Chapter 7

My phone rings on the third night in Wolf King City, Damon's name lighting up the screen from somewhere back in Obsidian territory, and I let it ring twice before I answer.

"You have some nerve," he says, no greeting, straight into it. "Do you know what people are saying about you? Running off to Daddy the second things get hard, dragging our daughter into your little tantrum."

"I didn't run anywhere." I keep my voice level, watching Wren asleep on the couch across the room, her breathing even for the first time in days. "You tore the cloak off my shoulders in front of the whole pack, Damon. I walked out the door you opened."

"You're being dramatic." I can hear him pacing, the creak of floorboards under his boots. "Come home. We'll talk this through like adults. Wren needs her father."

"Wren needed her father five years ago, at her own awakening ceremony. You were too busy handing her sacred stone to Callan to notice she was standing in that circle alone."

"Don't twist this into something it isn't." His voice sharpens, and underneath the anger I catch something else, something closer to panic. "You're my wife. You don't get to just disappear because you're embarrassed."

"I'm not your wife." I say it slow, clear, so there's no room left for him to argue around it. "The bond dissolution was certified by the Moon Goddess the night I dropped that cuff at your feet. It's done, Damon. Sealed. You can call every night for the next year and it won't change a single word of it."

Silence stretches down the line, long enough that I almost think he's hung up.

"You don't mean that," he says finally, quieter now, almost coaxing. "You've never meant it when you say things like that. Come home. I'll fix this."

"There's nothing left to fix."

I end the call before he can answer.

Damon’s pov

I throw my phone onto the desk hard enough to crack the case.

She'll come around. She always comes around, three days of silence and then a phone call half-apologizing for making a scene, and I've got better things to do than chase a woman who'll be back the second Wren starts crying for her own bed. I pour a drink and pull my father's ledgers toward me instead, half-listening to the television in the corner of his study, the evening broadcast running low behind the numbers I'm supposed to be checking.

Then her name cuts through the noise, and I look up before I decide to.

"...confirming reports that the missing heir to the royal Voss bloodline has returned to Wolf King City after nearly six years away, ending speculation that the line of succession had died out entirely following the King's estrangement from his only daughter..."

The photograph fills the screen and I go still with the glass halfway to my mouth. Elara, standing on the palace steps in a cloak I've never seen her wear, Wren's hand in hers, a crest stitched in silver thread across her shoulder that I recognize even from across the room.

"That's her," I say, out loud, to nobody. "That's Elara."

My father looks up from his own ledger, follows my stare to the screen, and sets his pen down slow.

"The Wolf King's daughter.？！" 

I hear the words come out of my own mouth like they belong to someone else, and underneath the shock something colder starts moving, fast, rearranging everything I thought I knew about the woman who just hung up on me.