Chapter 18 — The Second Thing She Used To Do

Austin discovered the second problem because too many people were waiting outside his office. Not arguing. That would have been simpler.

They sat on benches, stood against the wall, or held folded papers they kept checking as if the words might rearrange themselves. Austin stopped.

“What is this?”

“Morning requests,” the man nearest the door said.

Austin looked down the hall. There were eleven people.

“Why are they all here?”

The man hesitated. “They need decisions.”

“From me?”

“Yes, Alpha.”

Austin almost asked who had sent them all at once. Then he remembered. No one had.

That had been Hallie’s part. He entered the office and called in the first person.

The request took less than five minutes. A worker wanted to switch a regular duty because another assignment fit his skills better.

Austin approved it. The second man came in with almost the same request from the opposite side of the change. Austin stared at him.

“You two already agreed?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you both asking me separately?”

The man looked confused.

“That’s how we were told to submit it.”

By the fourth request, irritation had settled behind Austin’s eyes. By the sixth, he understood the pattern. Half these people did not need an Alpha’s judgment.

They needed someone to compare requests before they reached him. Two were asking about the same storage use on different days. Three had questions another office could answer.

One disagreement had already been settled by the people involved, but both sides still believed Austin needed to confirm it. The rules were not unclear. The route was.

Austin leaned back.

“Who used to organize these?”

The man across from him blinked.

“Hallie.”

The name struck harder than it should have. Austin kept his face neutral.

“What exactly did she do?”

“She usually spoke to people before they came in.”

“About what?”

“What they actually needed.”

Austin looked at the stack beside his hand. The man continued.

“If two requests were the same problem, she put them together. If somebody else could answer it, she sent them there. If it really needed you, she made sure the facts were ready.”

Eleven people had become six conversations. Six had become perhaps two that needed him.

“Was that an assigned duty?”

“I don’t know.”

Of course he did not. Austin dismissed him and looked at the next request. Hallie had trained for years to become Luna.

He had thought he understood what that meant.

Ceremonies. Pack relations. Formal disputes. Knowing families. Standing beside him when decisions carried social weight.

Those were the visible parts. He had never counted the conversations that never became meetings because Hallie sent someone to the right person first. He had never counted the arguments that arrived already narrowed to the real disagreement.

Why would he? If she did the work well, there was nothing left for him to notice. The mate bond tightened beneath his ribs.

Austin went still. Distance had not erased it. Hallie was still his mate.

She was also Grant’s wife.

At Cedar Draw, she was working. Austin knew that much about her. She would be learning its routines, seeing gaps, listening before people realized they had told her what was wrong.

And whatever she built there would not belong to Bellamy Creek. The thought irritated him. Then shame followed.

Belong. He had been using that word wrong. Hallie’s work had belonged to Bellamy Creek because Hallie had chosen to give it.

The mate bond had never entitled Austin to it. Her training as his future Luna had not entitled him to it either. Love had not entitled him to it.

The distinction should have been obvious. It had not been obvious while she was there every day. A knock sounded.

Another request.

Austin said, “Come in.”

The woman who entered carried no paper.

“I was told I needed your approval.”

“For what?”

She explained.

Halfway through, Austin realized she did not need approval at all. She needed to know which existing rule applied.

“Who handles this normally?” he asked.

She named the appropriate office.

“Go there. You don’t need me for this.”

Relief crossed her face. After she left, Austin wrote one note on the top page. Sort before audience.

Then he stopped. The phrase was inadequate. Sorting paper was not what Hallie had done.

She understood enough about both the system and the people inside it to know when a request was really a request, when it was a dispute, when it was confusion, and when someone only needed to be pointed toward the person who already had authority to help.

That was harder to replace than comparing names across schedules. The first problem had looked like an oversight. This one looked like structure.

Austin assigned an experienced coordinator to screen routine questions for the rest of the day, with instructions to route matters to existing roles rather than invent new authority. It would work temporarily. The hallway emptied by early afternoon.

Bellamy Creek looked normal again. That was almost the problem. Austin stood in the quiet and understood that Hallie’s best work had often ended exactly like this.

The absence of a crisis hid how much trouble had been avoided. The mate bond pulled faintly again. He had once mistaken Hallie’s constant availability for something he was owed.