Chapter Two: The Weight of a New Alpha

Reya drove me home because my hands wouldn't stop shaking long enough to trust them on a wheel.

Neither of us talked. The wipers dragged rain across the windshield in slow arcs, and Redoak Hollow slid by outside in wet, sodium-lit smears — the diner, the feed store, the turnoff toward the pack lands where every house belonged to someone whose family had lived here longer than the town had a name. I'd grown up on these roads. Tonight they didn't look like anything I recognized.

"You want to talk about it," Reya said finally, "or you want to sit in it a while first?"

"I want to un-know it." I pressed my forehead against the cold glass. "For about ten more minutes. Then you can ask me anything you want."

She didn't ask anything the whole rest of the drive. That was the kind of friend she was.

My cabin sat at the edge of the tree line, small and a little crooked, the porch light Kian had installed for me the summer before he — before everything — still burning steady above the door because I'd never had the heart to replace the bulb with a different one. I stared at it now like it belonged to someone else's life.

"You're staying at my place tonight," Reya said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm fine."

"You're the furthest thing from fine, and if your dead mate is actually not dead and decides to come knock on this door at two in the morning, I would like to be standing between you and that conversation."

I didn't have the strength to argue. I didn't have the strength for much of anything.

Reya's apartment above the bakery smelled like yesterday's cinnamon rolls, warm and sweet in a way that felt almost obscene against the shape of the night. She put a blanket around my shoulders like I was something breakable and didn't say a word about the fact that I was still wearing the same stunned expression from the bar.

I sat on her couch and finally let myself feel it — the bond, alive again after three years of silence, pulsing low and insistent in my chest like a second heartbeat that had learned my rhythm and refused to fall out of step with it.

"It doesn't feel like relief," I said quietly. "It should feel like relief. He's alive. I should feel — something good."

"Grief doesn't work like a light switch, Sable. You don't just flip back to the woman you were before he 'died.'" She sat across from me, feet tucked under her, eyes steady. "You spent three years building yourself into someone who survived without him. You don't owe him the version of you that existed before that."

"He lied to me. He let Vane lie to me."

"Yeah." Reya didn't sugarcoat it. "That's going to take more than an explanation to fix, if it's fixable at all."

I thought about Rhys Vane's face in the doorway, the way his eyes had found mine and stayed there a beat too long, the strange, sharp pull I'd felt low in my ribs that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with something I didn't have a name for yet.

"There's something else," I admitted.

Reya's eyebrows went up. "The new Alpha."

"It's not — I don't know what it is."

"Sable." She said my name carefully, like she was setting down something fragile. "You felt something for him. In the middle of that."

"I felt something happen," I corrected, though even as I said it I knew I was drawing a line that might not hold. "That's different from feeling something for someone."

She didn't push it further, which was its own kind of mercy. I fell asleep on her couch sometime past three, and if I dreamed, I didn't remember it by morning.

The pack house summons came at nine.

Not a request — a summons, delivered by one of Alpha Vane's betas standing stiff and apologetic on Reya's doorstep, saying Rhys wanted to see me before the pack meeting at noon. I almost laughed. Less than twelve hours as the Hollow's incoming Alpha and he was already pulling me into his orbit like gravity was something he'd simply decided applied to me now.

The Vane pack house sat at the center of the territory the way it always had — old stone, dark timber, the kind of building that had absorbed three generations of pack history into its walls. I'd been inside it a hundred times growing up. It had never once made my pulse hammer the way it did walking up the front steps that morning.

Rhys was in his father's study, though it was clear from the stacked boxes and the map of the territory pinned crooked to one wall that he was already making it his own. He looked up when I came in, and for a second neither of us said anything.

He'd showered since last night. His hair was dry now, dark and unruly, and without the rain slicking down his shoulders I could see him properly for the first time — the breadth of him, the restless energy sitting just under a stillness that felt deliberate, like a wolf holding itself in check by sheer will. Up close, the pull I'd felt in the bar didn't fade. If anything, it sharpened.

"Sable Reyes," he said. Not a question. He already knew who I was.

"You know my name. That's a start, considering you summoned me like I work for you."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, but close enough to make my chest do something complicated. "Noted. I'll ask next time."

"Will there be a next time?"

"Depends on how today goes." He gestured to the chair across from the desk. I didn't sit. He didn't push it. "I need to understand what happened last night, and I need it from someone who isn't going to dress it up for me."

"Why me?"

"Because you're the one he came back for." His eyes held mine, steady, unreadable. "And because my father owes you an explanation he's been avoiding giving me too."

That landed harder than I expected. "Your father knew. This whole time."

"According to him, yes." Rhys's jaw tightened, the first real crack in that composed exterior. "Which means the first official act of my leadership is going to be finding out exactly how deep that goes, and what else has been buried under it."

I studied him — really studied him, the way you study someone you're trying to decide whether to trust. There was none of Kian's easy charm in him, none of the warmth that had made loving Kian feel like standing in sunlight. Rhys Vane was something colder on the surface, banked embers instead of open flame, but I could feel the heat underneath it anyway, and that unsettled me more than anything Kian had said the night before.

"He said he did it to protect me," I said. "From the rogues. Said if they knew what I meant to him—"

"Do you believe that?"

The question hit somewhere unguarded. "I don't know what I believe anymore. I believed he was dead for three years. Turns out I'm not exactly a reliable judge of what's true."

Something in Rhys's expression shifted — not pity, which I would have hated, but something closer to recognition, like he understood exactly what it cost to say that sentence out loud.

"For what it's worth," he said, quieter now, "I don't think grief makes people unreliable. I think it makes them the only ones in a room actually paying attention to what's real."

I hadn't expected that. Hadn't expected any of this — not the pull in my chest, not the strange steadiness of him, not the way he looked at me like I was a person and not a problem to be managed.

"The pack meeting at noon," I said, changing course before I said something I wasn't ready to say. "What happens there?"

"Kian Ashford requests to stay in the territory. My father will likely want to grant it, out of guilt if nothing else." Rhys's eyes didn't leave mine. "I wanted to hear your objection before I heard everyone else's opinion about it."

"You're asking if I want him gone."

"I'm asking what you want. Those aren't always the same question."

I didn't have an answer. Not one I trusted, anyway — not with my bond to Kian still humming under my skin like an old wound reopened, and this new, unfamiliar current running underneath it every time Rhys Vane looked at me like that.

"I need time," I finally said.

"Then you'll have it." He said it simply, like it cost him nothing to give, though something in his voice told me it might cost him more than he was letting on. "Noon, Sable. I'd like you there when it's decided."

I left the pack house with my heart going in two directions at once, and no idea, yet, which one I was going to follow.