Chapter 12

Ryker's POV

The great hall of the Ashwood pack house felt smaller than it used to, and I couldn't figure out if that was because of the crowd gathered for the evening meal or because something inside my own chest had shrunk since the night of the ceremony, tightening a little more every time someone looked at me with a question they were too polite to ask out loud.

My father sat across the table, working through a plate of roasted meat like nothing about the last few days had shaken him at all, though I'd learned a long time ago that his calm surface rarely matched whatever was actually turning over in his head, and tonight was no different, because every so often his eyes would flick toward me, measuring, like he was waiting for me to say something he already expected to hear.

"You've barely touched your food," he said finally, setting down his fork with the kind of deliberate patience that always meant a conversation was coming whether I wanted it or not.

"I'm not hungry."

"You haven't been hungry in days." He leaned back in his chair, studying me the way he used to study opponents before a challenge, calculating, patient, never in a rush to show his hand. "This wouldn't have anything to do with what happened at the border, would it? With the girl?"

I set my own fork down harder than I meant to, the sound sharper than I intended in the quiet hall. "She has a name."

"I'm aware." My father's mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "I'm simply surprised to hear you defending the use of it, given that you were the one standing in front of the entire pack a week ago explaining exactly why she wasn't worth using it for."

The words landed the way they always did lately, sharp and uncomfortable, digging into a place in my chest that had started aching the moment I watched her walk away from the clearing with her chin held higher than I expected, higher than it had any right to be after what I'd just said to her in front of everyone we'd both grown up with.

I told myself, that night and every night since, that I'd done the right thing. Every instinct in me had said Elara wasn't strong enough to stand beside an Alpha, that a Luna needed to be someone who could hold her own in a fight, someone the pack would respect without question, and Elara had never been that, not once in the twenty years I'd known her, quiet and small and always flinching when voices rose too loud around her.

But I hadn't expected the flinching to stop.

I hadn't expected to hear the story making its way back through the pack, whispered first and then spoken plainly once enough people had confirmed it, about the way she'd stood in front of my own father at the border and told him he didn't deserve an explanation from her, about the way the Lycan King himself had stepped between them like he had something to prove, something to protect.

"You're thinking about her again," my father said, and it wasn't a question this time.

"I'm thinking about the fact that half the pack is whispering about a mark," I said, keeping my voice low enough that it wouldn't carry past our table, though I doubted it mattered much anymore, given how fast rumors traveled through pack lands these days.

"I'm thinking about the fact that you went to that border asking to see her wrist, which tells me you already suspected something before any of us had proof."

My father's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes went carefully blank, the same look he used to give visiting Alphas when he didn't want them reading his next move. "I suspected a great many things about that girl for a long time, Ryker. Long before the mark, long before the Lycan King ever laid eyes on her."

The words settled over me slowly, and something cold moved through my chest as pieces I hadn't wanted to look at too closely started sliding into place, the way my father had always been strangely watchful of Elara during pack gatherings, the way he'd pushed so hard, years ago, for the match between us, insisting it was for the good of the pack even when I'd been young enough to want someone else entirely.

"What do you mean, suspected," I said slowly. "Suspected what, exactly?"

My father was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice had dropped into something low and careful, the tone he used when he was about to say something he needed me to understand mattered more than it sounded like it should. "Her mother wasn't from any pack bloodline anyone in Ashwood could trace.

She arrived here pregnant, alone, asking for shelter, and there were things about her, things about the way certain old wolves in this pack reacted to her presence, that made me believe she was hiding from something far bigger than an ordinary pack dispute."

"You knew," I said, the words tasting bitter in my mouth. "You knew there was something different about Elara's bloodline, and you still pushed me to reject her at the ceremony."

"I pushed you to reject her because I didn't know what she was, not for certain, and a match to an unknown bloodline is a dangerous gamble for a future Alpha to make blind," my father said, and there was no apology in his voice, only the same cold calculation he'd always used to justify decisions that hurt people smaller than himself.

"I intended to look into her family more carefully after the ceremony was called off. I did not intend for a Lycan King to find her first."

Something ugly twisted in my stomach, a mix of anger and shame and something that felt uncomfortably close to grief, because the girl I'd humiliated in front of two hundred witnesses hadn't been weak at all.

She'd been exactly what my father suspected and never told me, and I'd thrown her away with cruel words in a crowded clearing because he'd decided it was safer not to explain his reasons until it was already too late to undo what he'd asked of me.

"She's not coming back," I said quietly, more to myself than to him. "Even if I wanted to fix this. Even if I stood in front of the whole pack and took it all back. She's not coming back to me."

"No," my father agreed, and for the first time all evening, something almost like regret flickered across his face. "I don't imagine she is. Which means we need to think very carefully, Ryker, about what it means for this pack when the woman carrying a goddess's bloodline is standing at the side of the most powerful Lycan King in three kingdoms instead of at yours."

I pushed back from the table, my appetite for the conversation as gone as my appetite for the food, and walked out into the cold evening air without waiting for him to say anything else, because for the first time since the ceremony, the ache in my chest wasn't about pride or reputation or the pack's opinion of me.

It was about the look on her face when I said the word weak, and the growing, sickening certainty that I'd never get the chance to take it back.