CORVIN

Victor Hale is alive and moving and I should be thinking about that. I knew how dangerous he was.

I made him that dangerous. I wanted him to be a weapon I could use. Now he would be the death of us all.

My border patrol confirmed it last night. A vehicle matching his description at Stormshadow territory at sunset in the evening. What he said to Darius I did not yet know, what he wanted I could guess, and the fact that he had chosen to go there. To make that particular move was not a coincidence because nothing Victor did was ever a coincidence.

Instead of thinking about that I was standing at my window thinking about a girl in a dress.

I turned away from the window and sat at my desk and opened Marco’s security report and stared at it without reading a single word. I picked up my pen and set it down. Picked it up again.

I was getting mated for the second time in my life. Tonight.

What kept coming back was her face yesterday when I told her the ceremony was moved. She composed it fast, I gave her that, but I had caught it before she could pull it together. That look that sat somewhere between devastated and too proud to perform devastation for an audience of one. Then the chin came up and she went steady and I had turned away because looking at her directly was becoming a problem I had not allocated space for.

She was a means to an end.

I had chosen her because she carried the white wolf bloodline, because that bloodline had not surfaced in Stormshadow females in generations, because the heir she would give this pack would carry power nothing in Gravemoon had seen before. That was the architecture. Everything else was noise I did not have the luxury of entertaining.

She was prettier than convenient.

I had noticed that early and hated myself for noticing and moved on because I had buried one woman a year ago and I was not doing that again.

I closed Marco’s report and picked up the phone and told him to bring the twins.

Rowan came in first, took the chair across from my desk, back straight, hands on his knees, jaw tight. The composed one. The one who absorbed things and waited for the right moment. I had always known exactly where I stood with Rowan because he was disciplined about it.

Ryker did not sit.

He stood to the left of the desk, arms crossed, jaw working, eyes on the wall, and I read him the way I had been reading him since he was a boy who thought he was unreadable.

He had not come here about the ceremony.

"Tonight is not a discussion." I closed the report and pushed it aside. "It is happening. Victor is making moves as of last night and I need this pack standing together, not fractured. So whatever either of you is feeling stays in this room and stays there permanently."

Ryker’s jaw stopped working.

"A year." He said it to the wall still, not turning.

"Excuse me."

He turned, his arms dropping to his sides. "Our mother has been dead for a year." His eyes locked on mine and stayed there. "One year, and you are down here mating some girl from Stormshadow and making a new heir like we are not standing right here. Like we do not exist."

"You do exist." I kept my eyes steady on him. "Which is exactly why the pack needs—"

"Don’t." He stepped forward, his chest rising sharply, voice dropping low. "Don’t make this about the pack. You want a new heir because you do not trust us with what you built. Say it like that."

I looked at my son.

"You want me to trust you with what I built." I came around the front of the desk slowly. "You, Ryker. You specifically."

"Yes."

"The same son who had made me his number one enemy and question every move I make." I stopped directly in front of him. "The same son who makes every decision from the chest and none of them from the head and then expects me to hand him something it took me thirty years to build."

Ryker’s eyes went red at the edges. His hands curled into fists and released, curled and released.

"So that is your answer." His chin lifted slightly.

"My answer is that you are reckless." I dropped my voice, quiet enough that he had to stay close to hear it. "You have always been reckless and I have always cleaned up behind it and at some point a man stops cleaning up and starts making different arrangements."

His breathing shifted, hands loose at his sides now.

"Different arrangements." He repeated it slowly, tasting the words. "That is what she is. A different arrangement."

"She is the future of this pack."

He laughed, short and ugly, dragging a hand across his jaw. "Our mother was the future of this pack too. You remember saying that? At her funeral. One year ago." He leaned forward slightly. "She is barely cold and you have a replacement already picked out and processed and ready to deliver."

The word processed landed the way he intended it to.

I did not move.

"Watch yourself." My eyes stayed flat on his.

"Or what?" He stepped toward me, chest forward, eyes fully red now. "You will make another arrangement?"

Rowan pushed up from his chair and moved between us, one hand raised. "Ryker. Enough."

Ryker stepped back, not because of Rowan, because he chose to, and turned his face to the window. His shoulders were heaving slightly, jaw locked tight.

Rowan turned to look at me. He had been watching the whole exchange the way he always watched things, cataloguing every detail without showing what he made of it.

"What about me?" He stood straight, hands clasped in front of him.

I looked at my other son.

"You are steady." I turned to face him fully. "You are capable. You are everything your brother is not when it comes to this pack."

He waited, completely still, because he knew me well enough to know there was more.

"But you have never once chosen me over him." I held his gaze. "Not once in your life. Every decision you have ever made where it came down to your loyalty as a son against your loyalty as a brother, you chose him. Every time."

"He is my brother." Rowan’s voice came out even, controlled, the way it always did when he was working hardest to keep it that way.

"And I am your Alpha." I turned back to my desk, bracing both hands on it, my back to them both. "Before I am your father I am your Alpha and you have never once behaved like you understood the difference. That is your flaw, Rowan. It has always been your flaw."

"So we are both disqualified." He stood from the chair slowly. "That is what you are telling us."

"I am telling you the truth." I kept my eyes on the desk. "You can do with it what you want."

Ryker turned from the window, face past red now and into that stillness that with him was always more dangerous than the noise, jaw loose instead of tight, eyes almost calm.

"Enjoy your ceremony." He walked out and pulled the door shut behind him and the frame did not shake this time, which was somehow the worst version of it.

Rowan stood in the middle of the room. He looked at the door briefly and then back at me, picked his jacket off the back of the chair, shrugged it on slowly, and walked out closing the door without a sound.

I stood there alone.

Both hands still braced on the desk. The security report open. Victor Hale at Stormshadow last night. The ceremony in four hours. Two sons walking out of this room and into tonight carrying everything I had just handed them.

I rolled my sleeves down, buttoned each cuff, straightened my jacket.

Went to the door, down the hall, down the stairs and through the corridor beneath the east wing, air dropping colder with every step, torches burning low on the walls, silence thickening the further down I went.

I stopped outside the cell.

She was standing at the far wall, back straight, arms at her sides, the way she had always stood, like every room she entered owed her something and she was waiting patiently for it to figure that out.

Her hair was longer. Marks on her arms that had not been there before. Thinner in the way that happened when survival cost more than the body could afford.

My wolf slammed forward in my chest so hard I put one hand flat on the cell door to steady myself.

She heard it and turned.

Her eyes found mine across the dim space.

"Hello Freya." My hand stayed firmly on the cell door.