His child brain saw that there was a Very Big Problem and the adults weren’t doing anything to solve it. She shrieked as his dad grabbed casserole dishes and slammed them against the wall. Pitchers, cutlery, crystal salad bowls. Mason’s dad committed wholesale slaughter of his wife’s entire crockery collection, breaking it as he broke, so he didn’t turn those vicious hands on her.
“What’s going on?”
An older man shouldered his way into the room, taking in the three of them with a well-practised eye. The buzz of dominance in his voice, that gaze, I knew what this man was.
“Neil?” It wasn’t really a question, more a sharply barked command, and the man put the plate he was holding down.
The look on Mason’s dad’s face, that smoothing down, locking away, hardening and forcing an enviable facsimile of calm over his face. He let out a long shuddering breath before he answered his alpha, the only sign of residual tension, but his words, when they came, were brutal.
“She’s a fucking nix. Has a mate in another town, thought she’d make me a nice roast meal to break the news to me.”
Both men’s eyes swivelled around to take the two of us in, the alpha’s and his dad’s hardening and kept on getting harder
“This true, Jen?” the alpha asked.
Nix, nix, nix… The word beat like a heartbeat in the little boy, said rapidly in time with his pulse. It was the thing that jumped out at him, the thing that explained this radical departure from the relative peace of their home. His mother was kind, sometimes distracted, preoccupied by things he couldn’t understand, but as long as he was quiet and well behaved, she found him again, sweeping him up in her arms and holding him close.
His dad was a jovial figure, greeting the lot of them each time he came home with a broad smile on his face, sitting down with a beer at the dining table to hear their stories of what they’d been up to. They sat together, father and son, watching the footy or the news, his dad explaining what was going on, smiling with how quickly his son picked up the rules or the information.
Mason’s neck must have craned up to look at his mother, wanting an answer too, as her tear-stained, frantic expression swum into view. We watched her lip tremble, her fingers moving to still them.
“Jennifer?” The crack of the alpha’s will was apparent now, beating down on all of them.
And her reply? A shaky nod, that was all it took to bring down hell.
It all moved super fast after that, in a series of blurry jumps where I caught fragments of action—from Jennifer trying to clean up the house and being told to leave it, to leave, to stuff being shoved into bags, Mason looking on as he saw some belongings snatched up, others left to languish. He’s tried to go back, to grab some toys, but her grip on his hand was like iron. He was tugged out the door of the only home he’d ever known to see a dishonour guard stood along each side of the front path to watch them go.
This, this was the key part of this memory, that I needed to see, because whether he remembered this correctly or not, the people he walked past, all their faces were twisted up into expressions of disgust. No one said anything to them, though there was plenty of mutters and asides as they moved farther down the driveway.
“Where’s this…other mate of yours?” the alpha asked, his brows drawn down hard. She told him, of course. “Well, I hope he’s ready for you. I’ll have one of the boys drop you and Mason over there, once I’ve called their alpha to let him know you’re coming. I hope whoever he is, he isn’t too attached to the place he’s in, because I know the man well and he won’t stand for this kind of nonsense in his town.” The alpha’s gaze shifted to a man standing to one side. “Bring one of the station wagons around.”
Mason felt like he’d lost feeling in his hand, but he squeezed tighter as the adults kept doing stuff he couldn’t understand, some men leading his father away, commiserating in the same way they had when the Gregor’s little baby had died. But he wasn’t dead. His mum wasn’t dead.
But they may as well be.
The neighbour’s boy, a little older than him, broke away from the crowd, sizing him up the way he saw some of the nastier older kids did before the parents got involved, looking at him, then his mother over with a predator’s eye.
“Your mum’s a slut.”
The word hit me as hard as it did the much younger Mason, but we didn’t get to dwell on that, the memory fading, only to be replaced by another.
A high-pitched scream cut the air, that primal shout of a hungry baby startling a sleeping Mason awake. It was so loud, so insistent, he couldn’t understand why he didn’t hear the clatter of adult feet, rushing to see to it. His brother, he corrected himself, Zachary. Zachary cried and cried and cried, getting louder and louder, so that even when he pulled his thin pillow over his head and clamped it down around his ears, he could still hear it. Finally, when the siren wail got too much for him, he jumped out of bed, opened the door wide, not caring when it slammed on the wall behind, and stomped down the hall.
Bruce, the man who had taken his mother from his father, his brother’s dad, he had the same idea, it seemed. He hustled past Mason, rubbing frantically at his eyes, trying to clear them until they both emerged into the meagre kitchen and dining room, where Zack’s cot had been set up. Mason’s mum was slumped over the table where they had breakfast, a tall dark bottle
