Chapter 12
Olivia
It's been two weeks since the night I told myself I was only staying over because it was late, and his bed was comfortable, and walking back to my cabin in the dark seemed like a safety hazard.
We’re both politely ignoring the obvious.
I go to his house after dinner, and he opens the door, and neither of us comments on the fact that my toothbrush has moved into his bathroom and there's an entire section of his closet that contains clothing in my size, tags still on half of it, that appeared one morning.
I haven't asked where the clothes came from. He hasn't mentioned buying them. We are two adults engaged in a sophisticated mutual fiction in which I am a guest who happens to sleep in the Alpha's bed every single night.
"This still doesn't mean we're mates," I told him last night, while wearing his shirt, in his bed, with my leg thrown over his.
"Absolutely not." He grinned, and pulled me closer.
My days have settled into a rhythm that I refuse to call a routine, because routines imply permanence.
But in the meantime, mornings are training with Bram and Rose, and then the library, where I've set up my new bindery on the big table under the window and I'm working my way through the damaged collection one book at a time.
The cracked-hinge ledger was first — an afternoon, just as I'd promised Peyton, and when I set it back on the shelf with its new hinge toned to match, I may have petted it. Nobody saw.
The herbal is my real project. Washing cockled pages is slow, precise work, and I lose hours in it, and the hours feel nothing at all like the hours I used to spend in Mississippi wondering how to make rent.
Peyton brings me tea without being asked.
Gemma stops by to check on progress and stays to ask questions about hide glue.
Rose comes in to complain about Kieran and ends up holding bone folders while I explain grain direction.
I have friends here. I haven't had friends since high school, and even then, friend was a generous word for the girls who tolerated me at lunch. These women sought me out, and they keep showing up.
It’s at the library that Kieran seeks me out one afternoon, and I can see from the wrinkling of his forehead that he’s not happy.
I set down my bone folder. “Hello, tyrant Alpha. Come to bark orders at me?”
"Have you noticed anything different about Amaryllis lately?"
I purse my lips, trying to think. "Different how?"
"The eating. She ate an entire pie at the pack dinner last night." He pauses, then leans in and lowers his voice. "Do you think there's any chance she's pregnant?"
I actually snort-laugh. "Not unless it’s a virgin conception. I promise you she is not secretly sneaking off and doing the boom-boom with anyone.”
That earns me a snicker. “The boom-boom?”
“The horizontal mambo. The beast with two backs.” I give him an amused glance. “Is it time we had the talk? When a male shifter and a female shifter like each other very, very much-”
He holds up his hands. “Stop! My virgin ears.”
I mutter something about how I don’t think there’s anything on his body that’s a virgin. He grins. Then the grin fades. “But why is she always eating?”
“She stress-eats, Kieran."
He frowns, cocking his head and giving me a puzzled look. "She does?"
"Hasn’t she always done that? She told me she did. I just assumed it was her thing."
"Huh." He chews his lower lip. "What would she be stressed about?"
"I don't know. Maybe she has a brother who drives her crazy." I give him a pointed look.
He almost smiles. Then his phone buzzes in his pocket and he glances at it and holds it out to me.
"It's yours. Your old number forwarded."
I take the phone. The screen says UNKNOWN CALLER, which in my experience means one of two things: a car warranty scam or someone I actively don't want to hear from. I answer it anyway, because apparently I haven't learned.
"Olivia."
The voice makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I haven't heard it in four years, and my body remembers it before my brain catches up – the tension roiling in my gut. The defensiveness, the fear for my brother.
"Hello, father.”
Kieran’s eyes go bright and feral. His lip curls back. He knows how badly my parents treated Stephen and me.
"I heard your brother's found his wolf, and they think he’ll be able to shift soon. About damn time," my father growls. No preamble, no how-are-you, no acknowledgment that the last time we spoke he told me I was an idiot to throw my life away for a genetic failure.
“And? Are you planning on sending him a cake?”
“Watch how you talk to me!” he barks, and Kieran lets out a snarl and his fangs descend.
“One of my people told me Stephen's been seen training at Shadowpine, which means somebody over there has confirmed it.
If the boy has a wolf, he belongs with his pack.
His real pack. He was born into our territory, and if he's able to shift, he comes home and fulfills his obligations. "
"His obligations?”
"He's my son. He was born under my authority. If he has an active wolf, pack law says he returns to his pack of origin and serves. That's not a request, Olivia. I'll file the formal claim with the inter-pack council if I have to."
A chill rushes through my veins. "You drove him to the side of a highway when he was fourteen and left him next to a gas station. You don't get to call that fatherhood, and you don't get to claim him back because he might finally be useful to you."
"The law is the law. You have a week."
The line goes dead.
I stand in the library holding the phone, and the herbal is drying on the table and the bone folder is resting where I left it, and the sun is still coming through the window, and everything looks exactly the same as it did two minutes ago.
But my brother…we have no legal defense against this.
My goofy, silly, brother who is finally coming out of his shell, finally walking without his shoulders hunched…
forced to cower again under my angry father’s harshness.
Because Stephen will never be strong enough, mean enough, Alpha enough, for my father.
Kieran crosses the room, his eyes blazing.
"He can't take Stephen," Kieran says. "The pack-of-origin claim doesn't apply."
I gulp a panicked breath of air. “You heard what he said. Born under his authority, pack law—”
"Olivia." He says my name level and certain. "Your father has no claim, because he's not Stephen's biological father."
The room goes very quiet. I can hear the panicked thundering of my own heart.
“Excuse you?”
"Stephen's biological father was human," he says. "That's why the wolf is faint. It only came through your mother's line, diluted by half. Your father's pack-of-origin claim requires a blood connection, and he doesn't have one. He has no standing."
Well. My mother travelled to human towns a lot, more than most shifters, because she was obsessed with buying the latest fashions and visiting the hoity toity beauty salons.
And as for my father, it was no love match.
They acted more like business partners than husband and wife.
She wanted his wealth and prestige, he wanted a beautiful woman on his arm.
It would not actually shock me to hear that she cheated on my father.
I open my mouth. I close it. I open it again.
"How long have you known?"
"I suspected the day Stephen walked into our tent. His eyes are brown. Yours are blue. Your mother's were blue. Two blue-eyed parents very, very rarely would produce a brown-eyed child." He pauses. "I told Amaryllis to look for confirmation during her examination. She found it."
The day Stephen walked into the tent. That was the first day. Before any of this — before he kissed me or fed me prime rib or crushed my phone or filled a closet with my clothes. He has known this the entire time.
My voice comes out sharp and bitter. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I didn't have proof. I had a guess based on eye color and a healer's preliminary findings, and I was not going to blow up your family on a hunch."
I stare at him. He stands there and lets me stare, and he doesn't flinch, and he doesn't apologize, and he doesn't reach for me.
The terrible thing is that he's right. If he'd told me in the first week — "hey, I think your brother has a different father based on his eye color" — I would have laughed in his face, or maybe kicked him in the shin.
He had no proof. He had a guess. And the guess turned out to be correct, and my mother was willing to sacrifice her own child so she could keep running up my father’s credit cards, and the man who punished my brother for being broken was punishing someone else's son for a condition he didn't cause and couldn't have fixed.
I should be furious. Three weeks ago I would have been. I would have stormed out, slammed a door, stomped across the grass, and added it to the list of reasons Kieran Holt is an overbearing, secretive, impossible man.
But I've sat across from him on that couch and said hard things and watched him hear them, and he didn't throw me out or shut me down. He's not the same wall I met at the market. He's a wall with a door in it, and I'm the one he opened it for, and I can't pretend that doesn't matter.
So instead of fury, I just feel a deep sadness wash over me. I am incredibly relieved that my father can’t drag Stephen back home, but the rewriting of our entire history is a sharp blow.
"I need to tell Stephen," I say.
He nods sympathetically. "I know."
"He deserves to hear it from me, not from a healer's file."
"I know that too."
I put the bone folder down on the table, square to the edge. I walk past him, and he doesn't stop me.
I find Stephen at the training ground, sitting on one of the granite boulders with a water bottle, watching Rose practice forms in the clearing below.
I can do this.
He’s eighteen, and he's earned the truth, and carrying this for him isn't my job anymore. He's shown me that much in the last two weeks.
"Hey," I say, sitting down next to him. "I need to talk to you about something."
"That's never good." He takes a sip of water. "What did I do now?” His tone is half-joking, half-worried.
"It's not about Rose." I take a breath. "Dad called."
The softness disappears. His shoulders go back up where they've lived for most of his life, and I hate watching him do it.
"He says if you have a wolf, he has a pack-of-origin claim. He wants you back."
Stephen's jaw tightens. "He can't have me back. He doesn't get to throw me away and then pick me up when I'm worth something." His eyes widen. “He can’t make me, can he?”
"No, it turns out he can’t. Kieran says the claim doesn't hold up, because—" I stop.
I look at my brother, his brown eyes in his tanned face, and I think about my mother, and the secret she kept for eighteen years, and the fact that the answer was right there the whole time, and nobody saw it except a stranger at a farmer's market.
"Because Dad isn't your biological father, Stephen. Your biological father was human. That's why your wolf is faint — you’re half shifter, not full.”
He doesn't say anything for a long time.
Rose is still practicing below us, unaware, and the breeze moves through the oaks, and I sit next to my brother and let the silence be what it needs to be.
"Okay," he says, his voice strained and far away. "Okay. That actually explains a lot." He tosses a pebble down the slope. "So I spent my whole life getting punished for something I had no control over.”
“I’m sorry, Stephen.”
His eyes go a little shiny. "And Mom knew."
I nod. "She must have."
"And she never said anything. Because she knew Dad would dump her and she’d be broke. She knew why I couldn’t shift and she never defended me.” His lips press together, and his body is stiff with anger and hurt.
"No."
He picks up another pebble and turns it in his fingers, staring at it blankly.
"Okay. Does this change anything for the wolf? Can Amaryllis still help?"
"I don't know. I think so. The wolf is real, Stephen. It's just faint because of the genetics. The ley lines and whatever Amaryllis is doing — it's working. You said yourself you've been feeling something."
"Yeah." He's quiet again. “Ironic. I’m finally close to shifting and Dad – I mean Jeremiah Cromwell - will never get to brag about it.”
“Serves Jeremiah Cromwell right. I’ll never call him dad again.”
He bumps my shoulder with his, which is Stephen for a hug, and we sit on the boulder and watch Rose practice her kicks, and neither of us says anything else for a while, because some things don't need more words after the right ones have been said.