Emberwood I'm inside out, you're underneath

Her question took him off guard. So much so that he froze briefly. It wasn't that he hadn't expected the question from his packmates at some point, but the wound was still so fresh that he actively worked to avoid thinking about it, and her question pulled him right back into the middle if his grief. He closed his eyes and released a soft sigh through his nose. Lainie's mom died, as did my other mate and all of of my children except Lainie. There were six...children. He paused, despair forming a lump in his throat. Speaking of that day always brought him right back to it. We were trying to make it through the mountains, and there was a landslide... he couldn't finish the rest. He hoped she would be able to make an assumption about what happened next because speaking the words would probably break the last bit of control he had over himself. Sometimes he could barely hold it together; he felt like he would crumble into pieces and fall into the darkness of his desolation, and now was getting dangerously close to being one of those times. He couldn't speak of it anymore and hoped the explanation he was able to give her would suffice.