Chapter 4

The Woman Damian Chose

Damian hadn't slept.

He stood at the window of his father's study, still in the remains of his ceremonial dress, watching the pack lands turn from black to grey as dawn came on. Behind him, the study door opened and closed without a knock. Only one person in the pack house didn't bother knocking anymore.

"You look terrible," his father said.

"I feel terrible."

"You feel guilty. There's a difference." The Alpha crossed to his desk and sat, unhurried, the way he did everything. Decades of command had worn all the urgency out of him. "Guilt passes. Sit down."

Damian didn't sit. "The enforcers went after her last night."

"They did their job."

"I didn't order that."

"No." His father's eyes were steady, unbothered. "Seraphine did. And you'll let her, because she's your Luna now, and a Luna who can't act without her mate's permission isn't worth the title." He gestured at the chair again, and this time Damian took it, because arguing the point further would only prove his father right about something. "You made your choice last night. In front of the whole pack. That choice has consequences, and those consequences move whether or not you sleep easy with them."

"I know what I chose."

"Do you?" His father studied him for a long moment. "Because you have the look of a man who's still doing the math."

Damian didn't answer that, because there wasn't an answer that wouldn't sound like weakness, and weakness wasn't something his father had ever had patience for.

The truth was simpler and worse than guilt. The alliance with Seraphine's pack secured the western border, doubled their trade routes, and gave them numbers enough to stop worrying about the packs that had been testing their borders for two years running. It was, by every measure that mattered to an Alpha's son, the correct choice. He had known it was the correct choice for months, ever since the negotiations first opened, long before the Choosing Ceremony ever forced him to say it out loud in front of two hundred witnesses.

He had simply never accounted for what it would cost to say it in front of one witness in particular.

"She'll be gone by sundown," his father said, as if reading the direction of his thoughts, which he probably was. "It's better this way. Clean. No loose threads for Seraphine's family to worry over."

"She was pack. Born here."

"She was unranked, unbonded, and unclaimed." His father's voice hardened, just slightly. "Sentiment doesn't hold territory, Damian. Alliances do. You'll understand that better with time, if you don't already."

Damian said nothing, and the conversation moved on to matters of trade routes as though Ivy had already been settled and closed.

He found Seraphine in the east garden an hour later, going over guest lists for the formal mating ceremony. She dismissed her attendants the moment she saw his face.

"You look like a man who wants to have an argument," she said, not unkindly.

"The enforcers. Last night."

"Necessary." She said it without hesitation. "You didn't think she'd simply accept it and go quietly, did you? Better to close it cleanly. One night. One decision. No lingering." She studied him with the same clear-eyed practicality she brought to everything. "You didn't tell me there was history."

"There wasn't anything to tell. We grew up together."

"Mm." She didn't push it, which was somehow worse than if she had. "It doesn't matter now. What matters is the alliance holds." She reached out and straightened his collar. "You made the right choice last night. Don't let anyone talk you out of believing that. Especially not yourself."

She left him there with that instruction settling over him like a weight he hadn't asked to carry.

That evening, one of his father's oldest advisors found him on the training grounds, watching the sunset without really seeing it.

"A word, if you'll permit it," the old wolf said, settling onto the fence rail. Kestrel had served three Alphas and buried two of them, and he'd never once said anything without a reason.

"Say it, then."

"The western alliance is solid. I won't pretend otherwise." Kestrel watched the horizon, not Damian. "But alliances built on a father's ambition and a son's obedience have a particular weakness, and I think you already know what it is."

"Enlighten me."

"They only hold as long as the son keeps obeying." Kestrel turned to look at him. "Seraphine's family didn't choose this match because they admire you, boy. They chose it because your father is old and you are young and malleable. The moment you stop being malleable—"

"I'm not going to stop obeying my father over a wolf I rejected two days ago."

"I didn't say you would." Kestrel's expression didn't change. "I said her family is watching to see if you might. A cracked alliance, discovered early, costs them far less than one that shatters after the wedding. If I were you, I'd make very sure there's nothing left for anyone to watch for."

He left it there, walking back toward the pack house without waiting for a response, and Damian stood alone in the fading light with Kestrel's warning settling next to Seraphine's instruction, next to his father's dismissal, next to the memory of Ivy's face across the crowded hall.

He told himself, for what felt like the hundredth time that day, that he had made the correct choice.

He was still telling himself that when a runner came sprinting across the grounds, breathless, with news that stopped every other thought in his head entirely.

The scouts patrolling the northern border had found signs of a struggle in unclaimed territory, rogue tracks, a torn scrap of fabric caught on a branch, blood that wasn't old enough to belong to last season's hunts.

The fabric matched Ivy's travel cloak.