Chapter 51
There are nights when buried memories slip through the cracks of a restless evening and peek their heads out. For Cain, this was such a night. He had closed his eyes beside Tina, only to drift into memories he had long kept buried.
“Cain!”
A memory from when Cain had still been small, small as a winter rabbit bounding across snow-covered mountains. The first voice in that memory was a bright, high-pitched call.
“Mother!”
At the sound of her voice, Cain abandoned the wooden toy soldiers he’d been wrestling with and scrambled to his feet.
“My little fluff ball[1]. Were you waiting patiently like a good boy?”
The woman who appeared at the mouth of the cave spread her arms wide to Cain. Her long black hair gleamed with particular vividness against the snow-blanketed landscape beyond, and within that shimmer lay a warmth that was quiet but unmistakable.
“Yes! I was good and didn’t cause any trouble. Mother, did you go to the boundary again?”
Cain had been nuzzling his face against his mother’s legs in a show of affection when he suddenly looked up. He had caught an unfamiliar scent on her.
“I can never fool my little fluff ball, can I?”
The human woman smiled gently, crouched down, and pulled her son into a tight embrace. When Cain craned his neck to lick her cheek, he tasted salt. His mother’s outings always tasted of salt.
‘Mother must get bored, even when she has toys to play with.’
That was what Cain thought each time his mother’s gaze drifted to somewhere far beyond the cave. He and his mother belonged to the pack his father led, and always would, yet she kept staring at the world outside. As though something different surely existed out there.
“Do you like the boundary, Mother?”
Cain would sometimes ask such things while basking in the warmth of his mother’s hand stroking his head before sleep.
In the pack he belonged to, the only ones permitted to approach the territory’s boundary were the alpha, his father, and his father’s mate, his mother. Whenever his mother spent days refusing to leave her room, his father would carry her on his back and run all the way to the boundary without fail.
“Mother, are you not eating again today?”
As Cain grew, his mother grew ever more silent. The spark that once shone in her eyes disappeared from view, until eventually she seemed to lack the strength to move her fingers.
Still, he loved his mother. The times she had picked berries for him, stroked his hair, met his eyes, and smiled, those hadn’t been lies. Those, too, had surely been a form of love.
“Cain. Mommy is… I’m… I just can’t do this anymore. I want to stop. I’m so lonely…”
The day his mother said those words through a tear-streaked face, Cain didn’t understand what she meant. But because he loved her, he asked back with a heart free of any pretense.
“Why are you lonely? I’m right here. Father is here too, always. We’ll all be together from now on, won’t we? So what’s so hard about it? I’ll stay by your side, always.”
Cain blinked his large eyes and asked in earnest. He couldn’t understand his mother. She belonged to the pack. She had his father’s protection. What could possibly make her lonely?
“……”
But that day, for the very first time, Cain saw it. A flash of terror, frozen like ice, passing through his mother’s jet-black eyes. His mother was afraid of him.
After that, she withdrew even further. She shut herself in her room and refused to open the door. Her words dwindled until it became difficult to even recall the sound of her voice.
Then one day, his mother vanished. There had been no warning whatsoever, she had simply bolted for the world beyond the boundary.
“Mother!”
But Cain knew his mother’s scent better than anyone. And he had reached the age where he could shift into his wolf form, so catching up to the speed of a fleeing human woman was effortless.
The flow of his thoughts at the time hadn’t been complicated. An individual that left the pack died. Especially a weak individual like his mother; she would certainly die. And he loved his mother. So he simply had to find her and bring her back to his side.
“Cain…”
But when he called to her before the boundary, when their eyes met, the expression on her face…
It was the kind that would never be forgotten. Not if he lived a thousand lifetimes.
How could he ever easily forget a face twisted with sorrow, futility, and despair?
The memories after that remained only in fragments. Raised voices from the room where his father and mother were. Something shattering. The violent weeping that seeped through the door. Those were things he preferred not to remember.
Translation Notes
[1] ↩
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