Chapter 2

Kade

The walk back to the pack house took eleven minutes. Kade knew because he counted every one of them, because counting was easier than doing anything else with those eleven minutes, and because he'd learned a long time ago that a body given a task will usually perform that task instead of falling apart in front of an audience.

Wolves stepped aside for him the whole way. Nobody spoke. That wasn't unusual — an Alpha walking through his own pack rarely invited conversation — but tonight the quiet had a different weight to it, the kind that came from forty people carefully not looking at him while thinking very loudly about what they'd just watched him do.

He let them think it. There wasn't a version of tonight where he got to control that too.

His father was waiting in the study, which meant this conversation had been decided before Kade even reached the door.

"You did the right thing." No hello. Marcus Voss didn't do hellos with his own son, not anymore. He stood at the window with a glass of something dark in his hand, watching the last of the pack disperse from the clearing below. "I know it doesn't feel that way tonight."

"It doesn't feel like anything."

That was a lie, and judging by the look his father gave him over the rim of the glass, not a very good one.

"Ashborne has eleven hundred wolves and a border six miles from here they've been testing for a year." Marcus said it like Kade hadn't sat through the same briefing a dozen times already. "Three of our scouts didn't come home last spring. You know exactly what happens if that alliance doesn't hold."

"I know the numbers."

"Then you know what you did tonight wasn't cruelty." He set the glass down. "It was arithmetic."

Kade didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer that wouldn't start a longer conversation than he had the stomach for, and some small, useless part of him was still standing in that clearing, still watching an omega girl's face do something he suspected he'd remember for the rest of his life.

His father left the way he always did, once he'd said the thing he'd come to say. Kade was still at the window when Seraphine let herself in without knocking, which told him everything about how this arrangement was going to run from here on.

"That was a lot of drama for a Tuesday." She said it lightly, the way she said most things, but she was watching him too closely for it to be as casual as it sounded. "You could've just told the elders your intended was already settled, before the ceremony. Would've saved everyone the theater."

"Would it have."

"No." At least she was honest about that much. "But it would've saved you the part where you had to say it out loud in front of her." A pause, not quite kind. "For what it's worth — I don't need you to want this, Kade. I need you to show up for it. Those aren't the same thing, and I'm not confused about which one I'm getting."

She left before he had to answer that, which he was grateful for, and which he suspected she already knew.

Alone again, Kade finally did the thing he'd been avoiding since he'd walked out of that clearing. He stopped moving.

It found him somewhere behind the sternum first. A small, wrong pressure, like a held breath he hadn't taken. He rubbed at his chest without meaning to, the way you rub at a bruise you don't remember getting, and told himself it was nothing. Smoke from the fire. The argument with his father. Five ceremonies' worth of tension finally letting go now that this one was over.

By midnight it hadn't gone anywhere. If anything it had gotten more specific — less like tension, more like something had been removed from a place he hadn't known was occupied until it went missing.

He didn't have a word for it yet. He would, eventually. Everyone who lived through a rejection long enough eventually did. But that night he only knew he stood at his window for a long time, looking out at a tree line an omega girl had walked into an hour ago and hadn't walked back out of, and that some low, traitorous part of him wanted to go check that she had somewhere to go.

He didn't move from the window. He told himself that not moving was the disciplined choice. The Alpha's choice. The choice that kept a pack from going to war over one girl's feelings.

He almost believed it.