Chapter 2

POV: Kade

“You did the right thing.”

My mother said it like she was handing me a gift. Like the words themselves could scrub the last five minutes off my skin.

They couldn’t. I could still smell Wren, faint under the smoke and the crowd and every other scent in that circle, and it was doing something to the back of my throat I didn’t have a name for. Not grief. Not exactly. Something closer to having swallowed a stone and being told to keep walking like nothing had changed shape inside me.

“Sit down, Alpha.” Councilman Reeve gestured at the chair across the war table like he was doing me a favor. “You look like you’re about to be sick.”

I sat because standing meant everyone could see my hands, and my hands hadn’t stopped wanting to move since I’d said the words. Reach for her. Take it back. Do something other than stand there and let the council’s math decide who I got to keep.

“The bond’s severed clean,” Reeve went on, already moving past it, already three sentences into the next agenda item. “No contest from her side, no formal challenge window. Good. Territory’s stable, the Sinclair alliance holds, and we don’t walk into the spring gathering looking like a pack that can be shaken by sentiment.”

Sentiment. That was the word he used for it.

“She has a name,” I said, before I could stop myself.

Reeve blinked at me like I’d spoken out of turn in a language he only half understood. My mother’s hand landed on my shoulder, light, deliberate, the kind of touch that meant stop talking far more than it meant comfort.

“Nobody’s forgetting she has a name, Kade.” Her voice was gentle. Her eyes weren’t. “But you’re Alpha for eleven months. Eleven. Every wolf in this territory is still deciding whether your father’s death left this pack weak enough to test. You cannot hand them a mate the council already flagged as a liability and expect them to read it as strength.”

“She’s not a liability. She’s a healer’s apprentice with a limp.”

“She’s an omega who hasn’t shifted in fourteen years, and every pack from here to the Ironclaw border knows it,” Reeve said, flat, like he was reading it off a ledger instead of talking about a person I’d smelled once and already couldn’t stop thinking about. “You want to explain to Ironclaw scouts why the new Alpha chose a mate half the territory already calls broken? Varga would eat that story alive and use it as an excuse to test our border by spring.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. That was the worst part. I didn’t have an answer, and some cold, practical piece of me that I hated knowing I had agreed with every word.

My mother’s grip tightened, just slightly, like she’d felt the fight go out of me and wanted to make sure it stayed gone. “You did what a good Alpha does. You put the pack first.”

“Then why does it feel like I just gutted someone?”

I hadn’t meant to say that out loud either. Reeve had the decency to look away. My mother didn’t.

“Because you’re not cruel,” she said, quiet now, just for me. “That’s not a flaw, Kade. It’s proof you’re not your uncle. But feeling something and doing the right thing anyway, that’s the whole job. Nobody said it would stop costing you.”

I looked down at my own hands on the table and made myself hold them still.

I kept seeing it. The exact second the rejection landed, the way her spine had gone rigid instead of breaking, the way she hadn’t looked away from me even once, not even when I would have understood if she had. I’d smelled fear on half the wolves I’d ever disciplined. I hadn’t smelled it on her. Just something sharper, something that had gone straight through me and lodged somewhere I couldn’t reach to pull it back out.

“The engagement announcement goes out at dawn,” Reeve said, already gathering his notes, already treating the last five minutes of my life as closed business. “Sinclair’s been ready for this for months. She’ll want to move fast, lock the alliance before anyone has time to second-guess it.”

“Move fast toward what, exactly?”

The door opened before Reeve could answer.

“There you are.” Bree came in already mid-sentence, bright in a way that felt aimed at me like a blade dressed up as a smile. “I already spoke to the seamstress about moving up the fitting, and my mother wants the ceremony before the first frost, which honestly works better for the guest lists anyway, don’t you think? Kade?”

She said my name like it already belonged to her.

I opened my mouth to say something, slow this down, buy myself a day, an hour, anything, and found there was nothing left in the room that was still mine to negotiate. My mother was nodding along. Reeve was already halfway out the door, satisfied. Bree kept talking, seating charts and flower arrangements and a date I hadn’t agreed to, spinning out in front of me like a wheel already turning too fast to grab hold of.

I realized, watching her mouth move and hearing almost none of it, that the decision hadn’t been mine to make back at that fire circle either.

It had just been mine to say out loud.