“And you’ve been lying there watching me sleep.”
“Seemed like the best use of my time.”
“You could have made coffee.”
“Coffee means getting out of this bed. That’s not happening yet.”
She studies me, her eyes moving over my face with a directness that used to make me nervous when I was twenty and now makes something warm expand in my chest. She reaches out and traces the scar on my jaw with her fingertip. Light. The same gesture she used to make when we were young. The fact that her hand remembers makes my throat tight.
“I forgot about this,” she says. “How it feels. Waking up next to someone.”
“I know.”
She pinches her lips together, as if debating whether to say something. Then decides to speak. “I haven’t shared a bed since before Cameron was born. Even when things were stable, I couldn’t… The wolf never settled. Not with anyone else.”
The mate bond. Dormant, damaged, supposedly broken, but still working beneath the surface. Keeping her solitary. Keeping us both solitary.
“You too?” I say.
She nods. “Nobody in eighteen years,” she says. Remembering what I told her in the kitchen. “Not for either of us.”
“Nobody.”
“You’re telling me Merric Rourke—six-five, alpha, a face like that, and a body like—” She runs a hand down my chest to my abs and below, to grasp my cock. She grins when I groan. “Likethis, went so long without—”
“I’m telling you my wolf made a choice when we found you, and that was it.” My breath hisses out as she releases me. “I tried early on. Once. A woman in a town north of Frostbourne. Pretty. Willing.” I hold Brenna’s eyes. “My wolf shut it down so hard I couldn’t shift for three days. After that, I stopped trying.”
Her features are doing something I haven’t seen before. Not the compressed control. Something open and hurting and tender.
“I need to ask you something,” she says. “And I need the real answer. Not the version you gave me in the bunkhouse, not the short version. The real one.”
“Ask.”
“Why did you leave? Not the Elder Council, not political pressure. Those are reasons for someone else. I want yours.”
The morning light moves across the ceiling. Outside, I can hear the ranch waking. A door closing, Greta’s voice, the distant ring of metal on metal that means Dane is already working.
“Bern came to me two days before I was supposed to claim you publicly,” I say. “He came alone. Late at night. And he didn’t talk about politics or tradition or what the other alphas would think. He talked about war.”
Brenna grows motionless.
“He told me that three neighboring packs had formed an alliance. That their alphas had agreed: if Frostbourne mated with a Ravenclaw witch, they’d treat it as an act of aggression against the traditional order. A formal declaration of war.”
“Three packs against Frostbourne.”
“We were completely outnumbered.” I nod. “And Bern laid it out… not threatening, not angry. Calm. Factual. The way he does everything. He showed me the communication transcripts. The alliance terms. The operational plans they’d drawn up. Where they’d hit first—the families on our eastern border. The settlement with the school.”
I stop. Breathe. The memory of that conversation is nearly two decades old, and it still has edges.
“He told me I had a choice. Claim Brenna Corvus and watch my pack torn apart by a war I couldn’t win. Or walk away, andthe alliance dissolves. No blood. No casualties. My wolves stay safe.”
“And you believed him.”
“I verified it. Called the other alphas myself. They confirmed the alliance was real. Told me straight: if I bonded with a magic-blooded wolf, they would ride for Frostbourne and take us out.”
Brenna is looking at me intently. She’s holding something back. Processing.
“You chose your pack,” she says.
