Chapter 2: The Weight of the Title

I had not lost control of anything in eleven years, and I intended to keep it that way through this meeting too.

"The eastern road again," Voss said, dropping the report on the table like it disgusted him. He was my Beta, and Selene's father, and he had opinions about everything, most of them correct, which made him useful and exhausting in roughly equal measure.

"Silverwood is sending a unit. Word from our scouts says they mean to hold the crossing and escort their caravan through by force if they have to."

"Let them try." That was Corin, my Head of Guard, cracking his knuckles like he was already looking forward to it.

"That's not strategy, that's appetite," I said, and he had the sense to look chastened.

I stood at the head of the war table in a room that had been my father's, and his father's before him, and felt, as I always did in this room, the particular weight of a title I had taken eleven years too early. I was seventeen when my father died and the pack looked to me instead of anyone older, wiser, more prepared, because the blood said it had to be me and the blood did not care that I was not ready. Eleven years of proving the blood right. Eleven years of never once letting Kade off the leash long enough to embarrass either of us.

My wolf did not love that arrangement. Kade wanted out more than he let show, prowling just under my skin most days, but I had built a wall between what I wanted and what I did a long time ago, and I trusted that wall more than I trusted almost anything else about myself.

"The eastern road isn't ours by treaty, whatever Silverwood claims," I said. "It's ours because we bled for it after they took the western trade route from us with a lie a hundred years old. I'm not surrendering it to spare their pride."

"Careful," Voss said, low. "You start reciting family history, you start sounding like your father.

"My father held this territory together for thirty years. I could do worse than sound like him."

Voss did not answer that, which was its own kind of answer.

The truth, if I let myself sit with it too long, was messier than the story I told the war table. My family's version went: the West betrayed us, killed a bride meant to bind our packs in peace, and exiled an innocent man for it. Their version, I assumed, went the opposite direction entirely. I had stopped trying to find the real one somewhere around age fifteen. It did not matter anymore whose grandfather did what. What mattered was that Silverwood held territory that should have been ours, and every trade caravan that crossed it without paying our toll was one more insult my pack could not afford to swallow, not with half the northern packs watching to see if the boy alpha could still hold his border.

"Send twenty guards to the crossing," I said. "Corin, you lead. Hold the road, take the toll, and if Silverwood's unit wants to make it a fight, don't start it, but don't run from it either."

"And if their unit's led by someone worth taking seriously?" Corin asked.

"Then you'll know it when you see it. I'm not worried." I was not. Silverwood's warriors had a reputation for discipline, not ferocity, and discipline had never once won a fight against wolves who wanted it more.

The meeting broke, and I let myself breathe for the first time in an hour once the room emptied, all except Selene, who lingered by the window with the particular patience of someone waiting to be noticed.

"You didn't ask my opinion," she said.

"You gave it anyway. You always do."

That got the corner of a smile out of her, which was as close as we ever came to warmth. Selene Cross had been promised to me since I was twenty and she was nineteen, a match built by our fathers out of two Beta bloodlines that made political sense on paper and had never once made my pulse do anything at all. She knew it. I knew it. We had built something workable out of that mutual knowledge: respect, an easy partnership, the kind of understanding that did not need to pretend at romance to function. My mother called it a good match. I called it manageable, which in my life had come to feel like the highest compliment I had left to give anything.

"My father thinks you're being reckless about the road," she said.

"Your father thinks I'm reckless about most things. It's practically his hobby."

"He's not wrong every time."

"No," I agreed. "Just this time."

She left without pushing further, which I appreciated about her more than almost anything else. She knew when a door was closed and did not waste her strength rattling it.

I went to the training yard after, because sitting still with my own thoughts for too long these days had a way of letting Kade get too loud, and physical exhaustion was the only thing that reliably quieted him. I sparred with Corin's second until my knuckles split and my breath came ragged, and even then, some restless thread under my skin did not settle the way it usually did.

Something's coming, Kade said, which he did sometimes, in the wordless, feeling way wolves spoke to the men wearing their skin.

Something's always coming. That's what borders are for.

Not that kind, it feels different this time.

I did not have an answer for that, and I did not like that I did not, so I told him to be quiet the way I always did when he got mystical on me, and went to wash the blood off my hands.

My mother found me in the hall afterward, which meant this conversation had been coming as surely as the one with Selene, just longer overdue.

"You're sending Corin to the crossing," she said. Not a question. Iris Blackthorn had never asked a question in her life that she did not already know the answer to.

"I am."

"Your father would have gone himself."

"My father had thirty years on the title before anyone doubted him. I don't have that luxury."

Something flickered across her face, not quite sympathy, not quite pride, some complicated third thing that lived in the space between them. "You've done well, Damian. Better than anyone expected, at your age, under these circumstances."

"But."

"But you carry it like a debt instead of a birthright, and one day that's going to cost you something you don't expect."

I did not have an answer for that either, and this time I did not tell her to be quiet, because you could not say that to your mother the way you could say it to your own wolf.

I went to bed that night the same way I went to bed most nights: tired enough to sleep, controlled enough not to dream of anything I could not explain in the morning. I did not know yet that somewhere south of the crossing, a girl with silver in her blood was riding toward the same stretch of disputed road with her own reputation to prove and her own wolf sleeping silent inside her.

I did not know that Kade's restlessness had a name, or a scent, or that within two days I would understand exactly what he had been trying to warn me about all along.

I only knew that the wall I had built between want and action had held for eleven years, and that I had no reason yet to believe it would not hold for eleven more.

I was wrong about that too. I just did not know it yet.