**BOOK THREE**
Still grieving the loss of his mate, twenty-four-year-old Tatum Knowles isolated himself from the rest of his pack. With the strength of both his pack and himself being questioned by those around them, the last thing Tatum planned to...
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I never originally planned on becoming friends with Cloud. I never intended for him to stay at our pack for longer than a few weeks, maybe a month. Initially, my goal was to try and get some knowledge out of him about my mate. The man had come from seemingly nowhere and was practically an enigma. I hoped he had—wanted him to have—answers to my mate's condition.
Maybe they had come from the same place? We didn't get many visitors at the Howling Night, so, at the time, it didn't seem impossible. However, I couldn't deny that as time went on, we'd become somewhat friends. I cared for him, and I know he did for me as well, so it was hard to be around him after losing my mate.
I knew he saw his actions as trying to help me: the calling, the avoiding talking about mates, the visits. I knew that it was him trying to show that he cared about our friendship—he cared about me. Yet, it felt like whenever I saw him; he became a constant reminder. Everything he tried to do was geared toward making me forget, but it felt like his actions always had the opposite effect. Every time I saw Cloud, I saw him; lying in that bed as the flatline rang in my ears. It wasn't fair, I knew that, but that strong desire to make me forget only made the loss feel so much worse.
So I pulled away. I began to distance myself hoping to escape that memory that replayed in my mind like a video on a loop.
When Cloud and Raiden left, part of me was upset, but the other part was glad. Because it meant that I didn't have to see him anymore, it meant that I didn't have to be reminded of what I saw as my failures. For a while, it worked. Not perfectly, I still wasn't anywhere near okay, but the haunting memories dulled.
Then Nixon came, and there was someone around to take my mind off the madness. He didn't know about the shit that'd happened, he didn't know just how much of a mess I truly was, and that helped. It helped take my mind off everything around me and helped me feel like there was some resemblance of the person I used to be still there.
Then Cloud and Raiden returned, and it felt like the two worlds I tried to keep apart were colliding. The one I'd built in my mind and the harsh reality clashed; I was violently ripped away from the warmth of the façade I'd allowed to envelope me and thrown out into the freezing cold reality surrounded by thunderstorms and hurricanes.
I never wanted them to meet but now? Now I couldn't deny that it had to happen. I couldn't hide behind false pretenses any longer. Af some point, my two worlds would collide, and I'd rather be the one to do it than someone else to. The first step to joining them together was speaking to Cloud.
My feet came to a stop in front of the small house that was close to the edge of the pack lands. It was Raiden's house, and judging by how concentrated their two scents were, he and Cloud were inside. I raised my hand and knocked on the door, the sound echoing through the silence.
