Patrick rises from his chair but doesn’t move toward the door. “With respect, Matriarch, I’m not going anywhere.”
“I wasn’t asking for your input.” Her voice could freeze a desert. “This is a family matter, and you are not family.”
I push myself up from the couch to face her on my feet. “He’smyfamily now. Whatever you have to say to me, you can say in front of him.”
Lydia’s nostrils flare, and for one horrible moment, I think she might actually strike me. Instead, she saunters closer and shuts the door behind her with a slam that sounds like a death knell.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she asks as she advances toward me. “Do you have any concept of the damage you’ve caused to this family? To this pack? To everything we’ve been trying to build since Sera broke the curse?”
“I survived. I thought that might matter to you.”
“Don’t you dare be flippant with me, child.” She stops inches from my face, close enough that I can see the pulse jumping in her throat. “You married a Thornridge wolf. A member of the pack that has been trying to destroy everything we’ve built for years. The pack that tried to infiltrate our territory through deception and manipulation. The pack that haskilled our wolves, threatened our allies, and would see every one of us dead or enslaved if it served their purposes.”
“I know what Thornridge has done.”
“Then how could you be so monumentally, catastrophically stupid?” Her voice rises until it bounces off the stone walls, filling the small room with her fury. “How could you throw away everything your sister sacrificed to free us from that curse? Sera nearly died breaking those chains. She gave up her home, her standing in this pack, her entire life to build bridges between Llewelyn and the other territories. And you repay that sacrifice by spreading your legs for the enemy?”
The vulgarity of it steals the breath from my lungs. I’ve never heard my aunt speak like this in all my twenty years of life, never seen her so completely unraveled. The matriarch I grew up with was cold and reserved, a woman who ruled through quiet authority. This version of her is something else, something furious and wounded in ways I don’t fully understand.
Patrick moves to stand beside me with his hand coming up to rest on my lower back, but I shake my head. This is my fight. I need to face it on my own terms, even if my knees are shaking beneath my dress.
“I didn’t choose this,” I tell her, and I’m proud of how steady my voice comes out. “I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to marry a Thornridge wolf just to spite you or shame the family name.”
“Then explain it to me,” Lydia’s demands. “Explain how my niece, a woman raised in the traditions of Llewelyn, trained in our ways and our values, ended up bound for life to a man who has spent his entire adult life working to destroy us.”
“He saved my life.”
“He compromised you!”
“Bastian Corvelli was going to use me as a weapon against this pack.” I take a step toward her, refusing to be cowed by her fury even though my whole body begs me to back down. “When Patrick found out about the plan, he could have gone along with it. He could have followed orders and handed me over to Bastian on a silver platter. Instead, he risked everything he had to protect me.”
“By forcing you into a marriage you didn’t want.”
“Yes.” I refuse to flinch from the ugly truth of it. “It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t some fairy tale where we fell in love over candlelit dinners and chose each other. But he did it because the mate bond demanded he keep me safe, and I’m standing here today because of that choice. If he hadn’t acted when he did, I’d be in Thornridge territory right now. I’d be Bastian’s prisoner, his tool, his weapon against everyone I care about. Is that what you would have preferred?”
Lydia shakes her head and scrunches her nose up in disgust until she’s almost unrecognizable. “You sound like a woman making excuses for her captor. Justifying his actions because you’ve convinced yourself you had no other options.”
“And you sound like a woman who learned absolutely nothing from what happened to Sera.”
The words land between us like a grenade with the pin pulled. Lydia actually rocks back on her heels as shock ripples across her face before she can smooth it away.
“How dare you—”
“How dare I what? Point out what everyone else is too polite to say?” Something cracks open inside me, something I’ve been holding back for twenty years. The good daughter. Thetraditional one. The Thornwick who never caused problems or rocked boats or demanded more than her allotted portion. That girl is gone, and I don’t miss her for a single second.
“Sera spent her whole life being told she was wrong,” I continue with my voice rising to match my aunt’s. “Wrong for questioning Llewelyn traditions. Wrong for wanting something beyond what the pack decided she deserved. Wrong for developing abilities that didn’t fit neatly into our expectations. And when she finally found her mate, when she discovered the truth about the curse that had been strangling our pack for three hundred years, what did you do? You doubted her. You questioned her judgment. You made her prove herself over and over and over again before you would even consider that she might be right.”
“That situation was entirely different.”
I sputter and ask, “Was it? Reeyan was a Grayhide wolf. An outsider. A man from a pack that had been our enemy for generations before Oren took over. And Sera married him anyway, because the universe chose him for her, and she was brave enough to trust that choice even when no one else would. Does any of that sound familiar to you?”
Lydia’s face has gone pale beneath its usual composure, but she doesn’t retreat an inch. “Reeyan wasn’t Thornridge. He wasn’t part of the pack that orchestrated attacks against us, sent spies into our territory, and murdered our wolves in cold blood.”
“He was still the enemy in your eyes. He was still someone you never would have chosen for her, someone you thought was beneath the Thornwick name and everything it represents.” I draw in a breath that burns all the way down to my lungs. “And now he’s one of the most valuable members of this alliance. A man who has dedicated his life to understanding thethreats we face and helping us survive them. Patrick can be that too, if you let him. He has intelligence about Thornridge that no one else can provide. He knows their weaknesses, their supply lines, their internal conflicts. He’s already proven his value to this council, and he’ll keep proving it every single day if you give him the chance.”
“Value.” Lydia spits the word like it tastes rotten on her tongue. “Is that what this comes down to? Trading your virtue for strategic advantage?”
“I stopped being a virgin years before I met Patrick, Aunt Lydia. If you want to clutch your pearls over my sexual choices, you’re far too late to start now.”
