Coach tucks his hands in his pockets.
“It won’t be simple,” he says. “If it’s any female from this pack, Vanessa will know the truth within the week. She still has allies here. One conversation, and the arrangement collapses before it starts.” He meets my eyes. “We need someone she doesn’t know. Someone with no connection to this pack at all.”
Sterling pulls out his phone. Turns the screen toward us.
“What about this woman?”
One of the leaked photographs. It’s a picture of Miranda and me in the diner, the day she was attacked in the parking lot.
My alpha raises a brow. “Miranda?”
He considers it. “She is quite loyal to you, and she cares for Ethan. Do you think she’d be willing to help?”
I stare at my alpha, feeling dazed. “She’s—She’s human, Coach. The Council will never allow—”
“Vanessa is using unconventional means, so that means we can too,” my alpha says slowly. “I’ll handle the Council.”
Sterling nods. “If you can get her to present as your partner, even temporarily, the optics shift entirely in your favor.”
My wolf locks up inside me.
Tell him. Tell him she’s ours.
Tell him asking her to do this is asking me to hold a flame to my own chest for the next six months and pretend I can’t feel it.
The words sit at the back of my throat and rot there. If Coach knows, the Council knows. If the Council knows, she’s gone before the week is out, and not in any way I’d survive.
“Would she agree?” Sterling’s question makes me hesitate. She’s already got so much on her plate. How can I ask her to do something like this? There has to be another way, one that doesn’t involve her.
“No.” I shake my head. “She can’t do this. She—”
“Grayson.”
“I said no, Coach. I’m not dragging her into this.” My wolf goes restless under my skin. “There’s a difference between the cleanest play and the only play.”
“Then suggest a better one,” Sterling counters.
I don’t have one. He knows it. That’s why he brought up her name. That’s why Coach hasn’t said a word against it.
I push back from the table and turn toward the railing with both hands on the wood. The lawn rolls down to the tree line with mist in the low places. The wind is coming off the trees toward the porch, away from the house. The kitchen behind me sits in dead air.
She’s been through enough. More than enough. Now I’m supposed to ask her to step into the middle of a fight that isn’t hers, in a world she doesn’t know the rules of, against a woman who will tear her apart for sport.
“She’s already got her face in those photos,” I mutter at the railing. “I’m not turning her into a headline on top of it.”
“Grayson.”
“I mean it, Coach.”
The bird in the tree line starts up again. Same one. It’s been at it for the last twenty minutes, and I want to put a stone through it.
“Hear me out.” Sterling’s voice stays measured. “You’ve been around this woman with your team for months. They know her. She works for the hockey team. It’s a natural assumption that the two of you are close. We don’t have to tie this to your playboy reputation. We don’t even have to push back against it. We spin it as her changing you. The woman who got Grayson Wolfe to settle down. That story sells itself.”
I don’t answer immediately. He’s right, and I hate that he’s right.
“It works in the press,” I say finally. “Not in the pack.”
Coach lifts his head.
