CHAPTER 10
Rumors Spread
Rourke found out first, because Rourke found out everything first, which was precisely why Kade had made him beta and precisely why Kade now found himself on the receiving end of a look he hadn't earned since he was nineteen and caught sneaking back into the pack house at dawn, reeking of somebody else's perfume and entirely too pleased with himself to hide it properly.
"You kissed a Calloway."
"That's not pack business."
"An alpha bonding to a hunter's daughter is the single most pack business thing that has happened in this territory in thirty years," Rourke said, not unkindly, which somehow made it worse.
"Half the scouts smelled it on you before you'd made it back to the porch.
You're not exactly subtle when you're happy, Kade.
Never have been. You used to whistle for a week straight the summer you and Elena started courting properly.
Everyone knew before you'd said a word about it. "
Kade had no answer for that, because it was true, and a man could not very well argue with his own scent, or with fifteen years of a friendship thorough enough to have catalogued every one of his tells without either of them ever discussing it directly.
"I'm not asking you to be happy about it," Kade said finally.
"I didn't say I wasn't happy about it." Rourke's arms were still crossed, but something in his expression had softened, just slightly, the wariness of a man watching his closest friend walk toward a cliff edge tempered by an older, more stubborn hope that this particular cliff edge might, this time, turn out to have solid ground on the other side of it.
"I said I was worried. Those aren't the same thing, and you know it. "
"I know it."
"Then go careful," Rourke said, "and tell me before Agatha finds out from someone who isn't you. She'll forgive a great many things, Kade. She will not forgive being the last to know."
? ? ?
By the following evening, Agatha Vane was waiting for him in the council chamber without having been summoned, which was its own kind of verdict, and this time she did not bother sitting down, standing instead at the head of the long table with both hands braced against its worn surface like a woman bracing against weather.
"I warned you," she said, "about the cost of quiet ending on your watch. I did not expect you to spend it quite this fast."
"There's a threat on our land older than the treaty," Kade said. "It killed Elena. It's killing our deer. Wren Calloway is the only person alive who can see it coming, and the bond between us isn't a complication I chose, Agatha, it's the one thing that thing appears to actually fear."
That gave the old woman pause, which was rarer than most of the pack understood. "You're certain of this."
"I've seen it flinch from her. Twice. Once at her feet, once at mine when I stood between them. Whatever it is, it doesn't want us close, and it's willing to work considerably harder to keep us apart than it's willing to work to actually finish either of us off directly."
Agatha was quiet a long moment, weighing something behind pale, unhurried eyes, and when she spoke again her voice had lost some of its earlier edge, replaced by something more careful, more genuinely uncertain than Kade had heard from her in years.
"Then you'll need the council's patience more than its blessing, because you will not get the second easily, and you may not get the first for long, either.
There are elders here who buried people your grandfather's war cost them.
They will not hear *the bond fears her* as an argument.
They will hear *the alpha is compromised* and reach for the only remedy they've ever trusted. "
"Which is?"
"Which is separation, enforced if necessary, and a council vote on your fitness to lead if the separation doesn't hold," Agatha said, plainly, without cruelty but without softening it either.
"I am telling you this so you understand exactly what you are risking, Kade, not to frighten you out of it.
I am ninety years old. I have buried three alphas and watched this pack survive every single one of their mistakes.
I would like, before I join them, to watch it survive a choice made honestly for once, instead of merely carefully. "
? ? ?
The hunters' side moved faster than the pack's, which did not surprise him half as much as it should have.
Wren called him two nights later, voice tight in a way he'd learned to read as fear wearing the mask of calm, the same careful flatness she'd used the first night at the boundary stone before her anger had gotten the better of her.
"Someone told the hunters' council I've been seen with you.
An elder came to the house today. Said my father would be turning in his grave four days fresh if he could see what his daughter was keeping company with. "
"What did you tell him?"
"That my father spent thirty years aiming at the wrong enemy and dying without knowing it, and that I wasn't in a hurry to make the same mistake just to make an old man comfortable." A short, humorless laugh, brittle at the edges. "He didn't love that answer."
"No," Kade said, feeling the bond hum faint and steady under his ribs like a second pulse, already certain, with a clarity that frightened him more than the cold in the churchyard ever had, that whatever came next — council, hunters, the thing in the trees — none of it would be enough to make him let her go now. "I don't imagine he did."
They stayed on the line a while longer, neither of them saying much of substance, both of them, he suspected, simply unwilling to be the one to end the call first, as if hanging up might somehow make the growing weight of everything gathering against them more real than it already, undeniably, was.
? ? ?
He drove down to see her the next morning anyway, council caution be damned, and found her sitting on her father's porch steps with the same notebook from the boundary stone open on her knees, her expression unreadable in the pale early light.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, without much conviction. "If Garrett's people are watching the house—"
"Let them watch." He sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders brushed, and felt the bond settle a little steadier for the contact, the way it always seemed to.
"I'm done pretending this is smaller than it is, Wren.
Whatever it costs us with either council, I'd rather pay it honestly than keep hiding something that's only going to get harder to hide the longer we wait. "
She leaned into him, just slightly, and for a while neither of them said anything else at all, both of them watching the mist burn slowly off the valley floor below, aware, in the particular way people become aware of weather changing, that whatever quiet they had left to spend together was measured now in days rather than months.