Don't Want To Go Home

Lyon's POV

The elders were already seated when I walked in.

Seven of them around the long table, all wearing the same expression. I sat down at the head of the table and looked at each of them without speaking.

Elder Cass started.

"The human girl has been inside this house for over twenty four hours now. The pack is unsettled. There is talk among the younger members, questions being asked that we cannot answer without compromising the laws we have upheld for generations."

"She saved my mother's life," I said.

"That is not the point, Lyon."

"Then get to the point," I said.

Elder Cass leaned forward.

"The point is that a human cannot remain on pack territory beyond an emergency. The emergency has passed. Nima is stable. The girl's purpose here is fulfilled and she needs to leave today. If you refuse, the council has the authority to remove her through official pack channels, which means involving more members of this community in something that should have been kept quiet."

The man beside him nodded slowly. "We understand your gratitude toward her. But gratitude is not a reason to bend laws that protect every member of this pack."

I let them finish. I sat there and listened to all seven of them take their turns, each one adding their piece to the same argument. Laws. Tradition. The stability of the pack. The danger of exposure. What it would mean if the Alpha was seen to be compromised by attachment to a human.

When the last one stopped talking, the room went quiet.

"Are you all done?" I asked.

Nobody answered.

"My mother was dying," I said. "You knew that. Every one of you knew what was happening to her and not a single person at this table found a solution. Your healers came and left and told me to prepare for the worst. I refused to accept that and I went and found the one person in this country who understood the illness killing her. That person happens to be human. And she came here and she worked through the night and my mother's monitor is green this morning."

I looked around the table.

"You sat back and watched the Alpha's mother move toward death because the cure came from a human. That is what I'm hearing from this table today. That is what your precious laws produced."

Elder Cass opened his mouth.

"I'm not finished," I said. "Christie Graves leaves when Nima is medically stable and cleared. Not before. If anyone in this pack goes near her, speaks to her with hostility, or attempts to remove her from this property, they deal with me. Not the council. Me."

I stood up.

"And one more thing. You call yourselves the backbone of this pack. You claim to lead alongside me. But you sat on your hands while my mother was suffering and now you want to enforce laws at her bedside. You're wicked. All of you. You don't care about Nima. You care about enforcing stupid laws."

I walked out before any of them could respond.

The door shut behind me and the hallway was empty and cool. I walked slowly, my jaw tight.

“Feel better?” Obsidian said inside me.

Marginally.

“You know you weren't only fighting for Nima in there.”

I kept walking.

“Lyon.”

I know what you're going to say.

“She's not just a doctor to you. You know what she is. You've known since she walked into that lab and you felt it before you even saw her face properly. You know what Christie is to you.”

I stopped walking.

I stood in the middle of the empty corridor and stared at the stone floor.

I was not going to say it. Thinking it would make it real and real meant complicated and complicated was the last thing I needed with a human woman who had a life in the city and a lab she loved and no understanding of what my world actually was.

What a coincidence that would be. What a terrible, inconvenient coincidence.

“It was never a coincidence,” Obsidian said quietly.

I pushed through the side door and stepped out into the open air.

The back of the house had a wide stone terrace that dropped down into a stretch of open land. I stopped when I saw her.

Christie was sitting on the bottom step, her knees pulled up, her face turned toward the sky. She hadn't heard me come out. Her voice was very low, barely above a breath, like she was talking to herself without realising it.

"I don't want to go home."

I stood there and didn't move.