Chapter Two
Corin
A man can run a territory of three hundred wolves, settle their disputes, guard their borders, and bury his father, and still be told by his own council that he is not, technically, a complete person.
I had been Alpha of Ashfall for six years, and I was about to lose it over a piece of paper and a wedding I did not have.
"You're brooding again," Jake said from the doorway of my study, where he had no business being and always was. "I can tell because the room got darker and a crow died somewhere."
"I'm working," I said.
"You're staring at a map and clenching your jaw. That's brooding with paperwork nearby. Trust me, I've watched you do it for thirty years," Jake said.
He came in and dropped into the chair across from me without being asked, because he was my beta and my oldest friend and the only wolf in the pack who had never once been afraid of me, which made him either very brave or very stupid. I had never decided which.
"The Convocation is in three weeks," I said.
"I'm aware," Jake said.
"Vince will move to challenge my seat under the Mate Statute," I said. "An unbonded true alpha is an unfit one, the law says, so he'll call a vote of no confidence and put himself forward, and half the council owes him money or favours, and I will lose Ashfall over a law older than my grandfather."
"So get bonded," Jake said, and shrugged, as if it were the same as telling me to get a haircut. "You've got three weeks and a face that, against all reason, women seem to like. Pick one."
"It's not that simple," I said.
"It's exactly that simple. You're making it complicated because of, and I say this with love, a thing that happened six years ago that you refuse to talk about and that turned you from a person into a very large filing cabinet," Jake said.
The door opened again without a knock, and Norman came in, and the room rearranged itself as it always did around him, everyone sitting up a half inch straighter.
He had been my father's beta, and then, after my father died, he had been the closest thing to a father I had left.
Grey at the temples now, steady as a mountain, the only man whose approval I had ever truly wanted.
"Corin. Jake. Plotting?" Norman said.
"Always," Jake said, and then, "He's refusing to get married again," Jake added.
"I'm not refusing. I'm declining to discuss it," I said.
"He's declining to discuss it, loudly, with his jaw," Jake said.
Norman smiled the patient smile he had been smiling at me since I was a boy with skinned knees.
"Corin," Norman said, and sat, "you know I would never push you. But the council will not wait on your feelings, and your father did not bleed to build this pack so you could hand it to Vince out of stubbornness."
He let that settle, because he knew exactly what my father's name did to me, and then he went on, gently. "Tira Wells is here this week. Her line is good. She's strong, she's clever, she'd hold the territory well, and the council respects her family. A bond with her would silence Vince overnight."
"I know what you're suggesting," I said.
"I'm suggesting you survive," Norman said.
A voice from the hall said, "You can stop talking about me as if I'm a brood mare at auction. I can hear all of you. These walls are paper."
Tira Wells stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. She was tall and sharp featured and dressed as if she were about to either close a business deal or end one, and she looked at the three of us with an expression that made it clear she found the entire situation beneath her.
"Tira," Norman said smoothly. "We were just-"
"Discussing whether I'd make a suitable wife to save the Alpha's chair. Yes. I caught the gist," Tira said.
She looked at me, and for just a second something flickered behind her eyes that was not contempt, something closer to exhaustion, before the cool came back down.
"For the record, Alpha, I'm no happier about it than you are. But my family owes Norman a great deal, and I do what's useful. So." She lifted one shoulder. "If it comes to it, I won't make it difficult."
"That's very romantic," Jake said.
"It's very practical. Romance is for wolves who can afford it," Tira said, and walked off down the hall, and I caught the smallest catch in her scent under the steel.
Norman kept talking strategy, and Jake kept making it bearable, and I let the words slide past me, because somewhere under all of it I was doing what I always did, which was think about a woman I had sent away six years ago and tried every day since to stop seeing when I closed my eyes.
I never said her name. I had trained myself out of it.
But the shape of her sat in me like a stone I had swallowed and could not pass.
The knock that changed everything came an hour later.
Leon, one of my younger border guards, put his head in, pale and uncertain.
"Alpha," Leon said. "There's a wolf at the south line. A female. Rogue, no pack scent. She's got a kid with her, a little girl, and she won't talk to anyone but you. Asked for you by name."
"Rogues don't ask for me by name," I said.
"This one did," Leon said. "She said, and I'm quoting, tell Corin that Yara Maeve is at his door and she'd rather be anywhere else."
The room went very quiet. The stone I had swallowed six years ago turned over.
"Corin," Norman said, and his voice had changed, sharpened, though I was too gutted to notice it then. "Corin, it is her, isn’t it?"
But I was already on my feet and out the door, moving faster than was dignified for an Alpha, down through the house and out into the cold, because some part of me that I had spent six years strangling had heard her name and simply refused to be sensible for one more second.
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