Chapter 6

POV: Bree

“She’s supposed to be nothing.”

I said it to my own reflection, which was not the sort of thing I usually did, but the meeting room was empty and my father had already gone ahead to update the council, and somebody needed to say it out loud before I let myself believe it again.

An omega. A limp. A wolf that hadn’t shifted in fourteen years, in a pack that measured a person’s worth by exactly that. I had spent months preparing for this engagement the way I prepared for everything, thoroughly, patiently, certain that once the fated bond was severed at the fire circle, Kade would need time, and then he would need me, in that order, and I had budgeted for both.

I had not budgeted for four times in one meeting.

Four times he’d gone somewhere else behind his eyes while my father talked patrol schedules and grazing rights, four times his whole body had gone still in that specific way wolves go still when they’re tracking a scent, and I knew exactly whose scent it was, because I’d smelled her too, faint on the wind through the open window, and I’d watched him chase it without moving an inch.

I had told myself, at the fire circle, that a severed bond was a severed bond. That whatever pull existed between fated mates would fade once the formal rejection landed, the way a wound closes once you’ve cauterized it.

I was starting to understand that I had been wrong about that, and I did not enjoy being wrong about things I had spent this much time preparing for.

My mother always said jealousy was for wolves who hadn’t done the work. I told myself, walking the long way back to my family’s quarters instead of the short one, that this wasn’t jealousy. This was strategy. There was a difference, even if it didn’t always feel like one from the inside.

The strategic version of the problem was this: Wren Calder was supposed to have stopped mattering three nights ago, and she hadn’t, and an Alpha who couldn’t stop thinking about a mate he’d already rejected was an Alpha whose judgment the council would eventually start to question, and an Alpha whose judgment the council questioned was not the foundation I intended to build the rest of my life on.

That was the version I could say out loud to my father without either of us having to be embarrassed about it.

The other version, the one I didn’t say out loud to anyone, was smaller and uglier and lived somewhere under my ribs where I kept the things I didn’t like admitting even to myself. I had wanted, for exactly one evening, to walk into that engagement announcement and feel chosen. Not settled for. Not the sensible alliance the council landed on once the better option got ruled out on a technicality of rank. Chosen.

I had watched his face at the fire circle. I knew the difference.

I found Marisol in the garden behind the main hall, deadheading roses with more force than the task strictly required, and I recognized the mood immediately because it was the same one I was fighting off myself.

“You saw it too,” I said, not a question.

She didn’t pretend to understand. “He’s young. He’ll settle.”

“Four times, Marisol. In one meeting.”

Her hands went still on the shears. “What exactly are you asking me?”

“I’m asking whether you’re as certain as you sounded three nights ago that severing a bond is the same thing as ending it.”

She was quiet long enough that I got my answer without her having to say it, and something in my chest went cold and clear in a way that felt, for the first time since the ceremony, like standing on solid ground again.

“She’s still healer’s apprentice,” I said. “Still has access to pack records, still moves freely through territory that borders warriors on active rotation, still spends time alone with an Alpha who can’t seem to keep himself from finding excuses to be near her. That’s not sentiment, Marisol. That’s a security question. Someone should have raised it days ago.”

“You’re proposing what, exactly?”

“I’m proposing that a pack under threat from Ironclaw scouts can’t afford blind spots. And an unstable omega with unresolved feelings toward the Alpha, wandering pack land with no formal oversight, is precisely the kind of blind spot that gets exploited.”

Marisol studied me for a long moment, and I watched her decide, the way I’d watched her decide things all my life, weighing what was true against what was useful and finding, in this particular case, that the two lined up conveniently well.

“The council would need something concrete,” she said. “Not just a hunch.”

“Then we find something concrete.” I kept my voice level, kept it reasonable, the way I kept everything, because reasonable was the only register that had ever gotten me anywhere in this family. “I’m not suggesting we invent a problem. I’m suggesting we pay closer attention to one that’s clearly already there.”

She went back to the roses. That was as close to agreement as Marisol Ashfall ever gave anyone, and I had learned a long time ago to take it.

I left the garden with the beginning of a plan I hadn’t fully shaped yet, and underneath the plan, quieter, the part of me I didn’t like looking at directly. I had wanted to be chosen. I hadn’t been. And if I couldn’t have that, I was at least going to make certain nobody else got to keep the thing that had cost me the choosing in the first place.