Chapter 33 #2
“What about you?” I ask. Because I owe her the question. Because our friendship means I don’t get to make this decision without looking at what it costs the people who’ve stood beside me.
She’s quiet. The forest sounds fill the silence: wind in the trees, the hawk’s distant cry, the creak of branches.
“I go where you go,” she says. “That hasn’t changed. Dane feels the same. Briar’s already packed, though she’ll deny it.”
“You’d leave Frostbourne?”
“Frostbourne is a place. The pack is the people.” She starts walking again. “Besides, somebody needs to keep your mate from burning herself out on ward magic, and you’re not qualified.”
I almost smile. “You know my faults.”
“Course I do. So I’ll be standing right beside you, picking up after you, same as always.” She glances at me. The faintest smile. “Some things don’t change just because the geography does.”
We walk the rest of the perimeter in silence. The lodge, the training ground, the cabins, the gate. Everything I built. Everything that will stand without me, because that’s how I built it.
Sienna heads for the lodge. Pauses, looking back at me. “For what it’s worth, I watched you walk away from the right choice once. I saw what it did to you.” She holds my eyes. “This is the right choice, Merric. Don’t make me watch you talk yourself out of it.”
She goes inside.
I stand in the compound alone. The sun is fully up now, the frost burning off, the mountain air warming by degrees, and pack life continues, just as it always has. Always will… with or without me.
I go back to the cabin.
Brenna is up. She’s in the kitchen with coffee, standing at the window in one of my shirts, looking at the compound the way she’s been looking at it for days… with the appreciation of a guest and the restlessness of a woman who’s ready to go home.
Cameron is at the table, eating toast as if he’s decided that if the adults in his life are going to take their time making decisions, he’s going to eat his way through the wait.
Brenna turns when I come in. Reads me before I say a word. I feel her register the change: the settled quality, the absence of the negotiation that’s been running under the surface for days. Her eyes narrow.
“You’ve decided something,” she says.
“I’ve decided something.”
Cameron looks up from his toast and watches us.
“I’m not going to ask you to stay at Frostbourne,” I say. “And I’m not going to let you go back to Ravenclaw without me.”
Brenna’s expression doesn’t change. But I sense a complicated tangle of emotion within her: relief, fear, the fierce protectiveness of a woman who doesn’t want to be the reason someone loses what they’ve built.
“Merric—”
“Ravenclaw needs wolves. Fighters. A magic-user needs her land. And our son,” I glance at Cameron, who is pretending to eat toast and listening to every word, “needs to go home.”
“You’re talking about leaving your pack.”
“I’m talking about stepping down. Naming Jonas. And going south with my mate and my son and whichever of my wolves want to come.”
Brenna sets down her coffee. The ceramic clinks against the counter.
“You built this place,” she says. “Your blood is in it.”
“I know what I built. I know what it costs. And I know what it cost me the last time I chose a title over the people who mattered.” I cross the kitchen.
Stand in front of her. “I’m not making that choice again.
I made it once, and spent eighteen years carrying the loss it brought. I will not do it again.”
She stares at me. I can feel everything she’s feeling, the jumble of gratitude and guilt and love and the stubborn, bone-deep resistance to letting someone sacrifice for her.
“You’re sure,” she says.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
Cameron clears his throat. “I’d like to point out that I’ve been ready to go home for a week, so if the two of you could stop having a moment and start packing, that would be great.”
Brenna’s composure cracks. Just a fraction. Mine does too.
“There’s a process,” I say. “I can’t just leave. The pack needs to vote. It needs to be done right. Publicly, formally, so there’s no question about the transition.”
“How long?” Cameron asks.
“Tomorrow. I’ll call the pack together tomorrow.”
Cameron nods. Goes back to his toast. But I catch it: the change in his shoulders. The tension that drops away, the way it began to drop when I sat next to him in the truck on the road south. A boy who’s just been told he’s going home, and is trying very hard not to show how much it means.
Brenna hasn’t moved. She’s standing at the counter with her coffee cooling beside her and her eyes on mine. There’s something in that look. Not relief. Not gratitude. Something quieter.
Trust.
The trust of a woman who asked a man to choose her once and watched him choose something else. Now she’s standing in a kitchen eighteen years later, watching him choose her, and is letting herself believe it.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” She picks up her coffee. Takes a sip. “But if you’re stepping down as alpha tomorrow, you should probably tell Rook before he hears it from Sienna.”
“How do you know Sienna—?”
“Bond.” She winks. “I felt the whole conversation. You were about thirty feet outside my range for the first ten minutes, and then you walked closer, and I got the gist of it.”
She takes another sip. Watches me over the rim, lips curling into a smile.
“Sienna’s right, by the way,” Brenna says. “This is the right choice. Don’t let me talk you out of it.”
“You just tried to talk me out of it.”
“I had to make sure you’d push back. If you’d folded, I’d have known you weren’t sure.” She sets the coffee down again. “You didn’t fold.”
“No.”
“Good.”
She walks past me. Squeezes my hand as she goes; brief, firm, the kind of touch that carries a whole sentence in the pressure of her fingers. Then she’s heading for the bedroom, already planning, already being Brenna.
Cameron catches my eye across the table. “Thanks,” he says. “For choosing us.”
My throat tightens. “Always should have.”
He nods.
I reach under my shirt. The leather cord is warm from my skin… eighteen years of warmth, eighteen years of carrying a thin gold band against my chest because letting it go meant letting her go. I pull it over my head. The ring slides free and sits in my palm, light as nothing.
“Here.” I set it on the table beside his plate. “This was your mother’s. I’ve been holding it for her. But I think it belongs to you now.”
Cameron looks at the ring. Doesn’t touch it right away. He studies it the way he studies everything: carefully, completely, reading the history in a circle of metal that’s been worn smooth by years of being held.
“You wore this the whole time?” he says.
“The whole time.”
He picks it up. Turns it once between his fingers. Then he puts it in his pocket. Not on the cord, not around his neck. In his pocket, where it sits against his thigh, close and private and his.
“Okay,” he says. And goes back to his toast.
I stand in the kitchen of the cabin at Frostbourne and feel the connection between me and the woman in the next room, and my son at the table. And I know—with the certainty that lives below thought, in the place where wolves make their decisions—that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Tomorrow I’ll stand in front of my pack and let them go.
Today, I’m going to sit down and eat breakfast with my family.