Seven Years Later (Face to face)

KADE’S POV

Seven years.

Seven years since Nadia disappeared without a single word, and I still hadn’t found a version of myself that didn’t check every room for her the second I walked into it. Restaurants. Airports. Once, absurdly, a grocery store three states away, because a woman with her exact walk had turned down the cereal aisle and my whole chest had seized before I even caught up to my own feet.

I told myself, at the time, that pushing her toward hatred was some kind of mercy. That if I was cold enough, cruel enough, distant enough, she’d forget me faster and go build a life that didn’t have a werewolf Alpha wrecking it from the inside out. I told myself a lot of things, back then, that let me sleep at night.

It was the worst lie I ever told myself, and I’ve had seven years to catalogue the competition.

I married Selene eight months after Nadia vanished. It lasted less than two years. Selene wanted an Alpha who could actually love her, and by the time she asked me for that, plainly, without any anger in her voice at all, I had nothing left in me to give to anyone. The only mate the moon had ever marked for me had walked out of my life carrying a secret I hadn’t let her finish saying out loud, and every day after that felt like living in a house with all the furniture missing.

I stopped searching for her, actively, around the third year. Not because I’d stopped wanting to find her. Because I finally understood that finding her would mean forcing myself back into a life she’d worked that hard to build without me in it, and for once in my miserable existence I decided her peace mattered more than my guilt. I let the trackers stand down. I told myself that was the last decent thing I had left to give her.

I knew the second I’d felt it, that night in the cellar — the bond snapping into place so hard and so sudden it nearly put me on my knees. Nineteen years old, fully grown, fully mine by every law the moon and the pack both recognized, and I still ran from it like a coward, because the elders had already all but promised the position to someone else, and because some sick, cowardly part of me had decided being cruel to her was safer than admitting what she actually was to me.

My father made the same choice, once, long before I was old enough to understand what I was watching. Rejected the mate the moon gave him because the pack council wanted a purebred Luna standing beside their Alpha instead of a human. She left him. Rebuilt an entire life from nothing, married a good, steady, human man who loved her without conditions, and never once looked back at the pack that had decided she wasn’t good enough to lead it.

That woman was my mother.

And I became my father anyway. No matter how much I told myself I was different, I always came back to the same realization: we were the same man, the same cowardice dressed up in a different generation’s clothing.

A knock at my office door pulled me out of the spiral before it could pull me any further down.

“Alpha.” Silas stepped in with a border-dispute folder under one arm, the kind of routine paperwork that crossed my desk a dozen times a month. “The Northern Alliance sent over the territory realignment proposal for the western corridor. They want your signature before the summit.”

“Leave it on the desk.”

“You’ll want to read the counterparty section first.” Something in his voice made me look up. “The controlling stake on the other side of that corridor isn’t a pack holding anymore. It’s private. Human-owned.” He set the folder down and opened it to a tabbed page instead of making me ask. “Veyron Holdings.”

I went still. “Say that again.”

“Veyron Holdings. Five years of acquisitions along that corridor, consolidated under one name.” He hesitated, watching my face the way a man watches a structure he isn’t sure is about to hold. “Alpha, I pulled the ownership records twice because I didn’t believe the first set either. It’s her.”

“Who?”

The folder went blurry in my hands for a second before I forced my eyes to focus.

“She’s not hiding,” he said quietly. “She never was. She’s listed publicly, sits on the Northern Alliance council, holds a seat no human has ever held before. If we hadn’t needed her signature on this corridor deal, we might never have crossed paths with her name at all. She built something so far outside where either of us was looking that it never once showed up in seven years of searching.”

I found the photograph three pages later, attached to the corporate filing. Nadia at the head of a long table, dark hair longer than I remembered, a composure I didn’t recognize at all, layered over a face I would have known in absolute darkness.

Beside her chair, half out of frame, a small boy stood close enough to be reaching for her hand.

“Who is that. Her child? She has a son? My chest went tight in a way I didn’t fully understand, some old ache flaring up at the sight of her with a family I had no part in.

“She’s confirmed to attend the summit,” Silas said. “As a seated Alpha, to finalize the corridor deal herself.”

“Then so am I.”

“Alpha, sending a delegate would be the standard move here, given the history—“

“I said so am I.”

He didn’t argue again.

—

Nine days felt longer than the seven years that came before them.

I rewrote my opening statement for the corridor negotiation four times, and threw out every version by morning, because I could not stop picturing her on the other side of that table reading my signature and knowing exactly what it had cost me to reach for professional distance instead of everything else I actually wanted to say. The whole council thought I was preparing for a difficult negotiation. But it was easier than explaining I was preparing to stand in a room with the only thing that had ever made me feel like less of an Alpha and more of a man who’d thrown away something he couldn’t survive losing twice.

I straightened my jacket three times in the car before I let myself get out of it. I have commanded wolves into open war without my pulse changing. I stood outside that summit hall like a man checking his own pulse for the first time in years.

The hall was already filling when I stepped inside, delegations from a dozen territories arranging themselves under banners I mostly recognized, the low hum of a hundred conversations I had no interest in joining. I scanned the room the way I always do; exits, allies, threats, and found none of that mattered the second I felt it.

That same current from the cellar. Unmistakable, even after seven years, even dulled by distance and time and every wall I’d tried to build against it. It hit me low in the chest and dragged upward, and I knew, before my eyes even found her, exactly where in that hall she was standing.

I found her near the head of the room, conversing with a tall man in council colors whose hand rested a fraction too familiarly at the small of her back for my liking.

She was dressed elegantly, like she belonged in that room more than anyone else. Dark hair longer than the photograph. She was nothing like the girl who used to fold herself smaller so nobody would notice how much space she was taking up.

Seven years, and the sight of her still hit me like the exact same wall.

I started walking before I decided to. I didn’t plan what I would say. I didn’t plan anything at all. My body simply carried itself in a room full of Alphas who would all remember exactly what they witnessed, because some instinct older than pride or protocol had already decided I wasn’t capable of standing on the other side of that hall and doing nothing while another man’s hand stayed anywhere near her.

She was mid-sentence when she felt it too. I watched it happen. The exact moment the current reached her, the way her shoulders went rigid, the way she stopped speaking without seeming to notice she had, the man beside her trailing off, confused, following her gaze toward whatever had stolen her attention out from under him.

Slowly, she turned.

And after seven years, across a hall gone quiet enough that I could hear my own pulse in my ears, Nadia looked directly at me, and for one second, before every wall she’d spent seven years building slammed back into place, I saw exactly how much it still cost her to see me too.