جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 6

POV: Kade“You did the right thing.”My mother said it like she was handing me a gift. Like the words themselves could scrub the last five minutes off my skin.They couldn’t. I could still smell Wren, faint under the smoke and the crowd and every other scent in that circle, and it was doing something to the back of my throat I didn’t have a name for. Not grief. Not exactly. Something closer to having swallowed a stone and being told to keep walking like nothing had changed shape inside me.“Sit down, Alpha.” Councilman Reeve gestured at the chair across the war table like he was doing me a favor. “You look like you’re about to be sick.”I sat because standing meant everyone could see my hands, and my hands hadn’t stopped wanting to move since I’d said the words. Reach for her. Take it back. Do something other than stand there and let the council’s math decide who I got to keep.“The bond’s severed clean,” Reeve went on, already moving past it, already three sentences into the next age

POV: Kade“Alpha, you’re not listening.”I was. That was the problem. I was listening to Bree’s father lay out grazing rights and border patrol schedules like they were the terms of a treaty instead of a wedding, and somewhere underneath all of it, I was also listening to something else entirely, a thread of scent that had no business being in this room and that I couldn’t stop chasing anyway.“I’m listening,” I said. “Continue.”Sinclair gave me a look that said he didn’t believe me, which was fair, and kept talking anyway, because whatever else he was, he wasn’t a man who let a lie slow him down when there was territory to negotiate.Bree sat across from me with a folder of her own, color-coded, tabbed, the kind of preparation that told me she’d been planning this meeting for longer than the ink on the engagement announcement had been dry. She caught me not listening twice more before she finally set her pen down.“You keep doing that,” she said.“Doing what.”“That.” She gestured,

POV: Bree“She’s supposed to be nothing.”I said it to my own reflection, which was not the sort of thing I usually did, but the meeting room was empty and my father had already gone ahead to update the council, and somebody needed to say it out loud before I let myself believe it again.An omega. A limp. A wolf that hadn’t shifted in fourteen years, in a pack that measured a person’s worth by exactly that. I had spent months preparing for this engagement the way I prepared for everything, thoroughly, patiently, certain that once the fated bond was severed at the fire circle, Kade would need time, and then he would need me, in that order, and I had budgeted for both.I had not budgeted for four times in one meeting.Four times he’d gone somewhere else behind his eyes while my father talked patrol schedules and grazing rights, four times his whole body had gone still in that specific way wolves go still when they’re tracking a scent, and I knew exactly whose scent it was, because I’d s