watch me

Vanessa's POV

The garden was quiet after he left. Ronan did not look at me again. He gathered Mandy from the path the way you gather something precious and fragile, one arm beneath her knees, one at her back, her face pressed into his neck, her cries softening now into something smaller.

He moved fast, barking orders at the pack members who had appeared at the sound of the commotion, and the whole procession swept out through the east wing door like a current.

Nobody asked me what happened.

I stood beside the stone bench with my cold coffee and my undisturbed roses and watched them go.

I flinched when his shoulder brushed past mine. Three years of being the object of worship in his life, now I was slowly turning to an eye sore.

I had expected something. I had understood, somewhere in the rational part of me that my father had sharpened like a blade, that things had changed and would keep changing. I had braced for that.

What I had not braced for was the way his hand had wrapped around her, the tenderness in them. Ronan's hands had known my body like a language he had invented for that purpose alone. Every scar, every curve, every place that made me exhale without meaning to. He had traced me like someone who wanted to memorize what they were touching.

I had felt, in those moments, like the most known person alive.Those same hands were now carrying her out of my garden.

My wolf whimpered low and long, curling in on herself the way she did when something hurt too deeply for howling.

Some delusional, stubborn part of me had still been holding something.The idea that there was still a version of this where he remembered who I was to him. Where the man who had once pressed his mouth to my temple and said

“ I would burn this whole world down before I let anyone hurt you,”was still somewhere inside the man who had just told me to leave my own bedroom.

I unclenched my hand from around the coffee cup and set it down.

Then I went inside.

I had barely sat on the edge of the guest bed, coat folded across my lap, when the door opened.

Ronan filled the frame. He had not been gone an hour. Mandy had been handed to the pack healers and he had come straight here, and the look on his face told me exactly what kind of conversation this was going to be.

He did not sit down.

"When," he said, "are you going to stop this?”

I looked up at him. "Stop what."

"This." He gestured at the air between us as though the word encompassed everything he did not want to itemise. "The jealousy. The hostility. She is pregnant, Vanessa. She is carrying my child and you are out there in the garden behaving like a…."

"She fell," I said immediately.

"She said you pushed her."

"I did not touch her."

"She said."

"I know what she said." I kept my voice even. "I am telling you what happened. I was standing. She was standing. She fell. I did not lay a single finger on her, Ronan.”

He looked at me for a long moment, the way you look at someone whose story you have already decided not to believe.

"You've been angry since the night I came home," he said. "I understand that. I do. But this has to stop.”

He held my gaze, my palm finding his jaw slowly before I'd chosen fully to move, feeling the familiar warmth of his skin and he went still beneath my touch.

I tilted my face up toward his and let the tears come because they were already there and I was tired of holding them back.

"I did not push her," I said quietly. "Ronan. Look at me. It's me. You know me."

He looked at me.

For one moment, one unbearable, flickering moment, I saw it. The man from the kitchen table, sleeves pushed up, leaning toward me like I had said something that mattered. He was still in there.

Suddenly, he took a step back and my hands fell.

"Your tears," he said, and his voice was flat, which somehow made it worse, "are not going to work on me anymore.”

My breathing hitched.

He straightened, rolled his shoulders once, and looked at me.

"When Mandy comes back from the healers," he said, "you will go to her and you will kneel and you will apologise. In front of whoever is present. You will do it properly." A pause. "If you do not, I will strip your Luna title. Formally. In front of the pack.”

The room tilted slightly and I sat very still.

"Your whore has taken everything," I heard myself say, and my voice came out strange and distant. "My room. My mate. And now you want to give her my title."

"Her name is Mandy." His voice was patient and final. "And this is not about her. This is about your behaviour and the consequences of it."

I looked up at him slowly.

"You wouldn't do that, Ronan."

The words came out barely above a whisper, small in a way I hated. The last small thing I would say in this room.

He held my gaze. Then he leaned in, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his breath, close enough that I could smell the pine and earth of him that had once meant safety, and for one treacherous second my body remembered what it had meant to be loved by him.

He said two words.

"Watch me.”

Then he straightened and walked out and the door slammed shut behind him ,the sound echoing in the guest room.

I shut my eyes, taking in a deep breath and releasing it. My mind dragging me back to the past as tears rolled down my eyes relentlessly.

I was a Lycan's daughter. I had walked away from that name because I had wanted something softer. I had buried it under three years of being a good Luna, a quiet wife, a woman who planted roses and swallowed pills and said nothing.

Look where soft had gotten me.

I had built this pack from the foundation up. Every alliance, every strategy, every negotiation that had elevated Ronan's name to the point where other Alphas crossed territories just to sit at his table. That had been me. All of it had been me, and he thought he could strip my title.

He thought he could make me kneel.

I set the coat aside and sat up straight.

If I walked out of Wild Bloomers the way I had walked out of my father's house, quietly, with nothing, I would leave Ronan exactly what he deserved. Nothing. Every strategy I carried in my head, every alliance that existed because of my name and my mind, every advantage this pack had ever enjoyed because of me. Gone. Let him see what Wild Bloomers looked like when I stopped holding it up.

But first, I closed my eyes.

For the first time in three years, I reached inward, past the wall I had built brick by brick the morning I left Jordan's territory, and I opened the mind link I had severed the day I walked out of my father's house.

I breathed.

"Hello." I paused. The word that followed cost me more than anything I had spent in three years. "Father."

The silence on the other end lasted exactly three seconds.

Then the most feared voice in New Orleans said simply, quietly, in a tone that contained no surprise whatsoever:

"I wondered when you would call.”