Chapter 25 （continued）
Conrí
He was furious.
Not because I’d found my mate—because I hadn’t told him. And beneath the fury, beneath the jaw and the volume and the pacing, I could see what it actually was.
He was hurt.
“Cuán, it wasn’t that simple,” I said.
His head snapped toward me.
I was about to expand on that but he cut straight across it.
“Simple? How hard is it?” He kept his voice just below shouting level, which in Cuán’s register still filled a room. “Cuán, I’ve found my mate. That’s it. That’s the whole sentence.”
He turned away and stared out of the window.
The city spread out below us—Canary Wharf at night, lit and indifferent, the Thames catching the light in long broken lines. From up here it looked ordered. Manageable. Nothing like it actually was.
“I’d have been happy for you,” he said quietly.
I knew that. That was the part that sat badly.
“She isn’t—normal,” I said. “The bond might not take. I’ve been trying to find out more before I said anything. About her. About rejected bonds.”
The silence that followed was brief and total.
He swivelled around. Jaw dropped. Eyes wide in a way I almost never saw on him—Cuán, who had an opinion about everything and delivered it without hesitation, standing in my living room looking genuinely struck.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was probably my reaction too.”
“That’s not possible.” He shook his head, a hand going through his hair. “Our mates are fated. It’s absolute. Mum and Dad—”
“Are exceptionally fortunate,” I said, cutting him off. “And not every bond is theirs.”
He stared at me for a long moment.
Then something went out of him—not the hurt, not the worry, but the argument. He crossed the room and dropped onto my couch with the full committed weight of a man who had just been handed news he needed to sit down for.
“I need a brandy,” he said. “For the shock.”
I rolled my eyes. But I moved to pour him one.
Against my better judgment, I told him.
“She’s coming to dinner tomorrow,” I said casually.
His jaw dropped for the second time in as many minutes. He took the brandy from me, looked at it briefly, and downed it in one go—making every Irish ancestor we’d ever had collectively proud—then extended the empty glass back toward me without a word.
I refilled it.
“What’s on the menu?” He pointed at me with the glass before drinking again, slower this time. “Don’t fuck this up, Conrí. One of us has to reproduce. The pack needs heirs and I am not currently in a position to provide them.”
He closed his eyes. His brows drew together with the gravity of a man contemplating something genuinely tragic.
“I may never find my mate,” he lamented.
“Cuán—” I began only to be cut off.
“Thirty-six years, Conrí.”
“You’re the same age as me.”
He opened one eye. “Eighteen minutes younger. It’s different.”
I looked at him for a moment—sprawled across my couch, second brandy in hand, mourning his unmated status at volume while I was the one with a potential broken bond and a mate who had poisoned an entire office floor and bitten her ex-boyfriend’s testicle off.
I turned away with the empty glass.
Whiskey. This conversation required whiskey for both of us.
It was time to tell him everything.
Well. Nearly everything. The name I’d used at the hospital could go to its grave with me.
Then my tactless brother said something. It was the thing that had been scratching away at the corner of my mind ever since I went to the hospital. It was the end of the line—literally.
“I’d rather be an uncle-dad than no dad. I don't think I could live without our pups, Conrí. Being alone for eternity is nothing compared to the end of the Gallaghers.”
My hand gripped our glasses to stop the tremor.
??
??
??
The doorbell chimed again.
I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t Nika—she wasn’t due for another two hours. I already knew who it was.
“I’ll get it, Charles,” I said, striding out of the library.
“Very good, sir.” He executed a neat u-turn in the hallway and retreated without comment, which was one of the many things I valued about Charles.
I opened the door.
Neev stood in the corridor with Seán balanced on her hip and a foil-covered tray in her free hand, her expression caught somewhere between genuine warmth and barely concealed curiosity.
“Ah, how are you?” I said, reaching over to rub Seán’s head. He giggled and flung my hand off with both of his—the indignation of a toddler who had decided he was too old for that now.
“He’s getting strong,” I said, taking the tray from her. “Thank you, Neev. You’re the third. Maeve and Rua have already been by—apparently there was some concern I’d starve the poor girl.”
Cuán and his filthy drunken mouth.
“I can’t lie, Alpha Conrí.” Neev tilted sideways, attempting to see past my shoulder with an optimism I had to respect. “I was hoping to catch a glimpse.”
I smiled pleasantly and said nothing, which was its own answer.
“She won’t arrive until later,” I said, waving at Seán as I began to close the door. “Say hi to Rían for me.”
I took the tray to the kitchen and set it on the counter, which earned me a look from the cook that communicated, without a single word, exactly what he thought about mystery foil trays arriving in his kitchen on a dinner night.
“It isn’t my fault,” I grumbled, and returned to the library.
All my time since had been spent on the bond.
The literature was overwhelmingly positive—celebrations of the mating bond, its permanence, its depth, the way it transformed both wolf and human in equal measure. Page after page of exactly what I already knew and none of what I needed.
Fractured bonds were barely documented. A footnote here. A careful omission there. As if the pack histories had collectively decided that failure was too shameful to preserve—that wolves who had suffered broken bonds deserved to be written out along with the pain of them.
Everything should have been recorded. All of it. The failures as much as the successes. How were we supposed to navigate something we’d been taught didn’t exist?
I was going to sit across a dinner table from my future mate tonight without the information I needed. Without knowing what was fractured in her wolf or whether it could hold. Without knowing what we were walking into.
I picked up the phone and called Cuán.
It was either that or spend the next two hours doing something that wasn’t overthinking Nika’s arrival.
At least with Cuán on the line I could direct the energy somewhere useful.
Namely, giving him a piece of my mind.