CHAPTER 11
Blood or Choice
Garrett Doyle had been her father's oldest friend and, as far as Wren could tell, his only real one — two men who'd spent thirty years feeding each other's grudge until neither of them could have said anymore where the fire ended and the kindling began.
He sat at her kitchen table now like he had every right to it, hat in his hands, looking at her with an expression that wanted very badly to be gentle and mostly managed disappointment instead.
She had known he would come, in some form, from the moment Odette had mentioned Ruth Anders and her kitchen window, and had spent the two days since half-composing arguments in her head while she finished sorting the last of her father's boxes into keep and donate piles, the physical work at least giving her hands something useful to do while her mind circled the same worn groove over and over.
She had found, in one of the boxes, an old photograph of her father and Garrett as young men, arms slung over each other's shoulders outside this very house, both of them grinning in a way she didn't think she'd ever actually seen either of them do in person.
She had not expected that photograph to make the conversation harder. It had, immeasurably.
She had known he would come eventually, from the moment Odette had mentioned Ruth Anders and her kitchen window, and had spent the better part of two days rehearsing versions of this conversation in her head, none of which had prepared her for how much smaller and more tired he looked in person than he did in her memory of him — a man well past sixty now, gray at the temples, his hands, when he finally set the hat down, trembling slightly in a way she didn't remember from her childhood.
"Your daddy asked me to look after you," he said. "Before the end. Made me promise."
"I don't need looking after."
"Everett would say different, seeing what I'm seeing.
" Garrett turned his hat once in his hands.
"Council's heard talk, Wren. About you and the Thornwood boy.
I told them it was foolishness. Told them a Calloway wouldn't be that foolish, not with her father barely cold.
" He looked up. "Tell me I told them right. "
She thought about lying. It would have been easy, and kind, and would have bought her time she badly wanted.
She found she couldn't make herself do it, not at her father's table, not with his ghost apparently still setting the terms of every conversation she had in this house. "You didn't tell them right."
Garrett's face did something complicated — grief, mostly, she thought, grief dressed up as anger because anger was easier to wear in front of people. "Do you have any idea what that pack cost this valley? What it cost your own family?"
"I know what my father *believed* it cost us. I've read thirty years of his notes this week, Garrett. I know exactly how much of his life he spent aiming at wolves for something that was never the wolves at all."
"That's grief talking. Or worse." His eyes narrowed, old suspicion surfacing under the concern like a stone under thawing ice. "Or is that *him* talking? They do that, you know. Get inside your head. Make you feel things that aren't yours to feel."
"Nothing about what I feel is his to give me, Garrett.
That's exactly the part none of you understand.
" She heard her own voice shake and hated it, because shaking made her sound less certain than she was, and she needed, badly, to sound certain in this particular room.
"I'm not choosing him instead of my blood.
I'm choosing to stop letting a war my father lost before I was born decide who I'm allowed to love. "
"Love." Garrett said the word like it tasted wrong in his mouth. "Your father would rather see you dead than hear you say that word about an alpha."
"My father is dead," Wren said, quiet and final, "and I am not going to spend what's left of my life proving I loved him by hating everything he hated. That's not devotion, Garrett. That's just grief with worse aim."
He flinched at that, visibly, and for a moment she saw underneath the anger to something rawer — an old man who had spent thirty years building his own identity around a war he'd inherited rather than chosen, and who did not, she suspected, entirely know who he'd be without it.
"You sound like him," he said finally, quietly.
"Sharp like that. He was sharp too, before the grudge wore him down to just angry. "
"Maybe I'll manage to stay sharp instead of angry, then. Somebody in this family ought to try."
? ? ?
He left without finishing his coffee, which in this valley was its own kind of declaration, and Wren sat alone at the table afterward with her hands wrapped around a mug gone cold, turning the argument over and over the way she'd turned over her father's spiral doodles, looking for the seam where it stopped making sense.
She didn't find one. That was the trouble.
Every instinct bred into her since childhood said this was betrayal — that loving Kade Thornwood was a debt she'd never be able to repay her father's memory, a wound she was choosing to reopen instead of let scar over decently.
And underneath all of it, quieter but steadier, was the bond humming faint against her ribs like something patiently waiting for her to stop arguing with her own heart and simply admit what it had already decided.
She thought of Garrett's trembling hands, of the particular grief dressed as anger that seemed to be this valley's only fluent language, and wondered, not for the first time that week, how many other people on both sides of the treaty line were quietly, privately exhausted by a war none of them had actually chosen, kept alive mostly by the fear of being the first to admit they wanted it to end.
She called Kade that evening, not because she needed to tell him anything urgent, but because she found, increasingly, that she wanted to hear his voice at the end of days like this one, and did not see any particular virtue anymore in pretending otherwise.
? ? ?
"Garrett came by," she told him, once he'd picked up, the two of them falling easily into the specific shorthand of people who had started, without quite deciding to, keeping each other updated on the small wounds of an ordinary day.
"Told me I sound like my father when I argue.
I don't know if that was supposed to be an insult. "
"Do you think it was?"
"I think," she said slowly, working it out loud as she said it, "that maybe it doesn't have to be one. He was sharp before he was angry. Maybe I get to keep the sharp part and leave the rest of it in the ground with him."