Chapter 7: Old Wounds, New Roots

The war council met three days after Wren's pregnancy was confirmed, though no one called it that out loud. Magnus preferred "family discussion," and Wren suspected he chose the softer word deliberately, for her sake, even as Ezra paced the length of the study like a caged animal and Ronan sat with his arms crossed and murder in his eyes.

"We march on Ashgrove," Ezra said, not for the first time. "We show them exactly what they threw away."

"We do nothing of the kind," Magnus said, patient but firm. "Not yet. Not while Wren is still recovering, and not while we act purely on anger instead of strategy. An unprovoked attack on another pack's territory would cost us allies we can't afford to lose, and it would put Wren and her child directly in danger besides."

"So we just let him get away with it?" Ezra demanded. "Let him keep his crown and his false Luna and his lies, while Wren carries his child in exile?"

"She's not in exile," Cassian said quietly, from where he sat beside Wren on the small couch near the window. "She's home. That's the difference, Ezra. This isn't about punishing him quickly. It's about making sure whatever happens next, it happens on our terms, not out of rage."

Wren watched the argument unfold around her with a strange, distant feeling, like watching weather move across a landscape she was no longer standing in. A week ago she would have flinched at the mention of Kane's name, at the reminder of everything she'd lost. Now she found she mostly felt tired — tired of the anger, tired of carrying feelings that belonged to a life she no longer wanted back.

"I don't want revenge," she said, and the room quieted at once, all eyes turning to her. "Not yet, anyway. Maybe not ever, in the way you all mean it. I want to be strong enough that no one can hurt me again. I want this child to grow up somewhere safe, surrounded by people who actually want it. Beyond that, I don't know yet what I want from Kane, or from Ashgrove, or from any of it."

"That's fair," Magnus said gently, before Ezra could argue further. "And it's your right to decide, more than anyone else's in this room. For now, we focus on what we can control. Wren's health. Her training, once she's strong enough. Building the kind of strength that means no one — Ashgrove or otherwise — ever mistakes this family for an easy target again."

"And if he comes looking for her?" Ronan asked quietly. It was the first thing he'd said in several minutes. "The mate bond doesn't simply vanish, whatever words he spoke in that hall. If he ever comes to his senses and comes looking—"

"Then he'll find a family that will not hand her over easily," Magnus said, something hard entering his voice for the first time since Wren had met him. "Fated mate or not, he had his chance. He chose wrong, in front of his entire pack, and he will have to live with the consequences of that choice for the rest of his life. My daughter owes him nothing."

Wren said nothing to that, though something in her chest twisted uncomfortably at the thought — not longing, exactly, not anymore, but something more complicated that she didn't yet have the words for. She pushed it down and let the conversation move on without her.

---

Over the following weeks, Silverpeak became, slowly and almost without her noticing, something Wren had never once had in her life: a home.

Callum monitored her pregnancy closely, marveling at how quickly her body seemed to be adjusting to the changes brought on by her newly awakened wolf — faster healing, deeper reserves of strength than any human pregnancy should allow, and an appetite that had the kitchen staff both amused and slightly alarmed. Cassian visited nearly every day, always with some small gift — a book, a piece of fruit from his own pack's orchards, once an entire basket of kittens he insisted she absolutely needed to hold immediately. Ezra was gruffer in his affection but no less constant, appointing himself her personal trainer the moment Callum cleared her for light exercise, teaching her the basic forms of self-defense that every pack child usually learned by age ten.

"You're behind," he told her bluntly, the first time she stumbled through a simple stance, "but you're not behind because of anything wrong with you. You're behind because no one ever bothered to teach you. That changes now."

Ronan kept his distance more than his brothers did, though Wren noticed he was rarely far — patrolling the grounds near wherever she happened to be, appearing with quiet efficiency whenever she needed something before she'd even finished asking for it. She understood, slowly, that this was simply how he loved people: not with Cassian's open warmth or Ezra's fierce protectiveness, but with steady, unglamorous presence, the kind that didn't need to announce itself to be real.

And Magnus — Magnus simply looked at her, some days, like he still couldn't quite believe she was real. He took to walking with her in the mornings, slow loops around the pack house gardens while her body adjusted to the new life growing inside it, and he told her, bit by bit, stories about her mother that Wren drank in like water after a long drought.

"She used to sing," he told her one morning, sunlight slanting gold through the trees. "Terribly, if I'm honest. Completely off-key. But she did it anyway, all the time, and I never once had the heart to tell her, because she looked so happy doing it."

"I don't remember her at all," Wren admitted. "I used to lie awake at the orphanage, trying to imagine what my parents might have been like. I never imagined anything close to the truth."

"She would be so proud of you," Magnus said, voice thick. "Everything you survived. Everything you're building now, in spite of it. I only wish she'd been here to see it herself."

Wren found herself, more and more, letting the old ache of Ashgrove settle into something quieter in her chest — not gone, not healed, but no longer the loudest thing inside her. There was too much else now, filling up the space that grief and rejection had once occupied entirely on their own.

---

At Ashgrove, the wedding preparations moved forward with a kind of grim inevitability that Kane could not seem to stop, no matter how many small, nagging doubts accumulated in the back of his mind.

Serena grew more short-tempered as the weeks passed, snapping at servants over minor mistakes, growing tense and evasive whenever Kane asked simple questions about her pregnancy that any expectant mother should have been eager to answer. He noticed, too, that her wolf never came out anymore, not even during the full moon runs the whole pack traditionally took together — she always claimed exhaustion, or the pregnancy, or some vague discomfort that kept her conveniently confined to her chambers.

His own wolf, meanwhile, grew steadily more agitated in her presence, a low, wordless unease that Kane had never experienced before with any woman, fated or otherwise. It wasn't hostility, exactly. It was something closer to wrongness, an instinct screaming quietly that something about the entire situation didn't add up, though Kane couldn't yet piece together what.

"Your wolf doesn't like her," Elder Rasmus observed one evening, watching Kane flinch almost imperceptibly as Serena's hand settled on his arm during a pack dinner. "That's unusual, for an Alpha and his intended Luna."

"It's nothing," Kane said, the same lie he'd been telling himself for weeks now, wearing thinner every time he repeated it. "Adjustment. That's all."

But that night, alone on his balcony again, staring south toward wherever Wren had disappeared to, he found himself wondering — not for the first time, and with a dread that grew heavier every day — whether the deep, persistent wrongness he felt around Serena had ever really been about adjustment at all.

He thought of the night of the blood ceremony. Of Serena's sudden, urgent claim of weakness, delivered with such perfect, practiced sorrow. Of the way she'd looked to him for confirmation of an order he didn't remember giving quite the way she'd described it.

Did I actually say that, he wondered, the thought arriving cold and unwelcome in the dark. Or did I only agree to something I was too broken and guilty to properly question?

He had no answer yet. But for the first time since the rejection, the question refused to leave him alone, circling in his mind long after he finally gave up and went to bed, sleepless once again.