Chapter 16 #2
I glanced at the cave where Nathan and Megan were staying.
"She is coming on fast too. She makes me sit at night and talk to her, tell her stories, correct her when she speaks.
" I paused, trying to articulate what I'd been sensing.
"Nathan, though—I don't know, Rivik. He controls his mate more than I feel comfortable with.
Or tries to. I watch them sometimes and I cannot quite put my finger on it, but he always seems to be there, always positioned between her and everyone else.
She never speaks unless he has spoken first. She never eats until he has eaten.
She never looks at anyone directly when he is close by. "
The sledge came down harder than necessary on the next strike, and I felt Rivik absorb the impact with gritted teeth.
"You think he hurts her?" His voice was tight.
"I don't know. I haven't seen any injuries that concern me. But there are different kinds of hurt, Rivik. You know that."
"I have. Keep watching," he said. "If you see anything conclusive, tell me immediately."
I nodded, and we returned to the work. The next pole went in cleanly, and I moved to the last one without being asked. Rivik handed me the sledge and braced the final post. I took a deep breath, wanting to broach something with him, but not wanting to add to his burdens.
"You have not been to share drink, or visit at my hearth in quite some time," I said quietly, not looking at him. "I have wanted to ask, have I offended you in some way, brother?"
"You haven't offended me."
"Then something else keeps you away."
He didn't answer immediately, so I brought the sledge down, filling the silence with something easier than words. The impact shuddered through the post, and I felt him absorb it.
"I've been busy," he said. The excuse felt weak. "The council. The eastern patrols. Cera arriving. The storm damage."
"All true," I agreed. I brought the sledge down again. The post shuddered, sank, held. "And before the storm? Before Cera?"
He flexed his hands around the post and said nothing.
"Rivik."
"Leave it, Daska."
"I would," I said, setting the sledge down with deliberate care, "if I thought you were well. But you are not well, and you have not been well for some weeks, and I am your healer as well as your brother, and I am asking you directly."
"I'm fine."
"You said that when you had a broken rib from the Greywash hunt. You also said it when your father died." My voice was quiet. "You have always said it. It has never once been true."
He released the post and straightened, rolling his shoulders. The last pole was seated well enough. The work was done.
He looked away, over my shoulder at the caves beyond, as though looking for someone.
“You care for her,” he stated. I didn’t need to ask who he was talking about.
“I do.” I did. There was no point in arguing. The beautiful stranger had completely entranced me.
"How much?"
"She is kind," I said slowly. "Gentle, despite everything she has endured.
She helps me with the healing work without complaint, even though she still tires easily.
She plays with the children, learns our language, and she makes me laugh.
She..." I paused, searching for the right words.
"She fits here. With us. With the pack."
With me.
"She is human," Rivik said. His voice was still flat, but something sharp edged the words. "And they were travelling somewhere. She will not remain."
"Perhaps she will."
"Why would she?"
"Because she might choose to," I said quietly. "Because she might find something here worth staying for."
His eyes flashed, amber turning briefly to wolf-gold before he forced the shift back. The air between us grew thick with tension I didn't understand.
"The pack will not accept a human mate," he said, each word carefully measured.
“For a wolf maybe, but for me…” Surely they wouldn’t care?
they wouldn’t want me taking a wolf shifter mate, that had been made clear to me when i reached adulthood, though i doubted Rivik knew about the conversation the elders had had with me.
As an adult, I could leave the pack, find my own kind, or stay with the pack who had raised me but accept I would always be the lowest status, that I would never find a mate or have a family of my own.
As a young bear who didn’t remember his own kind, it hadn’t been a hard choice to make.
Rivik, and even Ryke, were my family, my brothers.
They were my friends, and I would never give them up.
I had chosen the pack. But now, now I’d met Ellie and everything was different.
"You are already an outsider, Daska. Taking a human as a mate would only—"
"She is my fated mate."
The silence that followed was absolute. Rivik went completely still. His face drained of color, then flushed, emotions flickering too fast for me to name.
"What?" His voice was barely above a whisper.
"I felt it the moment I saw her." The confession poured out of me now, unstoppable. "When I was treating her wound, carrying her, tending her. I feel it every moment I’m with her, and when I’m not.
The bond… it was like coming home to a place I had never been.
" I met his eyes, needing him to understand.
"She is mine, Rivik. The Mother sent her here for me. "
He flinched. Actually flinched. I'd seen Rivik take a spear through the shoulder and not flinch.
"Rivik." I said his name carefully, the way I might speak to a wounded animal. "Brother."
"The pack—" he started, his voice rough.
"I know what you will say." I leaned forward, urgency making my words tumble faster.
"That the pack will not accept her. That I am already an outsider.
That taking a human mate will make things harder.
" I shook my head. "But they accepted me once, when your parents brought me here.
They can accept her too. Fated mates are sacred, Rivik. Even wolves know this."
“And does she return your feelings?” he asked stiffly.
"She kissed me," I said softly.
The change in him was instantaneous. His head snapped toward me, eyes gone full wolf-gold now.
His lips pulled back from teeth that had sharpened to fangs.
A low, menacing growl rumbled from his chest. Rivik had never made that sound at me.
Not once in all the years we had known each other.
I had heard him growl at challengers, at threats, at wolves who overstepped.
I had heard the low warning rumble he used to settle disputes before they became bloodshed. But this—this was different.
"Rivik—"
"Do not." His voice was barely human, rough and guttural. "Do not speak."
Rivik was losing control.
In all the years I had known him, years of hard hunts and harder winters, of watching him hold himself together through grief and pain and the slow, grinding weight of leadership—I had never seen this.
Not when old Makris had screamed at him for the collapsed den.
Not when the Greywash Pack had come to our borders with drawn weapons and bad intentions.
Not even when his father had slipped away in the night and Rivik and Ryke had raced away into the night, following the darkness with their howls of sorrow.
I'd seen Rivik angry before. I'd seen him in battle, covered in blood and howling victory to the sky. I'd seen him face down challenges to his leadership with cold, calculated violence.
But I had never seen him lose control. Not like this.
"Brother," I said carefully. "What is wrong? I thought… I thought you of all people would be happy for me." I tried to keep the hurt from my voice, but I didn’t quite manage.
Rivik closed his eyes, fighting for control, fighting the shift. "What is wrong?" He opened his eyes again, and the raw agony in them stole my breath. "She kissed you. She chose you. And she cannot ever choose me."
"I do not understand—"
"She is mine too."
The words landed like a stone dropped into still water, and I felt the ripples move through me in waves.
She is mine too.
For a moment, I simply sat with it. The fire crackled.
Somewhere across camp, the children were still laughing, oblivious and cheerful in their separate world.
The morning light had shifted while we worked, the sun climbing higher, and it caught the planes of Rivik's face and showed me everything he'd been hiding.
The hollows beneath his eyes. The tension carved so deep into his jaw it looked permanent.
The way he held himself like a man bracing against a current that had been trying to pull him under for days.Moons.
Understanding flooded in so fast it nearly knocked me sideways.
All of it. His distance, the brooding, the way he'd positioned himself at the edge of every gathering where Ellie was present.
The way he'd watched me carry her into camp, watched me tend her, the way he’d sat and watched her during her fever to let me rest. Every moment I'd been quietly, helplessly falling, he had been standing nearby, watching me fall, knowing exactly what it meant.
"You have been living with this," I said, and my voice came out strange. Hollow. "Watching me…" I broke off, the full weight of it crashing down. "How long?"
He turned away. Set his hands flat against the nearest post as though he needed something solid to hold onto. "Since I heard her scream the day we found them.”
“You never said anything. Why, Rivik? Why didn’t you say anything to me?”
"What would you have had me do?" The words came out harsh, ragged. "Tell you to step aside? Demand you give up your fated mate?" He laughed again, that broken sound. "I would not do that to you. I would not do that to her."
"But—" My mind struggled to find purchase. “We would share. It is not uncommon for a female to have many mates. She watches you, Rivik. I have seen her. She is drawn to you too, and now I know why. This is good news, brother. Don’t you see that?” I felt a burst of joy inside the more I thought of it.
Not only had I found a mate, she was my fated mate, picked for me by the Great Mother.
She was beautiful, perfect, funny, kind, and now I got to share her with my best friend. To me, it could not be more perfect.
"I think the Great Mother made her for both of us," I said, the joy of it was still fizzing through me, warm and bright and almost too large to contain. Rivik didn’t respond.
"Like Torval, and Wase and Brek share Lenna. Like the Ashwood brothers and their mate. It happens, Rivik. The Great Mother sometimes—"
"I know what the Great Mother sometimes does." His voice was very quiet now.
"Then you know it is possible—"
"I know it is possible." He turned, finally, and looked at me.
His eyes were back to their normal colour, but that was somehow worse.
Because what I saw in them wasn't anger anymore.
It was something far harder to look at. "I know that some circumstances, it is done.
Brothers, close friends, wolves who trust each other enough to—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I know all of this, Daska."
"Then why—"
“She is not a wolf.”
I looked at him. “That… that is important to you? I did not think you…”
"It is not about what is important to me. It is about what the pack will accept. What they will allow."
"The pack—"
"The pack will not permit their alpha to take a human mate.
" The words fell between us like stones.
Flat. Final. "You understand what I am saying to you, Daska?
Not merely that they would disapprove. Not merely that there would be whispers and muttering around the fires.
It would be unthinkable. An ordinary wolf who took a human mate would be shunned.
Cast out. His status stripped, his place in the pack forfeit.
The elders would not even debate it. For an alpha—" He stopped, jaw working.
"For an alpha, it would be the end. Not just of my leadership.
Of everything my father built. Everything his father built before him.
The pack would fracture. Other packs would see weakness.
Karik would see weakness. You know what Karik would do to us if he thought he could. "
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I thought of the young wolf Rivik had mentioned. I thought of Birch Lake.
"So I am not speaking of preference," he continued, quieter now, and somehow that was worse than the controlled anger had been. "I am not telling you this because she is not—" He stopped again, closing his eyes.
“The fact that she is not a wolf, I don’t care, Daska.
She is everything you say. I have been watching her for so long, it’s part of me now.
Looking for her everywhere, needing to know where she is, who she talks to, hear her laugh, even if I cannot be the one near her.
She is perfect, Daska. My perfect mate, everything I could want, and everything I cannot have. ”
I stared at him. "You are telling me the Great Mother herself chose a mate for you, and you intend to refuse her?"
"I intend to protect my pack. I am the alpha, Daska. These people trust me to protect them, to keep them safe. Taking Ellie as my mate would endanger everything, I cannot risk that.”
The word sat between us, heavy and impossible.
Cannot.
Not will not. Not choose not. Cannot. As though the choice had already been made for him, years before she'd arrived, years before either of us had known she existed.
I stared at him for a long moment, at the set of his jaw and the rigid line of his shoulders, and felt something that had been quietly building in my chest over the last weeks finally coalesce into something clear and cold and sharp.
"You are telling me," I said slowly, "that you will watch her leave."
"Yes."
"You will stand here and watch her walk out of this territory, out of your life, and say nothing."
"Yes."
He turned, and the look he gave me was not unkind. That was the worst of it. There was no coldness in it, no dismissal. Just a terrible, exhausted patience, the look of a man who had already had this argument with himself a thousand times in the dark and had lost every single time.
"You intend to refuse a fated bond," I said slowly. "You intend to look at what the Great Mother herself has given you and say no. You were made to lead. Not to suffer."
"Sometimes they are the same thing."