Chapter 17 - Caelan
My aunt is going to kill me.
I’ve been dreading this conversation since Patrick and I left the council meeting room three hours ago.
We’re holed up in a small sitting room in Oren’s packhouse now, tucked away from the chaos of wolves coming and going through the main halls.
Someone brought us tea that neither of us has touched.
The cups sit abandoned on the table, and whatever warmth they once held has long since faded.
Patrick occupies the chair across from me with his elbows braced on his knees and his head bowed. He hasn’t said much since Ash delivered her verdict. Neither have I. I suspect her words are weighing on us both, filling the space between us with things we don’t know how to say.
I can’t predict what he’ll do when everything he loves is on the line.
The phrase keeps circling through my mind like a vulture waiting for something to die.
Ash confirmed that Patrick’s desire to protect me is real.
She confirmed that his guilt runs deep and has for years.
Those things should comfort me, and they do in a way.
But then comes the rest of it, the caveat that changes everything.
Bonds can be broken under enough pressure.
I think about Jonas, the younger brother Patrick mentioned during his confession to the council.
The boy who was only eight years old when Thornridge absorbed their pack and killed their father right in front of them who grew into a young man who believes in everything Thornridge stands for because he doesn’t remember anything else.
Patrick spent sixteen years protecting that boy, shielding him, and staying in a pack he hated just to make sure Jonas survived.
If Bastian finds a way to use Jonas against Patrick, what happens then?
What choice does Patrick make when the brother he’s dedicated his life to protecting is dangled in front of him like bait on a hook?
I don’t know the answer. Neither does Ash. And that uncertainty scares the hell out of me.
I can feel Patrick’s exhaustion bleeding through the mate bond. His frustration, his fear, and his desperate need to be something other than what Thornridge made him. All of it twists around my mind and my heart until I can barely separate his emotions from my own.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Patrick complains without lifting his head.
“Sorry. Didn’t realize the mate bond came with a volume setting.”
He huffs out a laugh and shakes his head. “It doesn’t. But I can feel you spiraling from here.”
“I’m not spiraling.”
He cocks his head to the side and smirks.
“Fine. Maybe I’m spiraling a little.” I pull my feet up onto the couch and wrap my arms around my knees like I’m trying to hold myself together. “Ash basically told the entire council that you might betray us if things get bad enough. That’s not exactly the ringing endorsement we were hoping for.”
“She told them the truth,” he replies with a shrug.
“I don’t know what I’d do if Bastian got his hands on Jonas.
I’d like to think I’d stay loyal to you, to the alliance and to everything I’ve promised.
But I’ve never been tested like that. None of us know who we really are until we’re pushed to the breaking point. ”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be comforting. All I can do is tell you the truth. I won’t make you promises I’m not certain I can keep. What I will tell you is that right now, in this moment, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe. If that ever changes, you’ll be the first to know.”
Everything in me wants to argue with him, to demand guarantees and certainties and all the things that would make this situation feel less like standing on the edge of a cliff.
But I’ve spent nineteen years living under a curse that stripped away my ability to feel anything real, and I know better than most that life doesn’t come with guarantees.
Sometimes you just have to trust and hope and pray that the person standing beside you won’t let you fall.
“Okay,” I reply. “I can work with honest.”
The tightness around his eyes smooths a fraction, and he reaches across the space between us to take my hand.
His fingers are calloused from years of training and fighting and surviving in ways I’m only beginning to understand.
I squeeze back, using the gesture as an anchor to this moment, to the fragile thing we’re building together out of chaos and desperation and something that might eventually become love.
“We’ll figure it out,” he promises.
I open my mouth to respond, but the door to the sitting room swings open before I can get the words out. No knock. No warning. Just the crack of wood against stone as it hits the wall.
Matriarch Lydia Thornwick looms in the doorway with fury carved into every line of her face.
The temperature in the room trickles to freezing the moment she sets eyes on Patrick.
She doesn’t acknowledge him. Doesn’t spare him so much as a glance after that first frozen moment of recognition.
Instead, she turns the full force of her attention on me, and the rage blazing in her blue eyes makes my stomach drop to my feet.
“Leave us,” she commands, and there’s no question who she’s talking to.
Patrick rises from his chair but doesn’t move toward the door. “With respect, Matriarch, I’m not going anywhere.”
“I wasn’t asking for your input.” Her voice could freeze a desert. “This is a family matter, and you are not family.”
I push myself up from the couch to face her on my feet. “He’s my family now. Whatever you have to say to me, you can say in front of him.”
Lydia’s nostrils flare, and for one horrible moment, I think she might actually strike me. Instead, she saunters closer and shuts the door behind her with a slam that sounds like a death knell.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she asks as she advances toward me. “Do you have any concept of the damage you’ve caused to this family? To this pack? To everything we’ve been trying to build since Sera broke the curse?”
“I survived. I thought that might matter to you.”
“Don’t you dare be flippant with me, child.
” She stops inches from my face, close enough that I can see the pulse jumping in her throat.
“You married a Thornridge wolf. A member of the pack that has been trying to destroy everything we’ve built for years.
The pack that tried to infiltrate our territory through deception and manipulation.
The pack that has killed our wolves, threatened our allies, and would see every one of us dead or enslaved if it served their purposes. ”
“I know what Thornridge has done.”
“Then how could you be so monumentally, catastrophically stupid?” Her voice rises until it bounces off the stone walls, filling the small room with her fury.
“How could you throw away everything your sister sacrificed to free us from that curse? Sera nearly died breaking those chains. She gave up her home, her standing in this pack, her entire life to build bridges between Llewelyn and the other territories. And you repay that sacrifice by spreading your legs for the enemy?”
The vulgarity of it steals the breath from my lungs.
I’ve never heard my aunt speak like this in all my twenty years of life, never seen her so completely unraveled.
The matriarch I grew up with was cold and reserved, a woman who ruled through quiet authority.
This version of her is something else, something furious and wounded in ways I don’t fully understand.
Patrick moves to stand beside me with his hand coming up to rest on my lower back, but I shake my head. This is my fight. I need to face it on my own terms, even if my knees are shaking beneath my dress.
“I didn’t choose this,” I tell her, and I’m proud of how steady my voice comes out. “I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to marry a Thornridge wolf just to spite you or shame the family name.”
“Then explain it to me,” Lydia’s demands. “Explain how my niece, a woman raised in the traditions of Llewelyn, trained in our ways and our values, ended up bound for life to a man who has spent his entire adult life working to destroy us.”
“He saved my life.”
“He compromised you!”
“Bastian Corvelli was going to use me as a weapon against this pack.” I take a step toward her, refusing to be cowed by her fury even though my whole body begs me to back down.
“When Patrick found out about the plan, he could have gone along with it. He could have followed orders and handed me over to Bastian on a silver platter. Instead, he risked everything he had to protect me.”
“By forcing you into a marriage you didn’t want.”
“Yes.” I refuse to flinch from the ugly truth of it.
“It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t some fairy tale where we fell in love over candlelit dinners and chose each other.
But he did it because the mate bond demanded he keep me safe, and I’m standing here today because of that choice.
If he hadn’t acted when he did, I’d be in Thornridge territory right now.
I’d be Bastian’s prisoner, his tool, his weapon against everyone I care about. Is that what you would have preferred?”
Lydia shakes her head and scrunches her nose up in disgust until she’s almost unrecognizable. “You sound like a woman making excuses for her captor. Justifying his actions because you’ve convinced yourself you had no other options.”
“And you sound like a woman who learned absolutely nothing from what happened to Sera.”
The words land between us like a grenade with the pin pulled. Lydia actually rocks back on her heels as shock ripples across her face before she can smooth it away.
“How dare you—”
“How dare I what? Point out what everyone else is too polite to say?” Something cracks open inside me, something I’ve been holding back for twenty years.
The good daughter. The traditional one. The Thornwick who never caused problems or rocked boats or demanded more than her allotted portion.
That girl is gone, and I don’t miss her for a single second.
“Sera spent her whole life being told she was wrong,” I continue with my voice rising to match my aunt’s.
“Wrong for questioning Llewelyn traditions. Wrong for wanting something beyond what the pack decided she deserved. Wrong for developing abilities that didn’t fit neatly into our expectations.
And when she finally found her mate, when she discovered the truth about the curse that had been strangling our pack for three hundred years, what did you do?
You doubted her. You questioned her judgment.
You made her prove herself over and over and over again before you would even consider that she might be right. ”
“That situation was entirely different.”
I sputter and ask, “Was it? Reeyan was a Grayhide wolf. An outsider. A man from a pack that had been our enemy for generations before Oren took over. And Sera married him anyway, because the universe chose him for her, and she was brave enough to trust that choice even when no one else would. Does any of that sound familiar to you?”
Lydia’s face has gone pale beneath its usual composure, but she doesn’t retreat an inch. “Reeyan wasn’t Thornridge. He wasn’t part of the pack that orchestrated attacks against us, sent spies into our territory, and murdered our wolves in cold blood.”
“He was still the enemy in your eyes. He was still someone you never would have chosen for her, someone you thought was beneath the Thornwick name and everything it represents.” I draw in a breath that burns all the way down to my lungs.
“And now he’s one of the most valuable members of this alliance.
A man who has dedicated his life to understanding the threats we face and helping us survive them.
Patrick can be that too, if you let him.
He has intelligence about Thornridge that no one else can provide.
He knows their weaknesses, their supply lines, their internal conflicts.
He’s already proven his value to this council, and he’ll keep proving it every single day if you give him the chance. ”
“Value.” Lydia spits the word like it tastes rotten on her tongue. “Is that what this comes down to? Trading your virtue for strategic advantage?”
“I stopped being a virgin years before I met Patrick, Aunt Lydia. If you want to clutch your pearls over my sexual choices, you’re far too late to start now.”
Patrick makes a strangled sound behind me, but I don’t turn around.
Lydia stares at me like she’s seeing a stranger wearing her niece’s face.
Maybe she is. The Caelan she knew was quiet and compliant, the dependable Thornwick daughter who followed rules and met expectations and never demanded anything inconvenient.
That girl died somewhere between the bar and the cabin.
Between the first night I spent in Patrick’s arms and the moment I decided I would burn down the entire world to keep him safe.
“Your mother,” she begins, “will be devastated to find out what you’ve chosen.”
“I didn’t choose this marriage,” I admit, lowering my voice but not my resolve.
“But I’m choosing to honor it. Patrick has sacrificed more than you’ll ever know to protect me, and he’s willing to sacrifice even more to help this alliance destroy Thornridge from the inside out.
If Llewelyn can’t accept that the universe chose my mate for me, if you or my parents can’t see past your own prejudice long enough to recognize what’s standing right in front of you, then maybe our pack hasn’t learned a single damn thing from Sera’s example. ”
The words settle in the room like a declaration of war.
I don’t take them back.