Chapter 8

POV: Kade

“The wedding date’s been moved up.”

My mother said it the way she said most things that mattered, without looking up from whatever paperwork currently had her attention, as if the sentence weighed nothing at all.

“To when.”

“Three weeks. The council wants it done before the autumn gathering.”

“Three weeks.” I heard my own voice go flat. “An unclaimed wolf is howling on our border and the council’s priority is flower arrangements.”

“The council’s priority is a pack that looks settled the moment other territories start asking questions about who’s actually in charge here.” She set the paper down and finally looked at me, and there was no give in her expression at all. “An Alpha with a confirmed mate and a secured alliance is harder to test than an Alpha who’s still, in the eyes of every pack within scent range, unmarried and unproven.”

“So the solution to an active threat is a wedding.”

“The solution to an active threat is looking like a pack that has nothing left to prove. Those aren’t the same sentence, but they’re close enough for our purposes.”

I paced the length of her study once, twice, because sitting still had stopped being something my body wanted to do days ago and hadn’t improved since. “We don’t even know what howled. Garrett’s patrol lost the trail. We’re doubling border shifts on a guess.”

“And in three weeks, you’ll be doing that with a Sinclair alliance fully secured instead of half-negotiated. That’s not a coincidence I’m willing to leave on the table just because the timing feels rushed to you.”

“It feels rushed because it is rushed.”

“It feels rushed because you don’t want it,” she said, quieter now, and that was worse than the flat authority from a moment ago, because it was true and we both knew it. “I understand that, Kade. I’m not blind to what this is costing you. But wanting more time isn’t the same as needing it, and this pack needs stability more than you need three more weeks to feel differently about a decision you already made.”

“I made it because you and Reeve stood there and told me it was the only option.”

“It was.”

“Was it?” I stopped pacing and looked at her directly, and something in me that had been holding steady for days finally cracked enough to let the real question out. “Or was it just the option that was easiest to explain to the council?”

She didn’t answer right away, and in the silence I watched something move behind her eyes that I didn’t recognize, not the calm authority she wore for every council meeting, something older and more careful than that.

“You think I don’t know what it costs, choosing the easy explanation over the honest one.” Her voice had gone strange, distant in a way I’d never heard from her. “I’ve done it before. I watched it go badly before. I am not eager to watch it go badly twice.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the council’s math isn’t wrong, even if it isn’t the whole story.” She turned back to her papers, too quickly, the way people move when they’re trying to outrun a sentence they’ve already started. “Elena thought she could keep her daughter safe just by staying quiet and small. I watched exactly how well that worked.”

The room went very still.

“Elena,” I repeated. “Wren’s mother.”

My mother’s hand had gone flat against the desk, pressing down like she was holding herself in place. She didn’t answer.

“You knew her.”

“That’s not something we’re discussing tonight.”

“Mother.”

“I said it’s not something we’re discussing.” Her voice snapped back into the register I knew, controlled, closed, the door shutting so fast I almost missed the half-second before it did, the half-second where she’d looked, for the first time since my father died, genuinely afraid of something. “The wedding is in three weeks. That’s the conversation we’re having. Everything else is not your concern right now.”

“You just said her name like it means something.”

“Every name means something, Kade. That doesn’t make all of them mine to explain to you.” She gathered her papers with hands that weren’t quite steady, and for a woman who had spent my entire life being the calmest presence in any room, that unsteadiness told me more than anything she’d actually said. “Go check on the border patrol. That’s a real use of your evening.”

I stood there a moment longer, waiting for her to say something else, anything else, and she didn’t look up again until it was clear I understood the conversation was over whether I agreed with that or not.

I left with the wedding date sitting in my chest like a stone I hadn’t asked for, and underneath it, sharper, a single name I hadn’t known to go looking for until five minutes ago, already circling everything I thought I understood about why my mother had been so certain, so fast, that rejecting Wren was the only choice either of us had.