CHAPTER FIVE: WHAT HE'S WILLING TO RISK

Roman didn't say anything for a long moment after I told him. He just stood there on the terrace with the broken tea cup still scattered across the stone between us, watching me with an expression I'd learned by now meant he was thinking faster than his face let on.

"How strong," he said finally. "The pull. How strong was it ?"

"Strong enough that I dropped a cup without noticing." I pressed my palm flat against my sternum again, though the ache had faded to something duller now, more memory than sensation. "Strong enough that some part of me wanted to answer it."

Ivy crouched beside me, checking my pulse with two fingers against my wrist, murmuring something reassuring that I only half heard. Roman hadn't moved.

"That shouldn't be possible," he said. "Not after a rejection. The bond's supposed to be one-sided from his end. Severed."

"I know how it's supposed to work."

"Then either he's stronger than any Alpha I've ever heard of," Roman said slowly, "or the rejection didn't take the way he thought it did."

Something in the way he said it made me look up at him properly. There was a stillness to him that hadn't been there a minute ago, calculating in a different direction than before, and for the first time since I'd arrived on his land, I couldn't tell if what I was watching was concern for me or the early motions of a man deciding how a war might actually go.

"You think this changes something," I said.

"I think," Roman said carefully, "that a mate bond strong enough to survive a public rejection is not a small thing to a room full of Alphas who already suspect there's more to you than an ordinary pack daughter. And I think Kane Voss finding out you're alive, pregnant, and still bonded to him hard enough to feel him searching, is not information I can sit on much longer."

My stomach dropped. "You said you'd keep this quiet."

"I said I'd protect you." His voice didn't rise, but something underneath it had gone harder, more Alpha than the careful, hovering version of him I'd gotten used to. "Protecting you and keeping this a secret forever were never going to be the same promise, Mia. You had to know that eventually."

I hated that he was right. I hated it more that some small, exhausted part of me had known it the whole time and simply hadn't wanted to look at it directly.

"What happens now," I asked, echoing the same question I'd asked him on my first day here, except this time I already suspected I wasn't going to like the answer any better than I had then.

"Now I call a council," Roman said. "Not to hand you over. To get ahead of it before Kane's search parties widen far enough to reach my borders on their own, which they will, eventually, if that bond is still this active." He crouched down to my level, closing some of the distance he usually kept between us. "I would rather my own pack hear this from me, on my terms, than stumble into it and decide for themselves what it means that their Alpha is protecting a pregnant Ashwood mate."

"And if your council decides they don't like what it means."

His jaw tightened, just slightly, gone again before I could be sure I'd seen it at all. "Then I'll deal with that."

The council chamber was smaller than I expected, a long table, a dozen or so pack elders and ranking wolves, all of whom turned to look at me the second Roman brought me through the door. I felt every one of those looks land somewhere just under my ribs.

"This is Mia Ashford," Roman said, no preamble, no softening. "Rejected mate of Alpha Kane Voss. Pregnant with his children. She crossed onto our land three months ago, alone, and I've been sheltering her since."

A ripple went through the room, low voices overlapping, none of them addressed directly to me.

"You're telling us," said an older woman near the head of the table, her tone carefully even, "that you have been harboring an Ashwood royal on Cade land for three months, and are only informing this council now."

"I'm telling you exactly that," Roman said, without an ounce of apology in it.

"And the reason."

"Because as of this evening, the mate bond between her and Kane Voss appears to be active enough for him to be actively searching for her, despite a public rejection." Roman's voice didn't waver. "Which means Ashwood may find her regardless of anything I do to prevent it, and I would rather this council hear the full situation from me before that happens, than be blindsided by it."

The older woman's eyes moved to me, sharp and assessing in a way that made me want to shrink into the chair, though I made myself sit up straight instead.

"Ashford," she said, tasting the name slowly, like she was checking it against something in her memory. "That bloodline was supposed to have died out generations back."

The room went very quiet.

"I don't know what you mean," I said, and it was true, though something cold moved through me anyway, the same door-left-open feeling from the healer's room, except now it had a name attached to it that wasn't mine to understand yet.

"Perhaps it doesn't matter," the woman said, though her eyes stayed on me a beat too long before she looked away, and I understood, the way you understand a held breath by watching someone else finally exhale, that it mattered a great deal, and that she'd decided, for now, not to say why.

Roman's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. If he knew what she meant, he gave nothing else away.

"The council's concern," said a younger man further down the table, cutting through the moment before I could push on it, "is less about ancient bloodlines and more about what happens when Ashwood realizes their missing Luna is standing on our land. Alpha Voss will not accept a diplomatic explanation. He will see this as harboring a political weapon against his own pack."

"He rejected her publicly," Roman said. "He forfeited any claim to dictate where she goes."

"Mates don't work by forfeit, and you know it," the younger man shot back. "A rejection severs obligation. It does not sever the bond, not fully, not always, and you've just told this entire room that his side of it might still be very much alive. That is not a small complication, Alpha Cade. That is a door you are choosing to leave open on our border."

I sat there, in a room full of people deciding my fate in careful, measured sentences, and felt something old and stubborn rise up under the exhaustion. I hadn't crossed two hours of unfamiliar territory, pregnant and terrified, to sit quietly while a room of strangers debated whether I was a liability.

"I didn't come here to be a weapon," I said, and my voice came out sharper than I expected, sharp enough that several heads turned. "I came here because I was six days pregnant and alone and every door in my own pack had already closed. If Alpha Cade hadn't taken me in, I don't know where I would have gone. I'm not asking any of you to fight a war for me. I'm asking you not to speak about me like I'm not sitting in the room."

Silence settled over the table, different in texture than the one before, less calculating, more caught off guard.

The older woman studied me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind her eyes.

"No," she said finally, quietly. "I don't suppose you did come here to be a weapon." She glanced at Roman. "Whether you become one anyway is a different question entirely, and one this pack will need an answer to before Ashwood comes looking."

Roman didn't argue with her. He just looked at me, and for the first time since I'd met him, I saw something in his face that looked less like careful calculation and more like a decision he'd already made and hadn't told me about yet.

"They won't touch her," he said, to the room, not to me. "Whatever this council decides about the politics of it. That part isn't up for debate."

The younger man opened his mouth to argue and then, reading something in Roman's face, apparently thought better of it.

I sat very still in a room that had just decided, in its own careful, political way, that I was worth protecting and worth fearing in almost equal measure, and understood that whatever the old woman knew about the name Ashford, she wasn't going to tell me tonight.

But she would. Eventually. I made myself a quiet promise about that, sitting there with my hands folded over the small, stubborn swell of my stomach, surrounded by wolves who weren't mine and a man who'd just told an entire council he'd go to war over me without asking if that was a debt I wanted to owe him.