Chapter 44
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
MAGNUS
My coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago.
The dark brown liquid stared back at me, reminding me of my first girlfriend.
Like me, Ingrid had been sixteen years old, standing in a doorway in the snow while I delivered the message my father had sent me to deliver.
I had expected her to cry, to scream, maybe. Her tears had fallen silently.
She had stood completely still while they fell.
She didn't argue with me, or shout. She had looked at me with disappointment.
Maybe she had expected me to save her. Instead, I backed away from her, and she closed the door.
It was the last time I had seen or heard from her.
She and her mother were gone by morning.
That shame had stayed with me for years. My first failure. My only failure. Until now.
The kitchen was quiet. The only light was the one over the stove, the one my mother left on every night since I was small. She left it on to let us know that we could have a midnight snack or drink without getting into trouble or losing our way in the dark.
It was silly. Wolves could see in the dark.
I heard her before she appeared. The soft, unhurried steps of a woman who moved through her own house with comfortable certainty. My mom came into the kitchen in her robe, her hair loose, her feet in the slippers Ivar had given her three Christmases ago.
She looked at me. She looked at the cold coffee. She filled the kettle and put it on the burner.
"What's wrong, baby boy?"
Baby boy. She only ever called me that in private. I was her first and would always be her baby. I liked it when she reminded me of that.
"I don't know where to start, Ma."
"Start at the beginning. I have time."
"I'm a grown man. I shouldn't be coming to you with my problems."
"I don't stop being your mother because you get older. I am always here. I am always a problem solver. Do you know why?"
I wrapped my fingers around the cold mug. Better that than reaching out to her with the aching need to be held, to let someone else manage the cold I was feeling after being forced to let my fated mate walk away from me.
"Men solve things with violence. You need your mothers and you need your wives because without us you would have settled every dispute since the beginning of time by hitting each other and there would be no one left.
" She reached across the table, pulled the cold mug from my hands and replaced it with a warm one. "So. Tell me."
I looked at her hand on mine. I looked at the ring on her finger. At the bite on her neck that was decades old.
"I don't want to marry the wife you chose for me."
My mother took a slow breath. "Are you coming to me as my son? Or as the heir?"
"What's the difference?"
"As my son, you can tell me anything. I will love you through all of it, and we will find a way. As the heir, you already know what I have to say, don't need to hear me say it."
Outside the kitchen window the estate was dark, but it might as well have been daybreak with our sight. Somewhere in that dark the enforcers were running their patterns, protecting the pack with their numbers and the strength of the Blackwood name.
"I know it's pack first," I said.
"It is not always pack first. It is always family first. Without family, there is no pack. The pack serves the family. Not the other way around."
She had never said that to me. Not in those words. What I had heard was pack first, duty first; the heir does not get the luxury of personal preference. I had built my internal architecture around that version.
"I could run the pack with Rosalind. She's an acceptable partner for an alpha. The alliance with the Lobos is necessary. We cannot make enemies out of them." I stopped. "But I want to make a family with Nell."
Not a hint of surprise crossed my mother's features. "I like Nell. Very much. But she's not a wolf. That fact would be difficult for the pack."
"No, she's not a wolf. She's a panther."
A little thrill went through me as my mother quirked a brow. I had never surprised this woman in all my life.
"So that's what I smelled,” she said. "Well, that changes things."
She was quiet again. Thinking. I had always loved watching my mother think. It was like watching a chess match in real time. Only this time, she didn't make a move. I didn't need her to. The run home had given me time to think while my wolf took over.
"I have a peace offering in mind," I said.
My mother reached across the table and took my face in both hands, the way she had when I was small and she needed me to hear something completely. "What ever you decide, your family will be behind you. You know that, baby boy."
I did know that. That's why it was so hard. That night when I was sixteen, I could've protested being the one to tell my girlfriend her fate. My father would've sent someone else. But it would've reflected poorly on my family.
I was not going to marry Rosalind Lobo. That decision would have consequences. My family would stand behind me. But there would be casualties. Unless my plan went sideways.
My phone rang. Vidar. I answered on the second ring.
"Addie slipped her detail two hours ago. She texted me that she was with Nell. They left the Waldorf Astoria thirty minutes ago. They're headed into Lobo territory."
I was on my feet before he finished the sentence. "How many took them? Do we know which—"
"Magnus—"
"Gunnar," I shouted, even though he was on the other side of the house. I was already moving toward the door. "I'll have the full unit at the Lobo perimeter in twenty minutes and—"
"Magnus." Vidar's voice came through the phone at a volume that was not his usual register. Sharp enough to cut through my panic. "They weren't taken. Nobody captured them. They are walking in there of their own will."
I stood in the kitchen doorway. I looked back at my mother, who watched me with a small, knowing smile, like she'd figured out the gameboard strategy being executed and she liked the move. I didn't even know what game was being played.
I knew Nell — had been learning the shape of her mind since the cabin, the way she moved through problems, the architecture of how she thought.
She must have found a structural weakness.
She must have found a load-bearing clause nobody else had looked for.
She must have looked at this situation — at the arranged marriage and the pack alliance and the wedding in two days — and found a variable nobody else had accounted for.
Didn't matter. I wasn't going to let her save me again. I was going to be her fucking hero whether she liked it or not.