Chapter 23
Brenna
We make it halfway down the stairs before Greta’s voice carries from the kitchen.
“I trust everyone slept well.” The tone is innocent. The delivery is not.
Merric’s hand tightens on mine for a fraction of a second, and I consider, briefly, whether it’s possible to kill an eighty-year-old woman with a look.
We round the corner into the kitchen. Greta is at the stove, back to us, flipping pancakes with the unhurried rhythm of a woman who’s been making breakfast for sixty years and intends to make it for sixty more.
Willow is at the table with a coffee cup, and her reaction when she sees us—together, Merric’s hand still in mine, both of us wearing the dishevelment of people who showered together and are pretending they didn’t—is a picture of controlled amusement.
“Morning,” Willow says. Neutral. Almost.
“Morning,” I say. I let go of Merric’s hand to pour coffee. Casual. Unbothered. The performance of a woman who did not spend the night having the best sex of her life and is absolutely not walking differently because of it.
Greta turns from the stove. Looks at me. Looks at Merric. Her eyes sweep from our faces to our hands to our necks, where the mate marks have surfaced overnight; mirrored crescents, silver-white against our skin, visible above our collars. The mark of a sealed bond. Unmistakable.
“Hmm,” Greta says. She sets a plate of pancakes on the table. “Cormac and I sealed our bond in the spring of 1979. April, I believe. We were considerably quieter about it.” She pours syrup. “Of course, our bedroom wasn’t directly above anyone else’s.”
Willow puts her coffee down and presses both hands over her face.
“What?” I say.
“The walls in this house are old, dear. And thin. And your voice carries.”
“Greta!”
“I’m simply saying that if discretion is a priority, you might consider the cabin at the south pasture. It’s isolated. And soundproofed, because Cormac and I had the same problem in 1979.”
Merric is standing next to me with a plate in his hand and a smug look on his face. I elbow him in the ribs. He doesn’t stop almost-smiling.
Willow lifts her face from her hands. “I’m very happy for you both. Genuinely. But if I have to hear that again, I’m sleeping in the barn.”
“Noted,” I say. My face is hot. I haven’t blushed in years. Apparently, sealed mate bonds bring the blood back to your cheeks along with everything else.
Cameron comes downstairs.
Everyone pauses. Not tense—careful. He’s stopped on the bottom step, seeing us together, seeing the marks on our throats. His eyes move between us with the focus of a boy who learned the truth about his parents yesterday and is now confronted with the physical evidence of what that truth means.
“There’s pancakes,” Greta says. Because Greta solves everything with food.
Cameron sits down. Takes a plate. Doesn’t look at us for a long moment. Then: “You’re mated.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Like, officially.”
“Yes.”
He nods. Pours syrup. Eats a bite of pancake. Chews. Swallows. The whole kitchen waits.
“Good,” he says. “It took you long enough.” He takes another bite. “Also, Greta’s right. You were loud. I was right there on the sofa. I’m traumatized, Ma.”
Willow drops her head to the table. Greta turns back to the stove with the satisfied air of a woman whose life’s work is validated. Merric sits down next to Cameron and starts eating like a man who’s decided that if dignity isn’t available, breakfast will do.
I stand at the counter with my coffee and let the moment settle over me. My son at the table. My mate beside him. Greta at the stove. Willow groaning into the tablecloth. The morning sun through the kitchen windows, catching dust motes, turning everything gold.
This is what I fought for. Not the politics or the wards or the intelligence networks. This. A kitchen. A family. Pancakes.
The warmth lasts through breakfast. Merric and Cameron don’t talk much, but they eat side by side with an ease that wasn’t there yesterday—the careful, bruised beginnings of something that might become normal if given enough time and enough meals.
Cameron asks Merric to pass the butter and calls him “hey” instead of anything else, which isn’t “Dad” but isn’t “Alpha Rourke” either. Progress lives in small increments.
Then Merric clears his plate, leans back, and says, “We need to talk about Frostbourne.”
The warmth cools. Not gone—banked. Everyone at the table knows this was coming.
He lays it out simply. He’s been away from his pack for too long…
weeks, counting the time at Aurora before this.
Jonas, his acting second at Frostbourne, has been managing in his absence, but there are decisions that he needs to handle personally.
The council is using his absence to erode his position.
And Bern’s visit here—the intelligence he gathered, the aide’s meticulous documentation—was the opening move of something that requires Merric to be home to counter.
“I want Brenna and Cameron to come with me,” he says. “I want to introduce Brenna as my mate. To the pack.”
Silence. Willow looks at me. Greta’s hands stop on the counter.
“Your pack is traditional,” Willow says. “Half of them voted to exile magic-blooded wolves years ago.”
“I’m aware.”
“And you want to walk in with a Ravenclaw witch and say, ‘Surprise, meet the wife’?”
“That’s the general plan, yes.”
Willow turns to me. “You’re actually considering this?”
I wrap my hands around my coffee cup. The ceramic is warm. Grounding.
“I don’t want to leave,” I say. “I just got back. This ranch, this pack… I’ve been here less than a week.
” The words come hard because they’re true.
“But Merric’s right. If Bern is making moves, Frostbourne is where the fight will be.
And if I stay here while Merric faces that alone, I’m doing the same thing we both did before.
Handling it separately. Choosing the wrong path because it’s familiar instead of the right one because it’s terrifying. ”
Willow purses her lips, then she straightens in her chair. “The ranch will be fine.”
“Willow—”
“We survived while you were gone. We’ll survive a little longer.”
“You’ll have more this time,” Merric says. “Dane’s staying to finish the barn. Briar can cover the borders. Sienna can keep progress on track. The wards are stronger than they’ve been for a long time.”
“You’re right.” She nods. “And after what Hatchett saw at the parley—a live Brenna Corvus with white fire—the purist packs aren’t going to test us anytime soon.
” She sets her jaw. The family resemblance between us has never been clearer.
“Go. Take Cameron. Show those Frostbourne wolves what Corvus blood looks like when it walks through the front door.”
“You sound like my mother,” I tell her.
“Your mother would have told you the same thing.”
“I know.” I smile.
Greta clears the plates. “I’ll pack food for the road. Merric, you’ll eat properly, or I’ll know about it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Cameron, you’ll mind your mother and your—” She pauses before she says “father,” likely aware that it’s too soon to go there. “You’ll mind your mother and behave like a Corvus.”
“Yes, Greta.”
The decision is made. Not with ceremony. With pancakes and coffee and the momentum of people who’ve learned that waiting for the right moment is a waste of time.
I spend the morning preparing. Ward reinforcement: one more pass along the north and east boundaries, pouring enough magic into the lines to hold them for weeks. It drains me, but the alternative is leaving Willow with degraded protection, and I won’t do that.
Rook coordinates the logistics. Supplies for the journey, communications protocol with Briar and Sienna for daily check-ins. He moves through the planning with the efficiency I’ve come to expect from him, nothing wasted, nothing overlooked.
Merric and I don’t get another private moment until the afternoon. I’m at the north boundary, finishing the last section of ward work, when he finds me.
“You don’t have to pour everything into this,” he says. “You’ll burn yourself out before we get to Frostbourne.”
“My pack. My wards. My decision.”
“Our pack.” He says it mildly. Testing the word. “And you’re my mate, which means your health is also my responsibility.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“How does it work?”
“I make my own choices, and you respect them.”
“Even when they’re stupid?”
“Especially then.”
He laughs. It’s the second time I’ve heard him really laugh—open, unguarded—and my wolf rolls over in my chest with an embarrassing lack of dignity.
“I’m scared,” I tell him. Because honesty is the new experiment. “Of Frostbourne. Of what they’ll see when they look at me.”
“They’ll see exactly what Hatchett saw at the parley. Exactly what Bern saw in the kitchen. A woman who’s stronger than anything they’ve been aware of before.”
“Or they’ll see a threat.”
“Some will. We’ll handle it.”
“I’m glad you’re so confident.”
“I’m always this confident.” He reaches for my wrist, pulls me toward him, and lowers his mouth to mine. I’m breathless and laughing when he’s done kissing sense into me. But I don’t neglect my task.
The afternoon dissolves into packing and goodbyes.
The Ravenclaw wolves gather in the yard, some I haven’t spoken to properly since my return, most I fought to protect from a distance.
They look at me with the mate mark on my throat, and I see the range of reactions: pride, concern, curiosity, a few hard scowls from the older wolves who remember the first time a Frostbourne alpha broke their matriarch’s heart.
Arlen grips my hand. “You bring trouble down on Frostbourne, girl, you make sure it’s the right kind.”
“What’s the right kind?”
“The kind that changes things.”
Willow walks us to the vehicles. She hugs Cameron—fierce, brief—and then turns to me.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she says.
“That leaves a fairly wide range.”
“Exactly.” She grips my arms. Her eyes are bright. “Come back safe. All three of you.”
“We will.”
She turns to Merric. Extends her hand. He takes it.
“You break her heart again,” Willow says, “and I’ll come north with every wolf I’ve got.”
“Understood.”
“She means it,” Cameron says from the backseat of the truck.
“I know she does,” Merric says.
We pull out of the ranch at four in the afternoon. Merric drives. I sit shotgun. Cameron is in the back with his headphones on, which is either a teenager’s coping mechanism or a deliberate act of giving his parents privacy. With Cameron, it’s probably both.
The Ozark hills roll past. Green, ancient, familiar. My land. My home. I watch it in the side mirror as it shrinks, and the tug in my chest is fierce.
“We’ll come back,” Merric says, reading me.
“I know.”
“This isn’t goodbye.”
“I know that too.”
But it feels like something. A threshold. The ranch behind us, Frostbourne ahead. The girl who loved a boy in a field and the woman who fights her own wars, driving toward the place where it all went wrong, hoping it can become the place where it starts to go right.
Merric reaches across the console and takes my hand. I let him.
The road stretches north. My wolf is alert. Half terror, half anticipation, entirely alive.
I tighten my grip on his hand and watch the road unwind.