Chapter 19 Her Pain Is Mine
Her Pain Is Mine
Roan
The first night after Phoebe asks me to leave, I don’t go home.
I shift in the lane outside her cottage and run the eastern perimeter until my legs burn.
The forest is cold and dark and exactly what I need: something physical, something that hurts in ways I can understand.
I check every marker on the boundary, nose to the ground, cataloguing scents with the obsessive thoroughness of a wolf who needs a task to keep from howling outside his mate’s window.
The eastern approach is clean. No rogue trails, no fresh marks.
But the absence feels deliberate. The rogues have been pressing closer for weeks, and now, the moment Phoebe’s scent starts broadcasting her emergence, they go quiet.
That’s not retreat. That’s patience. They’re waiting for something, and I have a bad feeling I know what.
I circle back past Ivy Cottage at dawn. My wolf wants to stay at her door until she wakes.
Her light is off. She’s asleep, or trying to be.
I can feel the restlessness from here, a low-frequency hum that matches the one in my chest. I want to lie down on her doorstep like a guard dog and stay there until she wakes.
Instead, I go home, shower, and try to eat something and fail.
My father calls at eight. I let it ring.
He calls again at half past. I let that ring too.
The text arrives at nine: My office. Today. Non-negotiable.
I go, because avoiding him now would be petty rather than principled, and I’m trying to learn the difference.
The main house is quiet. Rebecca isn’t here, which means my father has chosen to have this conversation without his Beta present. That’s either a sign of trust or a trap, and with Chris Mistwood, it’s usually both.
He’s at the long table with a mug of coffee and a single patrol map. No stack of papers, no agenda. Just one map, marked with the eastern boundary and the cluster of cottages around Ivy Lane.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit. The surprise of it registers on his face before he hides it.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he tells me. “About watching me do this your entire life. About your mother.”
I didn’t expect this. My hands tighten on the edge of the table.
“Your mother was the best thing that ever happened to this pack.” His voice is measured, but the effort behind it is visible.
Chris Mistwood does not discuss his mate easily.
“She was also the best thing that ever happened to me, and I failed her. I know that. I’ve known it for sixteen years, and I’ve had to live with the knowledge that the way I loved her was the thing that wore her down. ”
The kitchen clock ticks in the silence.
“I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me,” he says. “I’m telling you because you’re about to make decisions about a woman’s life, and I want you to understand that I know what it costs when those decisions are wrong.”
He pauses. “You’ve been fighting me since you were seventeen years old. I called it rebellion because that was easier than admitting you might be fighting for the right reasons.”
“Then let me make them,” I say. “My decisions. Not yours.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.” He pushes the map towards me. “But while you’re making decisions about the girl, someone needs to make decisions about this.”
I look at the map. The eastern markers are flagged in red. Three of them.
“Lewis found scent traces this morning,” my father says. “Faint. Deliberately masked, which tells us they’re getting smarter. Three separate points along the eastern boundary, all within a mile of the village. They’re not testing anymore, Roan. They’re positioning.”
The cold that moves through me has nothing to do with the weather.
“Positioning for what?”
“I think you know for what.”
Phoebe. Her scent, strengthening by the day, broadcasts the emergence to every wolf within range. To a pack of rogues without mates, without territory, without anything to lose, an emerging Omega is the most valuable thing in the world.
“I want six wolves on the eastern perimeter,” I say. “Three pairs, rotating shifts, overlapping coverage. And I want someone on Ivy Lane at all times. Not visible. Not intrusive. But there.”
My father studies me. “That’s a lot of resources.”
“That’s my mate.”
The word sits between us. I’ve never used it in front of him before, not directly, not claimed it out loud in a way that acknowledges what it means. His expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes does. A settling. As if a piece he’s been waiting for has finally clicked into place.
“I’ll assign the teams,” he says. “Tom’s on light duties, but he can coordinate from the house. Rebecca will run the rotation.”
“I want to lead the night patrols myself.”
“You need to sleep.”
“I’ll sleep when the rogues are gone.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and I see him weighing the Alpha’s pragmatism against the father’s concern, the same calculation he’s been running my entire life. Then he nods.
“Your mother would be proud of you,” he says.
I stand up before the words can land properly, because if they land, I’ll have to feel them, and I don’t have time for that right now. “I need to check the eastern markers.”
“Roan.” His voice stops me at the door. “The girl. Phoebe. When she’s ready, bring her to me. Not as Alpha to Omega. As your father meeting the woman his son has chosen.” He pauses. “I’d like the chance to do it right this time.”
Christ. Sixteen years of resentment, and he dismantles it in two sentences. I don’t answer. I’m not sure I can.
I nod once and walk out into the cold morning, and the tightness in my throat isn’t anger for once. It’s something I don’t have a name for yet, something that sits in the space between resentment and forgiveness and is too new to identify.
I spend the next two days on the boundaries.
The scent traces Lewis found are faint but distinct.
Three wolves, possibly four, working the eastern approach in a pattern I recognise from the earlier incursions.
They’re using the river to mask their trails and approaching from different angles, which means coordination, which means leadership.
Someone is directing these wolves, and whoever it is has identified the eastern perimeter as the priority.
Because Phoebe is on the eastern perimeter.
I mark the trails, map the approach routes, and work out the gaps in our coverage.
There are two: a stretch of low wall near the old barn where the boundary dips towards the road, and a section of hedgerow behind the church where the undergrowth is thick enough to hide an approach.
I flag both for the patrol teams and add a note about the river crossing that Lewis missed.
This is what I’m good at. Tactics, territory, the practical mechanics of keeping people safe.
My father has spent years trying to make me do this in an official capacity, and I’ve spent years refusing, and the absurdity of that standoff is becoming harder to ignore.
I’m doing the job. I’ve been doing the job for weeks.
The only thing I’m refusing is the title, and the title is starting to matter less than the work.
I track her days the way you track a storm from a distance.
The fear on the first morning—sharp, cold, the kind that makes my hands clench in my pockets.
The anger on the second day, which is better, because anger means she’s fighting.
The deep exhaustion on the third day, when the fighting stops and the body takes over.
My independence is her isolation. My defiance is her suffering. I carry this knowledge through the patrols like a stone in my chest, and it’s heavier every hour.
She goes to the shop on the third morning. I’m at the boundary wall when the pain hits—not mine, hers, the village battering her senses like a wall of noise. When she gets home, the relief nearly takes my legs out from under me.
She’s getting worse. And I’m the reason she doesn’t have help.
The text arrives at twenty past nine on the third evening. I’m at the boundary wall, finishing a perimeter check in the dark, and my phone buzzes against my thigh.
Can you come over?
My wolf locks onto one thing only: get to her. It surges forward so hard my vision sharpens. My thumbs are moving before the thought has fully formed.
On my way.
I’m moving before I’ve put the phone away. Ivy Lane is a ten-minute walk from the boundary wall. I cover it in five, my stride lengthening, my heart hammering, my wolf singing inside my chest with a joy so fierce it hurts.
She asked. Three days of silence, processing, anger. She reached for me.
I slow down as I approach the cottage. I make myself breathe. The light is on in the kitchen. She’s close. Nervous. Hopeful. Afraid. I recognise every one of those feelings because I’m carrying the same ones.
I stop at her door. I raise my hand to knock.
It opens before my knuckles touch the wood.