“And they fell in love with her, right along with us,” Grieves adds.
“Fan favorite, baby!” Court crows.
Cleo laughs and shakes her head, and seemingly decides to let that line of questioning drop, her gaze focusing over my shoulder.
“Piers.”
A chair creaks behind me and I can just see our beta straightening. His nerves flow down our pack bond, tickling against me, to the point that I twist to smile at him reassuringly over my shoulder.
“Yes?” he says, sounding flustered. This is his first interview ever as a member of the pack, and I know Cleo is going to address it right now.
She smiles at him. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“For years the world has speculated on your relationship with the Ashbourne pack. Many suspect that you are not merely a personal assistant, that your bond is actually much deeper. Others, mostly the palace, maintain that you have a working relationship. Isadora Aureline recently released a statement claiming that she always saw you as a member of her pack, is there anything you want to say about that?”
Piers licks his lips and leans forward. “First and foremost, Isadora never saw me as a member of the Ashbourne pack, or as a part of her future with them. In every interaction I had with her, she made it clear she viewed me as the help even though she knew the truth to be the opposite.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It means he’s always been a member of our pack,” Thayer says matter-of-factly.
“We bonded him back at Uni,” Court chimes in.
“He’s always been integral to us,” Forsythe adds, twisting his head to beam at Piers, who flushes, before turning around to say seriously. “We just didn’t honor him the way that we should have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Forsythe’s grip on my fingers tighten even further, but I don’t complain squeezing him right back. I know this is hard for him, admitting all the ways he’s messed up, all the ways he feels he failed his pack, but it’s something that needs to be done, like lancing a boil so it can heal.
But beyond that, the world needs to know just how manipulative the queen of Bravonne has gotten. We need to weaken her base further, so Elizabeth can topple her with a tiny push.
“I’m not proud of it, but I caved to pressure put on me by my family. The queen, specifically. She stressed to me that it was bad enough that I had formed a pack, but to have a beta inthe mix would paint us as weaker. And if there is one thing an Ashbourne cannot be seen as, it’s weak. I was young and dumb and I let her dictate what my relationship with my beta would look like.”
“She convinced you that having a beta as a mate was something to be ashamed of.” Cleo’s tone is a blade now. Not surprising given she’s mated to a beta herself.
“In essence, yes.”
“In his defense,” Piers pipes up. “I could have argued more, spoken up more, forced the issue. I could have refused to let them bond me without some kind of reassurance that I wouldn't be hidden away, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until the show, until Florence. Until they were considering which of the twenty omegas would be our new mate, a member of the pack that I was a part of, and I wasn’t a part of the process that it chafed, became unbearable. Ren knew who I was right away,” he tells her. “She could tell we were in love, and more importantly she respected our relationship in a way that no one really had before. It was… a relief to be seen like that.” His fingers brush against his mating mark.
“I don’t know how no one else recognized it,” I tell her honestly. “To me it seemed so obvious, the love between them, the devotion. It made me so mad that they weren’t including him. And I just… I wanted to make him a part of the process.”
Cleo looks around at the four alphas of our pack, letting her disappointment with them show on her face, before she focuses again on Piers.
“Do you resent them at all?”
“No.”
“Not even a little? You’ve been a member of their pack for years, and they never bothered to claim you publicly. But a few months after meeting Florence they bonded her and very publicly claimed her. Does that seem fair?”
I stiffen not really understanding what she’s getting at. Is she saying he should resent me for having my pack claim me?
The alphas in my pack bristle, dominance bleeding out of them, while Piers does the same shifting forward to pin Cleo with a hard look. “I am fucking delighted that they claimed Florence so quickly. Hell, I would have preferred for them to claim her ages ago. How could I be anything but thrilled, when my own bite is on her pretty neck, when I claimed her right alongside them? And she claimed me right back? When I was snuggled against her in the photo heard around the world just like all of them, a part of the pack like I always should have been. We love Florence, all of us. I would never begrudge her or be resentful of her receiving the love she deserves.”
For a moment, no one speaks.
Piers’ words hang in the air, heavy and unshakable, leaving no room for doubt, no room for the narrative Cleo had been trying to press.
