Chapter 5

Kade

By the third week, Kade had a system. He ate exactly enough to keep his wolf from noticing, trained hard enough in the mornings that nobody questioned why he slept badly, and kept his study door closed after dark, when the ache behind his sternum liked to remind him it was still there, low and constant, like a held breath his body refused to release.

By the sixth week, the system had started failing him in small, specific ways.

It happened first in a council meeting — the kind of routine border-tax dispute he'd have handled in his sleep two months earlier. He was halfway through a sentence about grain allocations when the thread of it simply left him, replaced by a wave of something that felt like grief wearing borrowed clothes, so total and so sudden that he had to grip the edge of the table to stay upright in his chair. The room went quiet. Six elders and his own second-in-command watched him carefully not-watch him, the particular silence of people deciding, in real time, whether saying something would be worse than saying nothing.

"Alpha?" That was Torren, low, just for him.

"Grain allocations," Kade said, once he trusted his voice again. "We were discussing grain allocations." As if he hadn't just lost an entire minute of his own life to something he couldn't name in front of six witnesses who were all, he suspected, going to remember it far better than he wanted them to.

The meeting finished. Nobody mentioned it. That was somehow worse than if they had.

Afterward, Torren found him in the corridor, matching his pace without being asked, the way he'd done since they were pups training together under the same instructors. "You want to tell me what that was?"

"No."

"Didn't think so." Torren didn't push, which was one of the reasons Kade had made him second in the first place. "For what it's worth, you've been doing that a lot. Losing the thread. I've been covering for you in the smaller meetings. Wasn't sure if you'd noticed."

Kade hadn't. That, more than anything, frightened him. "How long."

"Few weeks. Started small." Torren's voice dropped further, careful now in the way only someone who'd known him his whole life could be careful without it feeling like pity. "There's a word for it, Kade. Nobody's saying it, but everyone's thinking it."

"Don't."

"I'm not going to. I'm just telling you that you can't out-train what's happening to you, and I've watched you try for six weeks straight."

Kade didn't have an answer for that, so he didn't give one, and Torren — mercifully, or maybe just tactically — let the silence stand instead of filling it.

His father found him in the training yard two mornings later, at an hour Kade hadn't slept through at all, running forms alone in the dark because it was easier than lying in bed cataloguing the ways his own body seemed to be turning against him.

"The wedding's set for the solstice." Marcus said it the way he said everything lately, like a decision already made and merely being announced, not discussed. "Ashborne wants it public. Big enough that nobody on either side gets ideas about backing out once the arrangements are finalized."

"Fine."

"You don't sound fine."

Kade set down the practice blade before he answered, mostly to give his hands something to do besides shake. "I said fine. That's the answer you're going to get, because it's the only one I have to offer you tonight."

His father studied him for a long moment with something that might, in a different man, have been concern. In Marcus Voss it came out sounding like accounting, a ledger being quietly balanced. "This will pass, you know. It always does, eventually, one way or another."

"Does it."

"I rejected a mate myself. Before your mother." He said it simply, like a fact he'd long since stopped attaching feeling to, which might have been the most honest thing Kade had ever heard him say in twenty-seven years of listening to him speak. "Nobody remembers that now, because it stopped mattering. Give it time. You'll stop noticing the shape of what's missing, the same way I did."

"And if I don't?"

Something flickered across his father's face, there and gone too fast to name. "Then you'll learn to carry it the way I did, and the pack will never have to know the difference. That's what the position asks of us. It's not cruelty, Kade. It's simply the cost, and every Alpha before you has paid some version of it."

Kade didn't believe the first part. He wasn't entirely sure his father believed it either, not anymore, but there was a version of this conversation where pretending to believe it was easier for both of them than the alternative, and they settled into that version the way they'd settled into most conversations for the last ten years — carefully, at a distance, with all the real things left unsaid on the table between them.

He went back to his forms after his father left, alone in the dark, and didn't stop until his arms gave out before his mind did, which had become the closest thing to peace he had access to these days. Somewhere behind his sternum, the ache sat exactly where it always sat, patient, unhurried, entirely uninterested in his father's timeline for when it was supposed to stop mattering.