Chapter 15

Wren

It was Petra who brought it up first, which surprised Wren more than anything else about the conversation that followed — Petra, who'd spoken maybe six words directly to her in four months, choosing this particular evening to break her long silence with something that mattered.

"You should be Alpha." She said it plainly, from her spot by the fire, not looking up from the mending in her lap. "Ezra's been holding this pack together on borrowed time for six years. Everyone knows it. He knows it best of anybody."

Ezra, across the room, didn't look surprised by the ambush, which told Wren this conversation had probably been planned before she'd even walked in that evening.

"She's not wrong," he said. "I've been thinking it since the rogue fight, if I'm honest. Been putting off saying it because I wasn't sure how you'd take it, and because naming a new Alpha isn't a small thing to ask of anybody, let alone somebody who's had exactly one pack already decide what she was worth without asking her opinion on it."

"That's different."

"Is it?" Ezra's voice stayed gentle, but the question landed anyway. "This isn't Blackthorn telling you what you are, Wren. This is six people who've watched you fix roofs and haul water and stand between three rogues and a twelve-year-old boy, asking you to be what you've already been acting like for months now. There's a difference between being told what you're worth and being asked."

Wren looked around the small room — Milo, watching her with open, hopeful eyes; Rennick and Dara, quiet but nodding; Sable, arms crossed, the particular look on her face that meant she'd known this was coming and had simply been waiting for Wren to catch up — and felt something rise in her chest that she didn't immediately recognize, because it had been so long since anyone had asked her to be something instead of simply overlooking what she already was.

"I don't know how to lead a pack," she said finally, which was the truest thing she had to offer. "I've never done it. I don't come from an Alpha line. Whatever's in my blood, I don't even fully understand it yet."

"None of us know exactly what we're doing, first time we do something that matters," Ezra said. "I didn't, when I took this pack six years ago with barely more than a burial and a bad feeling to go on. You learn it by doing it badly for a while, and then less badly, and eventually you look up and you've been doing it right for longer than you noticed." He held her gaze, steady. "This pack survives because of you. That's not sentiment. That's just what happened, whether or not you were trying for it to happen that way. The title's just catching up to the truth."

Milo, unable to stay quiet any longer, piped up from his corner. "Also you're really good at the vanishing thing, and Alphas are supposed to be strong, so."

That surprised a real laugh out of her, the first one in longer than she could remember, cutting through some of the weight the room had been carrying. "Thank you, Milo. Very compelling legal argument."

"I try."

The laugh loosened something in her chest that had been tight since Ezra first said the word Alpha, and in the quiet that followed it, Wren found she already knew her answer — had known it, probably, since the moment Petra broke six months of silence to say it for her.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'll do it."

The room didn't erupt into celebration, exactly — Nightshade wasn't built for grand gestures, not anymore, not with so few of them left to make one — but something eased in every face around that fire, a held breath finally released, and Ezra nodded once, satisfied, like a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying alone for six years and finding, to his quiet relief, that his shoulders remembered how to feel light.

"Good," he said. "We'll do it properly. Full ceremony, moon high, the old words. You deserve better than somebody just deciding it over dinner and calling it done." Something almost fond crossed his weathered face. "You've earned a real one, Wren. First good thing this pack's had reason to celebrate in longer than I care to count."

Wren looked around the small circle of firelight — this strange, thin, stubborn found family she'd stumbled into half-starved four months ago — and thought, for the first time since the night of the rejection, that maybe this was what building something back from nothing actually looked like. Not triumphant. Not clean. Just steady, and earned, and entirely, finally, hers.