Carrying His Claim

“Everything,” Marcus said, “is a lot, so buckle in.”I put my feet up on the corner of Petra’s desk, earning myself a swat that I ignored, and let him talk.“Alpha Kieran Ashwood. Took the seat six years ago after his parents were killed in a border raid — Blackmoor Pack, up north, and before you ask, no, that situation never got resolved, it just went quiet for a while. It’s not quiet anymore. That’s part of why this contract’s moving so fast.”“Define fast.”“Signed and settled inside two weeks, ideally. He’s got a Council breathing down his neck about succession, and with the border heating back up, an heir isn’t optional politics anymore, it’s stability politics. Packs get nervous about a throne with no clear next hand on it, especially when a hostile neighbor is testing the fence.”I glanced at Petra, who’d stopped pretending to work and was listening outright now, chin propped on her hand.“And the intended can’t carry,” I said. Not a question. Marcus wouldn’t have called me for

The east sitting room was smaller than I expected from a compound built like a fortress — warm light, a fire already going despite the mild afternoon, furniture worn soft in the particular way of rooms people actually lived in rather than rooms built to impress. Someone had put thought into making this space feel like the opposite of everything outside its walls.The woman standing by the window turned before Gideon had fully announced me, like she’d been listening for my footsteps the whole way down the hall.“Ms. Vance.” She crossed the room to meet me rather than waiting for me to come to her, and I clocked the slight unevenness in her gait before I clocked anything else about her — not a limp exactly, more like a step that had been rebuilt and never quite forgot it had been broken. She didn’t hide it and didn’t draw attention to it either. It was simply part of how she moved through a room, the way anyone’s history eventually became part of how they moved. “Thank you for coming al

I read the contract twice that night, once for the shape of it and once for the details that mattered.My guest room sat on the quieter side of the pack house, a fire already lit when Gideon showed me up, a window that looked out over the training yard instead of the border. I appreciated the choice even if I didn’t say so. I spread the folder across the small writing desk, poured myself the tea someone had left cooling on the tray, and got to work the way I always did — methodically, without letting myself skim the parts that mattered most just because I already knew, roughly, what they’d say.The Conduit Clause sat where it always sat in contracts like this, buried in careful legal language that most humans reading it would assume was metaphor. It wasn’t. The Provider’s biological function permits conception absent an established mate-bond between Provider and Recipient, through direct physical engagement sufficient to open a conception channel, in accordance with recognized pack-la

Morning made the whole compound look less like a fortress and more like what it probably was most days — a working pack house, full of people moving through ordinary routines that had nothing to do with me. I liked mornings for that reason. Whatever a room had decided about me the night before usually softened somewhat by daylight, or at least got quieter about it.I found my way to the kitchen on my own, mostly to prove to myself that I could, and was rewarded with coffee strong enough to justify the effort and a wide berth from most of the staff moving through it. Dessa found me there, offered a real smile that didn’t come with any of Marguerite’s undertone, and pointed me toward the healer’s wing for the first of what would become a standing weekly checkup — routine monitoring, nothing yet to monitor, but part of the residency schedule regardless.The healer, an older woman named Ottilie with hands steadier than anyone I’d met in years, ran through the basics without ceremony. Bloo

The note came the next morning, tucked under my door before I’d even made it out of bed — Gideon’s handwriting, precise and economical, informing me the first contracted session had been scheduled for that evening, per the residency timeline we’d agreed to in Kieran’s study. Seven o’clock. His quarters, not mine. A single line at the bottom, almost an afterthought: Let me know if you need anything beforehand.I read it twice, the way I read most things that mattered, and set it down on the desk beside my grandmother’s photo.I’d done this eleven times before. I told myself that first, the way I always told myself first, because the number was the whole foundation of everything I built a session on — eleven times, eleven clean beginnings and eleven cleaner endings, a body that knew exactly how to do this work without letting the rest of me get tangled up in it. This was the twelfth. There was no version of the math where twelve looked any different from eleven.I spent the day the way