_Kasper’s POV_

I was halfway to the car when I suddenly spotted Alpha Pierre. He appeared beside me and stopped me in my tracks.

Pierre came from the east building, it was the training facility, from the look of his clothes, and he stopped when he saw me, read my face in approximately two seconds, and asked carefully, “What did she say?”

I immediately understood he was asking about his mother. Everyone in the region knew she could be a handful and hated people for no reason.

“She called Ro an unlucky girl,” I said. “She also called her an abandoned woman. Her family dying was framed as a character flaw.”

Pierre closed his eyes briefly. “Kasper....i’m sorr......”

“I handled it, Alpha Pierre,” I said.

“I know you did.” He glanced back toward the main building. “Come inside. Not there, the other building. My office building.”

His office was in the east building, second floor, a room that looked like it was used for actual work rather than receiving people as he implied, which now I think about it I implied that and not him.

Papers were scattered on the desk, a board on the wall with maps and contact notes. He poured two glasses of water, which was not what I wanted, and sat down across from me.

“She’s been like this since Rowena and I were first introduced,” he said, without preamble. “Before your cousin married Kaelen. When it was still being discussed.” He set his glass down. “Aria decided early that Rowena was wrong for the family. The deaths, your father, your uncles, your grandfather, her brothers, your cousins, before that. She built a narrative around it.” His voice was flat and unimpressed with itself for saying the next part. “And I let her. Which I regret.”

I looked at him thoroughly, giving him the space to explain what he meant by that.

Pierre was not a man who said things carelessly. He was also not a man who said I let her lightly, that phrase had weight coming from him, the specific weight of something he had been carrying for a very long time. He had explanation for it. I trusted him, unfortunately.

“How long?” I asked.

He understood the question. He looked at the map on the wall for a moment.

“Since the first time I met her,” he said. “She was Nineteen. We were at a regional summit. She walked in with her mother and I.....” He stopped. Tried a different approach. “I’ve met a lot of people, Kasper. Most of them are variations on types I already know. Rowena was not a variation on anything.”

He said it the way you say something you’ve been thinking for years and have never said out loud, and the saying of it costs something.

I sat with that.

“You never said anything,” I said. “Not to me or to her either.”

“By the time the marriage was being arranged, Aria had made her position clear,” he said. “And Rowena’s mother was dying and Rowena was, she was in the middle of something enormous and I was not going to add to it by...” He stopped again. “And then she was married. And I respected that.”

“But you didn’t stop, you should have confessed or tried to stop the marriage. What if she’d also loved you?” I asked carefully .

He looked at me.

“The wedding banquet,” I said. “You sat beside her. You stood up and said what you said in front of everyone.”

“Because someone should have,” he said.

“Pierre.”

He picked up his glass. Set it down again. “What do you want me to say, Kasper? That I have feelings I didn’t act on and now she’s been through something terrible and I’m sitting here wishing I had done things differently three years ago? Yes. That’s accurate.” His voice stayed even, but the evenness was doing more work than usual. “But what I feel and what I do with it are separate things. I respect Rowena too much to make her situation about me.”

I thought about that. “She’s home now,” I said. “She’s free. This is kinda your chance.”

“She’s been home for two weeks,” Pierre said. “She’s investigating her grandmother’s embezzlement and trying to understand her family’s deaths and rebuilding an entire estate. She doesn’t need someone showing up with feelings she didn’t ask for.”

“She also doesn’t need to be alone,” I said.

Pierre looked at me steadily. “No,” he said, after a moment. “She doesn’t.”

I leaned back. “Come with me tomorrow. There’s an outing, Miriam,Vicky, and Rowena. Spring trip, north trail. Come as a friend. Nothing more than that.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I’ll come,” he said.

Something in his posture shifted, fractionally.

“And your mother,” I said. “She needs to understand that what she said today can’t continue. I will never sit still and watch anyone insult Rowena, not after everything she’d been through in this life. If you truly have feelings for her like you claim, then stop your mother from harboring such thoughts towards her potential daughter in law.”

“I’ll speak to her,” Pierre said immediately and actually smiled. Although his voice had taken on the tone that meant the conversation was going to be brief and clear and leave no room for revision. “Tonight.”

I nodded. That was totally fine by me.

We sat in the office for another few minutes, not talking much as we finished our water and moved to have lunch.

I had known Pierre for years, through pack alliance business, through regional gatherings, through the kind of professional respect that builds between people who operate in the same world and recognize competence in each other. I had always liked and looked up to him.

Sitting here now, understanding what he had been carrying quietly for ten years, I found that I respected him considerably more.

He had loved my cousin from a distance and never once made it her problem.

That was, in my experience, rarer than it should have been.