Chapter 4

Athena's POV

Asher meets Dimitri at the front steps of the pack house. Within the next minute, Dimitri steps outside his car, and I watch my brother do the thing he does best: offer exactly enough warmth to be correct and not a single degree more.

"Alpha Romanov." Asher extends his hand, and Dimitri takes it, the two of them measuring each other in the space of a handshake the way Alphas always do. "Welcome to Silverwater."

"Alpha King." Dimitri's voice gives nothing away either, and for a moment the two of them stand there, equals in rank if nothing else, deciding silently whether that's going to be enough to build something on.

It isn't friendship. I don't expect it to be, not yet, maybe not ever. Asher has spent ten years being the only person standing between me and everyone who might want something from our bloodline, and a mate bond doesn't erase that instinct just because it happened. What I see instead, walking a step behind them into the house, is acceptance. Careful, measured, the kind Asher extends to very few people. He isn't going to fight what the bond decided. That doesn't mean he's going to pretend he likes handing any part of me over to a stranger, even one my wolf chose without asking either of us first.

We end up in Asher's office an hour later, all of us settled into the kind of formal seating that makes a room feel more like a courtroom than a family meeting. Hailey sits beside Asher with a folder of pack records in her lap, already in Luna mode even here, at home, with no outsiders but Dimitri watching. Carter and Reese sit near the door behind Dimitri, quiet in the way Betas and Gammas learn to be quiet, present without taking up space. I sit where I always sit in this room, close enough to Asher's desk that anyone walking in would know exactly how much I matter to the decisions made here.

Asher folds his hands on the desk and looks at Dimitri for a long moment before he speaks.

"There's a tradition in this pack that I need you to understand before you take my sister home." His tone hasn't changed since the greeting outside, flat, plain in a way that leaves no room to misread it. "An Alpha's daughter never severs her ties to her blood pack. Not through marriage. Not through mating. Not through anything short of her own choice to walk away from it, which Athena has never once given me a reason to expect."

Dimitri doesn't interrupt. He watches Asher with the same stillness I noticed the first night, the kind that used to read as danger to me and now, somehow, reads as attention instead.

"If something happens to me," Asher continues, "the line doesn't end. Any offspring of my sister carries equal claim to the position of Alpha of Silverwater, the same as any child I might have myself. If they prove their worth the way every Alpha before them has had to prove it, the seat is theirs to take. That claim exists whether they're raised here or raised in your territory. It doesn't disappear because their father happens to rule somewhere else."

"Understood," Dimitri says.

"I'm not finished." Asher's eyes don't move off him. "That claim belongs to the child. Not to you. You gain no right to this pack, through my sister or through any pup she carries. Whatever authority you have here begins and ends with the fact that you're Athena's mate."

Something flickers across Dimitri's face, not offense, closer to respect, the same recalibration I've started to recognize in him whenever someone surprises him by being exactly as direct as they claim to be.

"I never expected otherwise," he says. "I have a pack of my own. I don't need yours."

Asher studies him a moment longer, like he's deciding whether to believe that as easily as it was said, and then continues.

"There's one more thing." Asher's gaze shifts to me, just briefly, something softer passing between us before it hardens again as he turns back to Dimitri. "My sister is a warrior. The best this pack has trained in a generation, and I include myself in that comparison. She will not be sidelined, silenced, or kept from her place. If your pack has a problem with her training and fighting beside the warriors, that problem needs to be solved before she ever sets foot on your territory."

"My pack doesn't have that problem," Dimitri says. "And if it develops one, I'll be the one who ends it."

I watch Asher weigh that answer too, turning it over for cracks the way he turns over every promise anyone's ever made him, and finding none.

Then his voice changes.

It's a small shift, barely a change in volume, but I've known my brother long enough to hear the difference between Alpha King speaking and Asher speaking, and this is Asher, stripped down to the only thing he's ever really been underneath the title.

"If I ever find out my sister is suffering in your pack, in any way," he says, looking directly into Dimitri's eyes without blinking, "or that even one wolf under your command disrespected her, I will raise a war on you. Even if it costs me everything I have built. And I want you to understand that this isn't an Alpha telling you the political cost of crossing him. This is her brother telling you what he'll burn down to protect her."

The room goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with rank or politics. I feel my own throat tighten, not from fear, but from something closer to gratitude, the same feeling I've carried since I was fourteen and watched this same boy decide, without anyone asking him to, that protecting me was worth more to him than his own safety.

Dimitri doesn't look away. He doesn't posture either, doesn't puff himself up the way I've seen other Alphas do when challenged, even quietly. He just holds Asher's gaze, calm and plain, and answers like the words cost him something to say honestly instead of easily.

"Athena will always be treated with respect and dignity in my pack." His voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. "You have my word."

Asher watches him a moment longer, searching, I think, for the smallest crack in that promise, some flicker of a man saying what's expected rather than what's true. He doesn't find one.

"I trust you, Alpha Romanov." He gives a short, curt nod, and something in his shoulders eases just slightly, the tension of a brother who has spent a decade being the only shield I had finally allowing someone else to stand in that place beside him. "Take care of her."

"I intend to."

I sit through the rest of it, the smaller details, territory arrangements, how often I'll return to Silverwater, how the packs will coordinate around border patrols now that our bloodlines are tied together, but none of it lands the way that exchange did. My brother just handed over a piece of his own protection to a man he barely knows, not because the bond forced his hand, but because he watched Dimitri answer honestly instead of easily, and decided that honesty was worth something.

I glance at Dimitri while Hailey walks through the last of the traditions with Asher and Dimitri that need to be taken care of before my farewell, and I catch him watching me instead of the papers in front of him, something unreadable in his expression that I'm starting to learn means he's turning something over in his head he isn't ready to say out loud yet.

I don't look away first. I never do.

But for the first time since the ball, I let myself wonder what it might actually feel like to be a mate of someone like Dimitri Romanov.

His face gives away nothing, the same guarded stillness he's worn since the moment I first saw him across the ballroom, but the bond doesn't care what his face is doing. I feel it pull low and warm beneath my ribs, quiet and certain, the way a hand finds another hand in the dark without needing to see it first. It isn't loud. It isn't dramatic. It's just there, constant in a way nothing about tonight has been, and somewhere underneath all the caution I've been holding onto since the ball, something in me starts, carefully, to trust him.

Not because he's said the right things, though he has. Not because Asher approved of him, though that matters more than I expected it to. Something simpler than that. Something my wolf decided the second his scent found me across a crowded room, and that I'm only now starting to let the rest of me catch up to.

He doesn't say anything. I don't either. There's nothing left to negotiate, nothing left to prove tonight, just his eyes on mine, impassive on the surface and something else entirely underneath it, and the bond humming quietly between us in a language that doesn't need words to be understood.