Chapter 63 — The Woman At His Side

Austin had read the Cedar Draw report often enough that the fold had begun to soften. He should have put it away. Instead, it lay beside the correspondence tied to his formal betrothal, close enough that the two futures seemed to have been placed on the desk for comparison.

Hallie, wanted as a Luna by another Alpha. The daughter of the Alpha whose alliance Austin had chosen, formally betrothed to him and waiting inside a future he had already set in motion. The marriage had not happened yet.

That distinction mattered. So did the fact that the betrothal had. Austin picked up the alliance papers first.

Nothing in them had become less useful because another man desired Hallie. The political support remained real. The security Bellamy Creek gained remained real. The agreement between packs had not dissolved because regret had finally become too sharp to ignore.

This was the future he had chosen as Alpha, and a woman stood inside it as a person rather than a symbol of territory.

She was more than a line beneath an alliance: a woman who would stand at his side if the marriage proceeded. Austin lowered the pages.

He had spent too long letting the word duty flatten everyone involved. It had made his decision sound inevitable.

Bellamy Creek needed support. Another Alpha had a daughter. A formal betrothal created an alliance. Therefore Hallie had to be rejected.

Clean. Necessary. Almost impersonal.

Except Hallie had been the one he rejected. And another woman was the one he had promised to marry. Neither of them had been created for his political calculation.

Austin looked toward the window.

The yard outside remained orderly. Bellamy Creek still needed what it had needed when he became Alpha. He could not rewrite those pressures simply because the consequences now hurt.

But pressure was not the same as inevitability. That was the part he had resisted admitting. The report from Cedar Draw made it impossible to avoid.

The young Alpha there understood recognized packs. He understood status, alliances, the political usefulness of a Luna, and the value of a marriage that other packs could read without explanation.

He had looked at Hallie and wanted her from inside that world, with full knowledge of what it demanded.

Austin’s jaw tightened. Hallie had not merely been suited to him because they were mates. She had not merely been suited to Bellamy Creek because she had grown up there and trained for the role beside him.

Another Alpha could look at her skills, her judgment, the way she moved through political work, and think she was worth choosing. That knowledge stripped away one of Austin’s last defenses. He had told himself he had rejected a private future for a public necessity.

But another Alpha, facing the same kind of public world, could apparently imagine Hallie as both. Austin sat back. The mate bond pulled beneath his ribs.

He did not touch it.

The bond had never been proof that Hallie should return to him. He knew that now, even if knowing did nothing to make the pull easier to bear.

His gaze dropped to the betrothal papers again. If he reduced the woman named in them to political advantage, he would be repeating the same failure from another direction. She was not the reason Hallie was gone.

Austin was.

The betrothal had supported the alliance he wanted. He had accepted that bargain. He had made it formal.

The woman attached to it now carried consequences too. If Austin spent every day regretting Hallie while moving toward marriage with someone else, that regret would not remain private forever. It would shape the marriage.

Shape the woman who entered it. Shape the alliance he had claimed mattered enough to sacrifice Hallie for. Austin closed his eyes briefly.

He had wanted to believe duty forced his hand because inevitability left no selfishness or misjudgment to own.

He had treated himself as an Alpha with no alternative, merely doing what Bellamy Creek required. In truth, he had made a choice.

A defensible one, perhaps. A useful one. Still a choice.

And choices did not become destiny because the person who made them disliked the cost. Austin opened his eyes. The Cedar Draw report remained where he had left it.

He thought of the line that had bothered him most: another Alpha had treated Hallie as exceptional without the mate bond or their shared history to shape the judgment.

The young Alpha had met the woman Hallie was now and seen value, independent of Austin’s old love for her. Austin could no longer tell himself she had only made sense beside him.

That belief had hidden a kind of arrogance he had not recognized while he still assumed she would remain available somewhere beyond his decision. She was desirable outside Bellamy Creek. Desirable outside the bond.

She was desirable to men who could offer the very position Austin had once decided she was politically insufficient to fill. The contradiction belonged to him, not to her.

He put the Cedar Draw report away at last. Then he placed the betrothal correspondence squarely in front of him. The woman he was formally promised to remained part of Bellamy Creek’s future.

The alliance remained active. The marriage remained ahead of them, not completed. Austin could not erase those facts simply because Hallie had become harder to lose.

He also could not keep pretending they had happened to him. He had chosen this road. Two women now lived with the consequences of that choice.

One had built a life beyond him. The other still stood in the future he had selected. Austin looked down at the papers and felt regret settle into something heavier than longing.

Responsibility. Duty no longer sounded like an excuse.