Chapter 3

The coffee's gone cold on the counter an hour before I let myself throw it out.

That's not sentiment. I don't do sentiment, whatever Ava thinks she's seen in me over three years of watching me lead. It's discipline — I don't waste things, and pouring out a full mug because the woman who was supposed to drink it walked into the trees instead feels, this morning, like the first waste I've allowed myself in longer than I can remember.

Daniel finds me still standing at the counter when he lets himself in the way he's let himself in for eleven years, no knock, because a beta who knocks isn't a beta I trust.

"You look like you lost a fight," he says.

"I didn't fight anyone."

"That's usually worse, with you." He pulls the second mug toward himself, the one that was meant for Ava, and drinks from it without asking, which is the kind of thing only Daniel gets to do. "Talk."

I tell him. Not all of it — some of it I'm still turning over, still deciding what shape to give it before I say it out loud even to him — but enough. Pregnant. Refused the bond. Walked out into the woods barefoot rather than sit at my table another minute.

Daniel doesn't say anything for a while. He's good at that, better than I am, letting silence do work that words would only get in the way of.

"What did you say to her," he asks finally, "exactly? Word for word."

"I said we'd bond. I said I'd call the pack together tonight."

"Before or after you asked her what she wanted?"

I open my mouth to answer and find there isn't one. That's the thing about Daniel — eleven years, and he still knows exactly where to put a question so it lands somewhere I can't sidestep it.

"There wasn't a version of this where I don't want the bond," I say. "She's carrying my child. That's not a small thing to leave undecided."

"Nobody's asking you to leave it undecided.

I'm asking whether you decided it with her or at her." He sets the mug down, quiet, but there's an edge under the quiet I don't hear from him often. "You've been Alpha since you were twenty-six, Marcus.

You've spent a decade being the last word in every room you walk into. That works when you're settling disputes between wolves who need someone to make the call. It doesn't work on the one person you're supposed to be building something with instead of ruling over."

"I'm not ruling over her."

"You told her what was going to happen to her body, her name, and her place in this pack in the same breath you found out she was carrying. You didn't ask a single question first. From where I'm standing, that's not so different from ruling."

It lands harder than it should, coming from him, because Daniel doesn't say things to wound me, he says them because he thinks I need to hear them, and eleven years of that track record means I can't dismiss it as easily as I'd like to this morning.

"She's the one who walked out," I say, and even as I say it I hear how much it sounds like an excuse instead of a defense. "She's the one who wouldn't talk."

"Would you have listened if she had?"

I don't answer that one either.

Daniel lets the silence sit a while longer before he moves, crossing to the window that looks out toward the tree line, the same one I've been avoiding all morning because I keep expecting to see her walking back through it and keep being wrong.

"There's something else," he says, not turning around. "Something you're not saying."

"I don't know what she's not telling me. That's the whole problem. I asked her, straight out — what aren't you telling me — and she left instead of answering."

"That's not nothing, Marcus.

A wolf who's spent three years under your roof, quiet, careful, never once challenging you on anything, and the one time you actually push for the truth, she walks into the woods barefoot rather than give it to you." He finally turns back to face me. "That's not a woman hiding that she's scared.

That's a woman hiding something specific. And I don't think you're going to get it out of her by deciding things faster than she can refuse them."

"So what am I supposed to do. Let her go.

Let her raise my child somewhere I can't see either of them, doesn't know if they're safe—"

"I'm saying find her. Not to drag her back to a bonding ceremony she already said no to.

Find her to ask the question you should have asked this morning before you told her how the rest of her life was going to go."

"And if she still says no?"

"Then she says no, and you've at least earned the right to be told that instead of assuming it." Daniel picks his jacket up off the back of the chair, already moving toward the door, already ahead of me the way he's been ahead of me on every decision I've been too stubborn to make quickly enough on my own.

"I'll go."

"Daniel—"

"You'll go yourself and you'll do exactly what you did this morning, because you don't know how to walk into a room without deciding what's going to happen in it before anyone else gets a vote. I don't have that problem. I'll find her. I'll ask what she needs instead of telling her what she's getting. And I'll come back and tell you the truth whether or not it's the truth you want."

I want to argue. It's not in me to send someone else to handle what's mine to handle — that's not how I've led for a decade, it's not how my father led before me, and some old, stubborn part of me wants to be the one standing in front of her when this gets resolved, wants to be the one who fixes it with my own hands the way I fix everything.

But I think of her face this morning, the flat certainty in we're not bonding, the way she looked at me like I was a decision that had already been made about her rather than a person asking her something, and for the first time in longer than I want to admit, I don't trust my own instincts to get this right.

"Find her," I say. "Don't push. Don't tell her what happens next. Just—"

"Understand her. I know." Daniel's already at the door, already half out into the cold morning I haven't been able to make myself walk into yet.

"That's the part you keep forgetting is possible, Marcus. You don't have to decide everything to still be in charge of something."

He's gone before I can find an answer to that, the door clicking shut behind him with none of the precision Ava's departure had — just an ordinary door, an ordinary morning, except that somewhere out past my tree line is a woman carrying my child who looked at everything I am and decided it wasn't enough to stay for.

Word travels through a pack whether an Alpha wants it to or not. By midmorning I can feel it moving through my territory the way weather moves through it — nothing said outright, nobody foolish enough to ask me directly, but a change in how people hold themselves when I pass, a carefulness that wasn't there yesterday.

Someone saw her walking the tree line barefoot. Someone else noticed I haven't left the house. It doesn't take a pack bond to do that math.

Sarah, who's run point on pack logistics longer than I've been Alpha, catches me on the porch around noon with a look that says she already knows better than to ask outright and is going to ask anyway.

"Should I be planning a bonding ceremony," she says, "or should I not be planning anything at all?"

"Not yet."

"That's not really an answer, Marcus."

"It's the only one I've got." I look out toward the trees, the same direction I've been looking all morning, half-convinced if I stare long enough I'll see her coming back through them, half-certain that's exactly the kind of thinking Daniel would tell me to sit with instead of act on.

"Hold off on telling the pack anything. This isn't theirs to have an opinion on yet."

"And if it never is?"

"Then it never is." It costs me something to say it, more than I expect it to, but I say it anyway, because the alternative — deciding for the pack the way I decided for Ava this morning — isn't a mistake I'm willing to make twice in one day.

Sarah nods, unconvinced but professional enough not to push, and leaves me alone on the porch with the cold and the silence and the particular kind of waiting I've never been good at, because waiting means someone else is holding the next move, and for a decade the next move has always, without exception, been mine to make.

I stand at the counter a while longer after that. Then I pour out the coffee I've been leaving to go cold, because there's no version of today where letting it sit there does either of us any good, and I start, for the first time in a decade, trying to imagine what it would look like to lead by asking instead of telling.

It doesn't come easily. I don't expect it to.

But something in me — something under the Alpha, something that's been quiet a long time — thinks it might be worth learning anyway, if there's still a version of this where she'd let me.