7. Chapter 7 #4
“I did not, however, anticipate that he would make a move on my son’s unclaimed mate.” A pause. “Nor did I anticipate my son being a colossal ass.”
Devon’s mouth twitched.
Ordinarily, I might have taken offense. Tonight the phrase seemed so devastatingly accurate that contradiction would only have humiliated me further.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Then we are spared the tedious portion where you defend yourself.”
He leaned back slightly, one long hand settling on the chair arm. Firelight from the hearth caught faint silver at his temples and made his eyes look even paler.
“You cannot force her away from him,” he said.
“You cannot order her from the lounge. You cannot invoke house authority to inconvenience him until he grows bored and departs. You cannot, under any circumstances, behave as though Maddie is an object some other male has approached in opposition to you.”
Each sentence struck where it was meant to.
“She is unclaimed,” he said again. “She owes you nothing. Not patience. Not explanation. Not fidelity to feelings you have thus far answered with disdain.”
The truth of that sat so plainly between us; I had no refuge from it at all.
“If Sage offers her welcome, attention, and the company of her own kind,” my father went on, “then he is offering what you in your wisdom have repeatedly failed to provide.”
The words should have angered me. Instead, they landed with the exhausted inevitability of an overdue verdict.
Devon spoke then, very softly. “She is lonely.”
I turned my head toward her.
“You are all so old here,” she said, and there was no insult in it, only blunt sorrow.
“Old in your habits. Old in your rules. Even when you are kind, you carry centuries in the room with you. Maddie carries home in her voice, and she has been far from it. Wolves ease each other. You left her alone with that ache, and another wolf capitalized on it.”
I shut my eyes once.
Not because I disagreed. Because I did not.
When I opened them, my father was still watching me with that exacting patience that had shaped nations and children with equal discipline.
“If you want the situation changed,” he said, “there is one path.”
I waited, elbows braced on my knees now, the posture of a man who had long since ceased pretending dignity remained intact.
“It does not involve control,” he said. “It does not involve strategy. It does not involve allowing matters to worsen until she is sufficiently hurt that your eventual apology appears profound by comparison.” Dryness touched the edge of his tone then, dangerous in its restraint.
“And it certainly does not involve brooding in hallways while other men behave like men.”
I let out a low breath that might have been a laugh in a kinder life.
His eyes did not soften, but something in his face eased by the smallest degree. Perhaps because at last I looked less like a prince defending rank and more like a son in earnest trouble.
“You move,” he said. “With honesty.”
The room seemed to narrow around the words.
“You go to her without pretense. You tell the truth without dressing it in explanations. You do not negotiate. You do not manage impressions. You do not speak to her as though she must assist you through your own awakening by providing reassurance.” His gaze held mine with frightening steadiness.
“You tell her what she is to you and what you have done wrong. Then you leave her the dignity of choosing.”
The choosing.
That was the blade in it. Not confession. Not even humility. Choice.
Because choice meant she could say no.
It meant she could hear everything and still decide that the polished wolf downstairs with his pack and his open attention offered a better future than the prince who had taken too long to become decent.
Perhaps my father saw that understanding move through me, because his voice lowered a fraction more.
“If you do not move honestly,” he said, “someone else will move decisively. Sage Lynch does not strike me as a man who mistakes hesitation for nobility. If he wants her, he will pursue her. Politely at first. Then, with increasing confidence, if no one gives him reason to believe the ground is otherwise occupied.”
Occupied.
A savage word. A useful one.
“I do not know if she will listen,” I said.
The admission came out quieter than anything I had yet said in the room.
“She may not,” my father replied.
No comfort. No false assurance. Merely fact.
Devon’s hand returned to my forearm. Her touch was feather-light and impossible to ignore.
“But truth is cleaner than fear,” she said. “Even when it hurts.”
I looked at her and found no na?veté there, only that stark, unornamented sincerity she carried like a blade too pure for most people’s handling.
She had fallen from heaven without cause and still believed honesty mattered.
I, who had spent centuries among courts and predators, found myself ashamed all over again.
The office fell quiet after that.
And I sat there in the middle of their silence, understanding with a clarity that felt very near terror, that every elegant delay available to me had run out.