Chapter 41: The South Run

KieranThe rain line had been a mistake. I knew it the second it left my mouth.I'd only said it to break whatever she was building behind that stare. She'd been winding up to come at me, and I'd reached for the first thing that wasn't the call, and what came out was the weather. Now she was looking at me like I'd grown a second head, and I couldn't take it back.She'd had Alarick handled. I knew that. She didn't need me in there.But I wasn't going to stand in a doorway and listen to him call her weak. Not from him. Not from the man who'd spent years making her exactly that and then acting surprised to find her bent. He still knew where every old wound on her sat. He could press them without lifting a finger, over a phone, three packs away, and I'd had to listen to him do it.So I'd stepped in. And honestly? I'd say it again if he gave me the chance."Being right," Meredith was saying, "doesn't give you the right to walk into a fight I was already winning."We were back to this.Sh

Chapter 42: Not The Calm One

MeredithSera turned back around to face me, and I made myself sit still in the saddle and not look away from her, even though something in me wanted to.Kieran stayed where he was beside his own horse. He didn't step in, and I knew by now that the not-stepping-in was deliberate.The stable boy had found a strap to fuss with. It didn't need fussing with. He worked at it like his life depended on the buckle.I waited. Sera said nothing, and the silence stretched out long enough that I started to feel it crawl up the back of my neck, and I had to fight the urge to fill it for her.Then she looked at me, dead on, with something cold and flat in her eyes that I felt in my chest before I understood it."You want all of us to believe you can't be handled," she said. "That you walked in here and nobody puts a hand on you. But you gave Alarick five years to handle you. Five. So forgive me if I don't bow to the new version overnight."My grip tightened on the reins, and the gelding tossed his

Chapter 43: Alpha Croft's Dramatic Little Script

KieranI read it twice and felt the afternoon go out of me.The mud, the race, all of it drained off and left the cold thing underneath. Bloodmoon had gone through the coalition. They'd put it on the record. And I stood there reading the same polite sentence over while something tightened in my chest and stayed tight.Meredith was still close, watching my face instead of the notice. She'd already worked out from my expression that this wasn't Bloodmoon whining down a phone line again."Lay it out," I told Silas."They haven't accused us of anything."He kept his voice level. "That's the clever part. They've just asked, in writing, through the liaison, for assurance that she's safe, that no one's coercing her and that she can speak. If we sit on it, they say the silence is the answer. If we come back swinging, they say a clear conscience wouldn't need to swing." He shrugged. "Either way they've handed us a question we can't put down cleanly.""Then we don't swing." I folded the phone s

Chapter 44: Still Speaking

MeredithI crossed the yard with mud drying stiff on my dress and Kieran's no still ringing in my ears."Let him handle it," I muttered, and I dragged the next few steps out of myself like they cost money. "Handle it. Sure. He'll handle it.""Let him handle it," I said again, lower. "Right. Because it's his name they printed. His face they're all losing sleep over." I yanked a clump of mud off my sleeve and flicked it at the dirt. "'Let me handle it, Meredith.' Handle what, exactly? It's mine. The mark's mine, the mess is mine, and somehow the one mouth nobody wants to hear from is also mine." The path from the stables down to the lower yard was busy. Wolves moved through it with feed sacks and patrol gear and baskets of training clothes, and a few of them caught the state of my dress and looked away fast. One younger wolf kept staring a beat too long, until the woman beside him drove an elbow into his ribs."Ow—what was that for?" he hissed at her.She didn't bother answering. She

Chapter 45: The One Who Stops

KieranShe was still wearing it.That small, pleased thing at the corner of her mouth, the one she'd put there after she leaned in close enough to ruin my concentration and then stepped back like she'd lifted something off me clean. I knew exactly what she'd done.My fist closed at my side. My wolf was up and pacing under my skin, leaning hard toward the distance she'd opened on purpose, and I held still through it, because giving her that was the whole of what she was counting on.She tipped her chin up a fraction, and the message in it was plain enough. Your move, Alpha. We both know what it'll be.A knock hit the door, and I came near to flinching at it, which annoyed me more than the knock did. Silas's voice carried through the wood, my name and a question I didn't bother to take in. I kept my eyes on her.Her expression changed. A bright, quick thing moved through her eyes, because she thought the knock had handed her a way out, and she expected me to take it. She expected Alpha

Chapter 46: Send It To His Mother

AlarickI'd wanted the office quiet so I could wait in peace for my own plan to land.Instead my phone lit up with her face.It was a saved clip by the time I found it, the live already over and spreading with the count under it climbing while I watched. Meredith stood in the middle of the frame and spoke straight into the lens, and I sat forward without deciding to.She was angry. Flushed at the cheek, jaw set, the mark plain on her throat where she'd made no effort to cover it."—it has stared at me, it has tested me, and it has annoyed me on a more or less daily basis," she was saying, "but it has not gagged me, and not one wolf here has told me to make myself smaller than I am. Which is more than I can say for the pack that's suddenly so worried about my wellbeing."Under all of it her voice came out level, steadier than it had any right to be, the kind of steady I didn't want to sit with too long because I didn't recognise it on her.The pack that's suddenly so worried about my w