03 Alpha Before Mate

Seraphina’s POV

Three days felt like an insult stretched thin enough to call mercy. I spent the first of them at my father's cell door, close enough to talk through the bars, until the guard posted there, a boy I'd known since he was small enough to ride on Elias's shoulders, told me, apologising with his whole body, that he'd been given orders not to let me stay past sundown. I spent the second one going through my father's study with my mother, both of us pretending we were looking for anything that might help him and both of us really just needing to touch the things he'd touched.

On the third morning, I went to find Kael before the council could. I found him in the training yard instead, alone, working through a set of forms with a blade he usually left mounted over his hearth. He didn't hear me at first, or he pretended not to, and I stood at the fence and watched him move through the motions like his body needed the exhaustion more than his mind needed the practice.

"Kael."

He stopped mid-turn. Lowered the blade. For one unguarded second, before he arranged his face into something more careful, he looked at me the way he had at the fire pits three nights ago, like I was something he still didn't quite believe he'd been given.

"You shouldn't be out here alone." He set the blade down against the fence post. "It isn't safe for you right now."

"Isn't safe. That's an interesting way to describe my own pack."

"Seraphina...”

"He taught you to hold a blade before you could spell your own name." I crossed the distance between us before I could talk myself out of it. "He taught you to track, to read a room before you spoke in it, to apologise to Beta Ferris's wife after you broke her good vase and blamed it on the dogs, which, incidentally, is a family tradition apparently. He sat at our table for your name day every year since you were small enough that you cried when the candles went out. He loves you like a son, Kael. Whatever he did, if he did anything, you know this man."

"I know the man I thought I knew." His voice was low, carefully even, the voice of someone holding a wall up with both hands. "I don't know what to do with the man the evidence is describing."

"Then don't do anything with him yet. Wait. Investigate properly. Give it more than three days."

"The council isn't giving me more than three days." He raked a hand through his hair, and for a moment the exhaustion under his composure showed all the way through. "Half the Elders are already saying I knew. That I must have known, or allowed it, because he trained me, because your family has always stood closest to mine. Two of the border packs have sent word asking whether Blackridge intends to answer for what its own Gamma did to them. I have wolves under my authority who died in that raid, Seraphina. Families who buried people because someone sold our routes to men who used them."

"He didn't sell anything."

"You don't know that."

"I know my father."

"I thought I did too." He said it quietly, and it cost him something to say it, I could see that much, but it didn't make it land any softer. "The council wants the Vale name distanced from Blackridge's leadership before the border packs decide we can't be trusted to police our own. They want it done before the review even finishes. They're asking me to separate the pack from your father's household completely. Formally. Publicly."

The training yard went very quiet, or maybe that was only inside me.

"What does separate mean?" I asked.

He didn't answer right away, which was its own kind of answer.

"What about me?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "Kael. What about me?"

“You’re my mate.” He offered it as an answer, and my heart almost allowed those three words to reassure me.

"Then say that. Say that out loud to the council instead of standing there deciding what you're going to do with your face when you tell me something terrible."

"It isn't that simple."

"It is exactly that simple. Either I'm yours, or their demand for distance includes me."

He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him choose his next words the way a man chooses which stone to put his weight on crossing a river, carefully, already flinching from what he expected the current to do.

"I am Alpha before I am your mate." He said.

Isolde went very still inside me, the stillness before a wolf decides whether to leave or remove someone's throat.

‘He said that,’ she murmured, disbelief sharpening into fury. ‘Out loud. To us. How considerate of him to announce his stupidity before we made the mistake of defending it.’

"Say that again," I told him. "I want to be sure I heard you."

"Seraphina...”

"Say it again." I insisted.

"I am Alpha of this pack before I am anything else to anyone, including you." His jaw was tight, his eyes bright with something that might have been grief if I'd had any charity left to spare for it. "If I let my own feelings decide how Blackridge answers this, I will have proven every Elder right who thinks I'm too young, too soft, too tied to the Vale household to lead. I cannot give them that. Not now. Not with packs at our border already sharpening a grievance."

"So I'm a liability."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

Neither of us said anything for a while. Somewhere past the fence, a bird kept singing the same four notes, oblivious, and I hated it a little for that.

"There will be a public hearing," he said finally, quieter now, like the volume of it embarrassed him. "Tomorrow. The council wants a decision made in front of the pack, so no one can say afterwards that anything was settled quietly, unfairly, in a closed room."

"A decision about what?"

“About your father. About the household. About…” His gaze dropped from mine before he forced out the rest. “About us.”

"You already know what you're going to decide, don't you?"

"Seraphina."

"Don't say my name like that. Don't say it like it's an apology you haven't finished writing yet." My throat was doing something I refused to let become tears in front of him, not yet, not while he still owed me an answer. "Look at me. Tell me plainly, what have you really decided, Kael?"

He didn't answer. He only searched my eyes with his, and for a moment I could have sworn there were tears standing in them, or maybe that was only the blur of my own, because even before he said a single word, some part of my heart already knew.