Chapter 26

The council gathered again the next morning, quieter this time, none of the sharp tension from the legitimacy hearing left in the room. Ivy sat beside Kade in the front row, his hand wrapped around hers, and watched Damon stand alone in the center of the stone floor where he'd knelt in defeat only hours before.

"The challenge is settled," the elder said. "What remains is what this council does with the one who lost it."

Damon said nothing, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere past the crowd.

"I won't ask for exile," Kade said, standing. A murmur moved through the room, surprise plain on more than one face. "He's still pack. Still blood. Stripping him of everything he has left doesn't make this pack stronger, it just makes it smaller."

"He tried to take your seat through manipulation and a hired fighter," an older council member said. "Mercy has limits, Kade."

"I know what he did." Kade's voice stayed level. "I'm not asking for mercy without cost. I'm asking that his cost be earned back instead of simply taken away. Strip his succession claim permanently — he'll never sit this seat, not through me, not through any child of mine. But let him serve this pack in some capacity that isn't power. Let him prove, over years if it takes years, that there's more to him than the ambition that nearly cost him everything."

The hall was quiet for a long moment. Ivy watched something shift, slowly, across Damon's face — not gratitude, not yet, but something that looked, for the first time since she'd met him, like genuine surprise.

"Why," Damon said finally, voice rough. "After everything I did. Why extend that."

"Because I spent sixteen years running this pack alone, certain that trusting anyone was a weakness I couldn't afford," Kade said. "I don't want to spend the rest of it making the same mistake with my own family that I made with everyone else. You're still my cousin, Damon. I'd rather you earn your way back to being someone I trust than lose you completely over one fight, however badly you fought it."

Damon didn't answer right away. When he finally did, his voice had lost every trace of its old, easy performance.

"I'll take that," he said quietly. "I don't deserve it. I'll take it anyway."

The council murmured its agreement, and the elder moved to close the matter, but Kade wasn't finished.

"There's one more thing," he said, and turned, reaching for Ivy's hand to bring her to stand beside him in front of the whole gathered pack. "I made a mistake at the start of all this. I let a contract stand between us instead of the truth, and I let this council learn who Ivy really was to me from my cousin's mouth instead of my own. I won't make that mistake again."

He turned fully to face her, amber eyes steady, and something in the room went hushed and still.

"Ivy Marsh," he said, loud enough for the whole hall to hear. "You are not my surrogate. You never really were, not underneath the paperwork. You are my mate, chosen by the bond and now chosen by me, in front of my pack and yours both. I want to claim you as Luna of this pack, publicly, permanently, with nothing left unsaid between us."

Ivy's throat tightened, the whole hall blurring slightly at the edges. "Ask me properly, then. Not just announce it."

Something that was almost a laugh escaped him, warm and surprised. He got down on one knee, right there on the old stone floor, in front of the entire pack and Odalys and Rhys and even Damon, still standing quiet at the center of the circle.

"Ivy Marsh," he said. "Will you stand beside me as Luna of this pack? Not because a contract said you had to. Because I want you there, every day, for the rest of however long we both get."

"Yes," Ivy said, laughing and crying at the same time, pulling him up before he'd even finished rising on his own. "Obviously, yes."

The hall erupted, warmth and noise replacing the tension that had lived in this room for weeks, and somewhere near the back, Ivy caught Odalys watching with an expression that looked, for the first time since they'd met, entirely at peace.

"Thorne's people will need answering," Odalys said quietly, once the noise had settled enough to hear her. "That fight isn't finished. But it can wait a day or two, I think, for this."

"A day or two," Kade agreed, pulling Ivy close against his side. "I think we've earned that much, at least."