Chapter 20

Damian POV

The list Garrett brought me had six names on it. I hated every single one of them before I even got past their titles.

"This one's got land near the northern border," Garrett said, tapping the top of the page like that was supposed to mean something good. "Older, though. Widower. Late fifties."

"She's twenty-two."

"Wolves live long lives, Alpha. Age gap's not unusual for arrangements like this."

"Next."

He moved down the list. A beta from a smaller pack two territories over, decent standing, reputation for being harsh with subordinates. A minor noble with gambling debts nobody talked about openly but everybody knew existed. A lone wolf recently welcomed into a neighboring pack, no real history to vet at all, which somehow felt worse than a bad history.

"There's got to be somebody better than this," I said, dragging a hand down my face.

"These are the ones willing to take on a bride with her... circumstances," Garrett said, careful with the word,but not careful enough to hide what he meant by it. "Prison records complicate things. Most decent prospects want someone without that attached to their name."

"Watch it."

"I'm not saying I agree with it," he said, and something in his tone had shifted lately, less certain than it used to be whenever her name came up. "I'm saying that's the reality of the pool we're working with."

I stared at the list another long minute, hating every name on it the longer I looked.

"What about him?" I pointed at the fourth option, a name I didn't recognize well. "This one. Alpha of some pack out east."

"Already matched, far as I know. Just hasn't been announced yet."

"Damnit." I pushed the paper away. "There's nobody decent here."

"There's nobody decent because decent options don't usually go looking for wives with her history," Garrett said, blunt about it in the way he has always been blunt, something underneath it now sounded less like judgment and more like frustration on her behalf, which was new. "That's just how these things work."

"Then find better options."

"I'm working on it."

"Work faster."

He gave me a look, somewhere between annoyed and amused, and gathered up his papers without arguing further.

I sat there a long time after he left, staring at that list, trying to figure out how I let things get to a point where my own sister's best available choices were a widower, a gambler, and a man known for cruelty toward people who worked for him.

I told myself I was stalling because none of them were good enough. That was true, as far as it went. But some smaller, more honest part of me knew I was also stalling because every name I crossed off meant one more day she stayed here, one more day I hadn't fully lost her yet.

I found her and Rosalind in the small sitting room that evening, an unplanned overlap, both of them there when I walked in looking for Wren about something else entirely. I almost turned around and left them to it. Something in the air stopped me.

Rosalind sat very still, hands folded in her lap, looking at Wren with an expression I hadn't seen on her since before any of this happened. Something searching. Something almost afraid to ask whatever she was working up to asking.

"Wren," she said, quietly, "can I ask you something honestly?"

"You can ask."

"This mate request." Rosalind's fingers twisted together slightly. "Is this really what you want? Not what you think you have to do. Not what feels easiest right now. What you actually want."

The room went very still. I stayed in the doorway, unnoticed, unwilling to interrupt whatever this was.

Wren didn't answer right away. She looked at Rosalind for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes, and when she finally spoke, her voice came out steady, like she thought this answer through many times before this moment ever arrived.

"What I want," Wren said, "is to stop needing anyone in this house to choose me before I'm allowed to matter."

Rosalind's breath caught, audible even from where I stood.

"I wanted that for fifteen years," Wren continued, no cruelty in it, just plain fact laid out simple. "I wanted it in prison, every single day, thinking somebody would eventually visit, eventually write, eventually remember I existed. I have wanted it since I came home, hoping if I just waited long enough, things would go back to how they used to be."

"Wren…"

"I'm not asking for that anymore," Wren said. "That's what I want. A life where I'm not spending every day hoping somebody finally picks me. A mate gets me that. Doesn't matter who he is, as long as he gets me there."

Rosalind's composure, the careful, gentle steadiness she always kept wrapped around herself like armor, cracked visibly for the first time since Wren had come home. Her hands trembled slightly in her lap, and something wet gathered at the corner of her eyes that she blinked back fast, like she wasn't allowed to let it fall.

"I never meant for you to feel that way," Rosalind said, voice thin.

"I know you didn't mean it." Wren's voice softened slightly, the closest thing to gentleness I heard from her toward Rosalind in a long time. "That's almost the worst part. You didn't mean any of it, and it still happened anyway."

Rosalind opened her mouth, closed it again, nothing coming out that felt big enough to answer that.

"I'm not trying to hurt you by saying this," Wren added. "You asked me honestly. I'm giving you an honest answer."

"I know." Rosalind's voice had gone very small. "I just... I hoped you'd say something different."

"I know you did." Wren reached over, just briefly, and touched Rosalind's hand, something soft in the gesture despite everything else in her voice. "I'm sorry it's not the answer you wanted."

I stood in that doorway feeling like an intruder in my own house, watching two women I loved sit in the wreckage of a family that used to make sense, neither one of them able to fully fix what had already broken.

Rosalind didn't say anything else for a long moment. She just sat there, composure barely holding, staring at her own hands like she was trying to figure out exactly which choice, out of all the small ones she made over two years, had finally added up to this.

I backed out of the doorway before either of them noticed me there, because whatever that conversation was, it wasn't mine to interrupt.

I went back to my study, back to that list of six names I hated. But now I didn't feel angry about having to find her a match.

I just felt like I already lost the argument a long time before I ever knew we were having one.