcements, years apart. The first lists Dominic Valentine, born to the mother and a man whose last name means nothing to me. The second lists Darcy Valentine, born to the same mother and a different man entirely, a different last name trailing after his.

I read it twice. Then a third time, slower, like the letters might rearrange themselves into something less damning.

*Different fathers. Same mother. Both boys carry her name.*

I lean back against the headboard and let that settle into my bones. A family name that survives no matter which man fathered the child is a name that outweighs everything else, a name stitched into identity itself. It’s the thing holding the whole picture together. The Valentines aren’t just a surname the boys happen to share. They’re what the boys belong to, body and blood.

My mind drags me back to the day Darcy walked into Rosethorne like he already owned the floor beneath his feet. I remember how Puck went rigid beside me, a wire pulled taut and humming. I’d thought it was jealousy then. Later I decided it was something territorial, some alpha posturing I didn’t have the vocabulary for yet. I never asked the obvious question.

*Why did Darcy come here at all?*

Rosethorne isn’t a school you transfer into on a whim, not when everyone inside its walls has been here forever, the way Mandi said it, like roots sunk too deep to pull. The hallways breathe old names and older secrets. A boy doesn’t just appear mid-semester unless somebody sent him, unless somebody wanted him here.

I pull up the old article again, the collision write-up I could recite from memory at this point. *Unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style.* I’ve read that line until the words lost meaning, but this time I check the date stamped at the top. Then I check the date on Darcy’s enrollment email, still sitting in my inbox because he forwarded me a schedule once and I never bothered deleting it.

I count the months between them on my fingers, slow, deliberate, like a kid doing homework she doesn’t want to finish.

It isn’t long. Not long enough to be an accident. Not even close.

My stomach lurches. Because now the pieces are sliding together, clicking into place with a precision I hate, and I can’t unsee the pattern once it forms. The compliments that always sounded like a file being read aloud in a pleasant voice. The questions about Puck, how we met, what he said, what I noticed when no one else was looking. I thought Darcy was interested in me. I thought I was being charming, clever, worth someone’s attention. God help me, I even felt flattered.

He wasn’t interested in me. He was collecting.

I think of the gala, his mouth close to my ear, voice smooth as polished stone. "You could do so much better than him," he’d said, and I’d heard concern, maybe even interest.

Now I hear it for exactly what it was. A nudge. A shove toward a door he wanted me walking through long before I ever noticed the handle. And every time I defended Puck, I handed him precisely what he wanted - showed him exactly where the soft spot lived, right there under my ribs, easy to find if you knew where to press.

My eyes sting. I wipe them with the back of my wrist, furious at myself for crying over a boy who played me like an instrument he’d memorized years ago. Tears at a quarter to four in the morning fix nothing. They never have.

But this isn’t really about Darcy, is it? It’s about how easily I let it happen, how smoothly I slipped back into old patterns I swore I’d outgrown. My mother managed me with a smile stretched just like that woman’s in the photograph. My old coaches managed me the same way. The entire skating world ran on that same brand of polished, practiced control, and I promised myself years ago that I would never fall for it again.

Then Darcy Valentine showed up with a warm voice and an easy laugh, and I fell for it anyway, every single time, like I’d learned nothing at all.

Mandi sighs in her sleep and rolls over, the mattress creaking under her weight. I freeze instantly, my hand hovering over the laptop screen, guilt pressing down harder than any fear of being caught - she’s suffered enough without my mess bleeding into her rest too - until her breathing settles back into its slow, even rhythm. The clock on my phone reads 3:41. The window beside my bed sits as a black square, flat and empty, and somewhere beyond the glass the forest has gone quiet. The howling has stopped, though the silence it leaves behind feels heavier than the sound ever did.

I set the laptop carefully on the floor and pull the notebook back into my lap, the one that has slowly stopped being a list and started being a case file, pages dense with names and timelines and suspicion. I flip past the circled names, past the lines connecting one secret to another, past the rough sketch of a wolf with golden eyes staring up at me from the paper, until I reach a fresh page.

It’s blank and white and waiting, patient in a way nothing else in my life has been lately.

My hand is steady. That surprises me more than anything else tonight. For weeks my fingers have trembled every time I tried to write something down, as if they were afraid of what the words might become once they existed outside my head. Tonight they don’t shake at all. Tonight they know exactly what they’re doing.

I uncap my pen, press the tip to the top of the page, and write.

*He’s been lying to me from the start. Every single day.*