Chapter 4: The Pack Square (Part Two)

Nobody moved.

The whole pack just went still. Hundreds of wolves, all of them connected through the bond, all of them breathing the same cold morning air, and not one of them moved or spoke or stepped forward.

They just watched.

I looked at Jason.

"I need to speak." My voice came out steady. I do not know how. My hands were shaking at my sides and the tears I had wiped away were already threatening to come back and the mate bond was a raw, open wound in the center of my chest, but my voice came out steady. "Please. I just need one minute."

Jason's jaw was tight. His eyes were on me, fully on me now, and I could see him calculating, could see the Alpha instinct working behind his expression, managing the moment, managing the pack, managing me.

"Laila," he said quietly. A warning dressed up as my name.

"My parents died three days ago." I said it to the crowd as much as to him. To the elders with their unreadable faces. To the wolves I had grown up beside who were now looking at me like I was something unpredictable. "Three days. And I have been alone in that estate since the night they died, and not one person came to sit with me. Not one."

A murmur moved through the crowd.

"She is making this about herself," someone said. I did not see who. I did not look.

"I am his mate." The words came out raw, cracked straight down the center. I pressed a hand to my chest without meaning to, right over the place where the bond lived, where it was currently tearing itself apart. "I am standing here because I am his mate and I deserve to—"

"That is enough."

Elder Thorne. His voice cut across the square like a blade, clean and final, the authority of decades behind every syllable.

"The Alpha has made his announcement," he said. "Whatever personal matters exist between you and Alpha Jason are not pack business and this is not the time or the place."

"Her parents just died," a voice said from somewhere in the middle of the crowd.

Then another voice, louder: "She was there that night. Covered in blood. Funny how she was the only one left standing."

The air changed.

I felt it happen, that collective shift, like weather turning. The faces that had been uncertain a moment ago were hardening now, people making decisions in real time, and I watched it move from the front rows backward and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

"She has always been unstable." Selena's voice was soft. So soft. Perfectly, terribly soft. "I feel for her. I truly do. We all know what she has been through. But this," and I heard the small, careful pause she left, just long enough to let the crowd fill it with their own conclusions, "this is not grief. This is something else."

I turned and looked at her.

She looked back at me with sad eyes and a mouth pressed into a gentle, regretful line, and I understood with a clarity that hit me like cold water that she had planned this. All of it. The timing, the blue dress, the soft voice, the way she had let me push to the front and given me just enough rope.

She had known exactly what would happen when I stepped forward.

And she had let me do it anyway.

"Jason." I turned back to him. Just him. The crowd, the elders, Selena, all of it fell away and there was just him and me and the bond between us that was screaming so loudly I could barely hear my own thoughts. "Look at me. Please just look at me and tell me you know I did not hurt them. That is all I am asking. Just say it."

The square was absolutely silent.

Jason looked at me.

And for one moment, one terrible, suspended moment, I saw it. The thing behind his eyes that was not calculation or Alpha control or managed distance. Something real. Something that remembered who we were to each other, something that had not yet finished grieving the loss of whatever this was.

It lasted less than three seconds.

Then he looked away.

"This is not the place," he said quietly. "We will talk privately."

That was it.

That was all he gave me.

The crowd exhaled around me and I felt it in the bond, the collective turning, the decision made, and I knew that whatever I said next would not matter. Whatever I did, however I stood or spoke or pleaded, it was already over. They had made up their minds in the space of four minutes, shaped by Selena's soft voice and Jason's silence and the sight of the adopted daughter covered in her dead parents' blood two days ago.

I felt a tear track down my face.

I did not wipe it away this time.

Let them see it. Let them see all of it. I was done performing composure for people who had already decided.

I looked at the crowd one more time. At the faces I had known my whole life. And then, at the very back, I found Darius.

He was watching me the way he had watched me yesterday. That same expression, jaw tight, something behind his eyes that looked almost like it wanted to be courage. His mouth moved slightly, the shape of words that never became sound.

He looked down.

And said nothing.

I turned and walked away from the platform.

Nobody stopped me. Nobody called my name. The crowd parted and let me through and closed behind me like water, like I had never been there at all, and I walked with my spine straight and my chin up and Selena's soft devastating voice still sitting in my ears.

She has always been unstable.

I made it to the far side of the square before my legs stopped cooperating properly. I put my hand on the old stone wall at the edge of the territory path and stood there for a moment, breathing, just breathing, the cold air scraping the inside of my throat on the way down.

My other hand found my stomach.

He had not defended me. Not once. Not a single word.

The bond in my chest felt like something that had been cut and was still trying to bleed, not understanding yet that there was nothing left to pump through it.

I closed my eyes.

My mother's voice came to me the way it had been coming since the night she died, in pieces, in fragments, the last real things she had ever said.

There is something they want. Something they came here for. It is you.

I opened my eyes.

The square was still loud behind me. The pack returning to their morning, to their cheering, to the future their Alpha had just handed them in Luna blue.

I pushed off the wall.

I had nothing left in this territory. No parents. No mate. No pack that would stand beside me. Nothing except the secret pressed beneath my palm and a dead woman's warning and the first cold sparks of something that had not yet decided what it wanted to become.

I started walking.

I did not know yet where I was going.

But I knew, with the same certainty that my wolf knew things before my mind caught up, that I was never going to let anyone make me stand at the back of a crowd again.

Never.