Her response is immediate.Already here. Hurry up.
The main house smells of coffee and tension. Chris is at the long table with patrol maps spread in front of him, and he looks up when I walk in with the expression of a man who has been waiting for this moment and intends to make the most of it.
Rebecca is at his right hand. She gives me a look that carries a week’s worth of suppressed opinions and a single, clear instruction:Don’t make this worse.
“Sit down,” my father says.
I don’t sit. I stand at the opposite end of the tablewith my arms crossed, because sitting would mean this is a conversation between equals, and we both know it isn’t.
“Arthur tells me you brought a woman to the bonfire.” My father doesn’t waste time. “A human woman. With a scent he says he hasn’t encountered since your mother arrived in Mistwood.”
The comparison lands where he intends it to. My jaw tightens.
“Her name is Phoebe Clarke. She’s the new vet. And yes, I brought her to the bonfire.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Don’t play games with me, Roan.” His voice is patient in the way that means he’s running out of patience. “Arthur is seventy-three years old. He’s smelled every wolf and half-blood and latent carrier who’s passed through this village in half a century. When he says this woman carries something dormant, I listen. So I’m asking you directly: is she your mate?”
The room goes very still. Rebecca’s eyes are on me. My father’s eyes are on me. The question fills the room like something solid.
“Yes,” I say.
My father exhales. It’s not surprise. It’s confirmation. He leans back in his chair and looks at me withsomething I haven’t seen before, something that might be relief if it weren’t so tangled up with calculation.
“How long have you known?”
“Since the forest. The morning I fought the rogues. She found me. Treated my wounds while I was in wolf form.”
“Two weeks.” His voice is flat. “You’ve known for two weeks, and you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t tell anyone.”
“That’s not better. That’s worse.” He stands, and the movement carries the full weight of an Alpha who’s been challenged in his own house. “An Omega with latent heritage is emerging in my territory, bonded to my son, and I find out because a seventy-three-year-old man smells her at a bonfire. Do you have any idea how that looks?”
“I don’t care how it looks.”
“You should. Because it looks like the Alpha’s heir doesn’t trust his own pack. It looks like he’d rather protect one woman’s privacy than the safety of forty-three wolves who depend on me to know what’s happening in my own territory.”
“Her safety matters more.” He plants his hands on the table. “If she’s emerging, she needs support. She needs someone who can explain what’s happening and manage the transition. She needs the pack, Roan. Nota man who’s spent ten years refusing to learn anything about his own heritage.”
The words hit because they’re true. Because they’re the same thing I told myself this morning, sitting at my kitchen table, and hearing them from my father’s mouth makes them worse.
“I’m invoking a formal claim,” I say.
The room goes still. Rebecca’s hand stops halfway to her wine glass. My father stares at me as if I’ve spoken in a language he doesn’t recognise.
A formal claim is old law. Older than my father’s leadership, older than the pack hierarchy as it currently exists. It gives a bonded wolf the right to manage their mate’s introduction to the pack without Alpha interference. It hasn’t been invoked in Mistwood in living memory, because nobody has been foolish enough or desperate enough to use it. It’s a direct challenge to the Alpha’s authority over pack membership, and my father knows it.
“You don’t get to do that,” he says, and his voice has dropped to the register that makes lesser wolves bare their throats.
“I just did.”
“That law exists for packs without stable leadership. We are not?—”
“That law exists to protect mates from being absorbed before they’re ready. Which is exactly whatwill happen if you bring the full pack to bear on a woman who didn’t know werewolves existed until this week.”
