Chapter 11
Ragon
The registry forms sit on my desk, half-finished.
Black ink on white paper. Official seals. Boxes waiting to be checked. Signatures required in three places.
I can't make myself pick up the pen.
But the decision is made. Marie goes back to the registry tomorrow. The paperwork just needs to be completed. It's a simple thing, signing a form, I've done it a hundred times, and my hand won't move.
I lean back in my chair and run my hand over my face.
Everything is fucked.
My pack is falling apart. I'm telling myself I let it happen but that's not honest. I caused it. I know I caused it. I know that like you know something in your body before your mind finishes the sentence.
I just haven't figured out what to do with that knowledge yet. The knowing and the understanding are different things. The knowing is easy, it sits there. The understanding would require me to look at something I'm not ready to look at.
So I don't.
I think about Drake instead. My sunshine alpha.
The one who used to light up every room he walked into, who made everything feel brighter, easier, possible.
Who has looked at me for the last three days like it physically hurts him to.
He’s bleak in a way I've never seen him before.
Like someone dimmed all the light and he doesn't remember where the switch is.
I did that to him.
Eli watches me like you watch a stranger you're not sure about.
Eli who has always been the one who understood my reasoning, who could hold the complicated version of any situation without needing it simplified.
Now he just looks disappointed and that's almost worse than rage.
Rage at least means they still think you're capable of better.
And Jasper.
Jasper looks at me with his face carefully neutral and I have started to wonder, in the small hours when I can't sleep, exactly how long he's been looking at me that way.
Whether he looked at me that way the first week or whether I just didn't notice until Vee was gone and Marie was leaving and there was nothing left to look at except the pack I have and what it's actually worth.
I need to find Vee.
That's the thing I come back to every hour. Every dead end conversation with registry contacts who give me nothing or every walk through the house where her door is closed. Her garden is overgrown and her coffee mug is still in the cabinet where she left it.
If I can find her and bring her home, the pack can start to heal. Drake will come back to himself, Eli will look at me how he used to, and everything that went wrong will have somewhere to go and someone to undo it.
I believe this.
I don't examine it very closely but I believe it.
Vee belongs with me. With us. She's pack even though—
The thought catches.
I've had her for five years. Five years in my house, my bed, my life, and I never claimed her. I told myself there was time. That the bond was there whether the bite was or not. That she knew how I felt and she was secure enough in her place that the formality of it could wait.
But five years is a long time to tell someone they can wait.
I know this somewhere I don't like to look.
I pick up the pen and set it back down.
There's something I keep coming back to. It nagged at me through the whole heat, surfacing and submerging, and now that my head is clear it's louder.
Marie never tried to be claimed.
I should have pushed further on that. Would have, if I'd been thinking straight.
An omega in heat with her pack, her scent match right there, and she never once tilted her head or pressed her throat toward us in offering.
When we came near her neck she'd shift away.
Cover it. Turn her face into the pillow.
I thought she was being respectful. Waiting for me to initiate.
I remember the moment Jasper talked me back from it.
We'd been going for days. I surfaced enough to think and the pull was so strong, so certain, and I had Marie in my arms, the paperwork was already filed and I thought: now. Do it now.
Then Jasper's hand was on my arm. We were by the door between rounds, him fully clothed, me barely, and he looked at me the way he'd been looking at me for days—neutral, careful, something I couldn't read underneath it.
"Wait," he said. "She lied about Vee. You found that out just before this started. Claim her now and you can't take it back. Wait until after. You need answers first. Make sure."
The words cut through the rut fog. I looked at him and I saw the sense of it.
"Vee deserves a conversation," he said. "If you're going to do this, she should at least know what happened first."
I'd agreed. Told myself it was the right call. That I was being a good pack lead, responsible, fair to Vee.
The truth is messier than that.
I didn't claim Marie because I was already uncertain. Not about the scent match—the pull was real, overwhelming, consuming. But about Marie herself. About what she'd done and why.
The scent match didn't explain that. And I didn't have an answer for it.
So I waited. And called it virtue.
I push back from the desk and head down the hall to Marie's room.
I knock once. Don't wait.
She's by the window. The afternoon light catches in her hair. She's been crying, tear tracks still visible, and the familiar alpha surge rises—my pack, my omega, let me fix it—and I stamp it down.
I realize… I can do this. I could always do this.
That's what I've been sitting with for the last few days.
The fact that I could always do it and I chose not to.
Every time I wanted to check on Vee and told myself to wait.
Every time I heard Drake or Eli push back and used my dominance to stop them.
Every time the scent match pull made me feel like I had no choice when I had the same choice I always have.
I just liked the feeling of no choice better.
"I need answers, Marie."
She barely looks at me. "What does it matter now, Ragon? It's already decided."
"It matters to me."
She doesn't respond.
"Why didn't you want to be claimed?" I ask. "During your heat. Why didn't you push for it?"
She sighs. "Because I never cared about that."
"But I thought—"
"You thought a lot of things I needed you to think."
"You begged us to bond you in for months. You tried to get us to bond you without Vee. You nagged me about it incessantly. But when it came down to it… you didn't want it?"
"You'd just found out that I lied. I was out of my mind with heat, but I knew enough to know you might claim her next. Right after me. And I couldn't—" She stops. "I didn't want that."
"So it was about keeping her out. Making sure she never got what you had."
Marie is quiet.
"That's it, isn't it?" My voice sounds hollow even to me. "You wanted to be the only one. You couldn't stand sharing us with her."
She looks at me. And there's something in her expression I can't read—not guilt exactly. Something more complicated than that.
"Sure, Ragon," she says. "That's it."
"Why? This is more than just jealousy."
She turns from the window. "Are you still sending me back?"
"Yes."
"Then it doesn't matter."
I watch her. The stillness of her form and how she's choosing what to show me and what to hold back. She's been doing it since she arrived and I was too deep in the biology to read it clearly.
"One thing I still don't understand," I say. "If it was about pushing her out, you were already winning. You had us. You had me. She was fading on her own." I pause. "So why the zoo? Why climb over a railing and risk your own neck? Why go that far?"
Her lips flatten. "Because I was running out of time. I was desperate."
"Time for what?"
Silence.
Then: "Have you found Vee? Do you know where they took her?"
My brain ticks. The shift. The sudden animation in her voice.
"I have a lead," I say.
Marie's whole body changes. She's on her feet, hands wringing, eyes wide and urgent. "Where? Is she coming back? Are you going to get her?"
I look at her.
"Why do you care?" I ask. "You spent months making her life miserable. Why does her location matter to you now?"
The animation closes over and the shutters come back. She turns to the window.
"When are you sending me back?" she asks.
"Tomorrow."
"Then we have nothing left to talk about."
I stand there.
She doesn't look at me again.
I leave with more questions than I came in with and no way to get answers from someone who has decided she's done giving them.
This whole picture is wrong, I just can’t see the shape of it yet. Like how she reacted when I mentioned Vee. The desperation that came and went so fast. The question she didn't answer about what she needed time for.
But I don't have the bandwidth. My pack is falling apart and Vee is gone and I have forms to sign and a lead to follow.
I go back to my study and sit down.
I pick up the pen.
I start filling out the forms, and I tell myself that when Vee is back, I'll understand the rest of it. That everything will make sense once she's home and I'll make things right. She'll forgive me because she always has and we'll go back to what we were.
I believe this.
It doesn't occur to me to ask why she would want to.