Chapter 5 Finneas
— · —
Finneas
The council chamber was stone walls and oak, a table built from a single slab that had been there longer than I’d been alive. Five senior Alphas around it. My father sat at this head before me, and his father before him.
“He’s a risk,” Aldric said. A gray-haired, permanently suspicious man, one of the oldest members of the council and the one most likely to find a problem with anything that hadn’t been done exactly the same way for the last forty years. “No background. No references. We don’t take in strays.”
We were discussing the young rogue wolf from the western border. I’d had him brought in for an audience two days ago. Barely twenty, thin, no pack affiliation. The kid stood in front of the council and asked for sanctuary with his chin up and his voice not wavering, which I respected.
“He left his pack voluntarily,” I said. “No criminal record. Luca vetted him.”
“Luca’s vetting is not the council’s vetting.”
“Luca’s vetting is my vetting. I trust him with my life.” I held Aldric’s gaze until his jaw tightened. “The kid gets sanctuary.”
He didn’t argue further, but he held the stare a beat too long.
Testing. Always testing, pushing just far enough to see if I’d push back and then retreating when I did.
He’d been doing it since my father’s time and he’d keep doing it until one of us was dead.
Since I planned to outlive him, I could be patient.
“Next item,” I said. “The construction complaints from the southern district.”
Aldric jumped on that too, naturally. Wanted the project halted pending a full noise assessment.
The project was a housing development for new pack families, something I’d personally approved six months ago because we had wolves living in cramped quarters with no room for their children and the southern land was sitting empty.
Halting it would set us back three months minimum and leave twelve families in temporary housing through winter.
“The construction continues,” I said. “We’ll adjust the schedule to reduce noise during early mornings and late evenings. Luca, coordinate with the foreman.”
Luca nodded from his seat near the door. He didn’t sit at the table for council meetings because technically his rank didn’t require it, but everybody in the room knew he was the one I listened to most and his presence alone kept the younger wolves in check.
A younger Alpha at the far end decided this was his moment. Pushed back on the eastern border patrol schedule, said the routes were outdated, the rotations too thin, talking fast and gaining confidence with every sentence while the rest of the table watched.
I let him finish. Every word. Sat still, face blank, giving him nothing to react to. When he was done and the silence settled, I released just enough of my pheromones to fill the room. Not aggressive. Just present. A reminder of who sat at the head of this table.
His posture dropped. Chin dipped, shoulders curved inward, his wolf submitting before his brain caught up. A few of the other Alphas shifted in their chairs too.
“The patrol routes were updated six weeks ago,” I said, level. “If you have a specific concern, bring it to Luca with data. I don’t change strategy based on feelings.”
He nodded and the room went quiet. Meeting adjourned.
Luca fell into step beside me as I walked through the estate corridor toward the study. Hands in his pockets, easy slouch, looking for all the world like someone out for a casual stroll and not the man who’d just spent an hour cataloguing every power play in that room.
“Aldric is going to be a problem eventually,” he said.
“Aldric has been a problem since my father’s time. He’ll push until I push back and then he’ll fall in line.”
“Fair.” He glanced at me sideways. “There’s another thing.”
“What.”
“Lorraine.”
Goddamn it. “What did she do.”
“Told the Hale family that you and her are engaged. Formal announcement coming by the end of the year, according to her.” He paused, and I could hear the restrained amusement under his next words.
“Also told the pack liaison coordinator that she’s the future Luna and expects to be consulted on all social event planning. ”
I stopped walking. “She said what.”
“Direct quote from the coordinator: ‘Ms. Ashtor informed me that as the incoming Luna, she expects to approve all event details going forward.’ Coordinator had no idea what to make of it. Came to me. I told her to disregard it, but the damage is spreading. The Hale family has been telling people congratulations.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes.
Lorraine had been doing this for as long as I could remember.
Growing up, she was always there, at every dinner, every holiday, trailing after me and George and our friends.
Her mother Regina and my mother Margaret had planned this marriage since before either of us could walk, and Lorraine absorbed it as gospel.
I’d declined her invitations, dodged the subject, flat-out told her I wasn’t interested.
None of it landed. She heard what she wanted and discarded the rest.
The worst part was I remembered when she wasn’t like this.
When we were kids, before the mothers started whispering about weddings and bloodlines, Lorraine was just a girl who showed up at our house and followed George around and stole food off my plate at dinner.
Annoying in the way kids are annoying. Normal.
Then around sixteen, seventeen, something shifted.
She started dressing differently when I was around, showing up at events I attended, manufacturing reasons to be alone with me.
And every time I pulled away, her mother and mine pushed harder, like my disinterest was a phase they could wait out.
I didn’t hate her. She was someone who was at my father’s funeral, who brought my mother flowers every week for a year after he died. Cutting her off felt less like setting a boundary and more like pulling out a foundation, and I didn’t know what would collapse once I did.
“I’ll talk to her,” I said.
“You’ve been saying that for months.”
“I know.”
“Her family carries weight. If you don’t shut this down publicly, the pack is going to treat it as fact. Some already are.”
“I know, Luca.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m standing, you’ve known for months and you haven’t done shit about it.”
I turned to look at him. He didn’t flinch. That was Luca. Anyone else in the pack would have dropped their eyes or backed off, but Luca just stood there with his hands in his pockets and that look on his face that said he’d known me too long to be intimidated by the Alpha bullshit.
“Then do it,” he said. Quiet. Final.
I didn’t answer. Because shutting Lorraine down publicly meant going through my mother first. Margaret would cry, invoke my dead father, lecture me about duty and legacy.
The truth was I’d been trained since birth to put family first, always, no exceptions.
For a long time before Andrea, I’d looked at my future and seen exactly what my mother wanted.
Not because I wanted Lorraine, but because I didn’t want anyone.
Relationships were a distraction. A strategic partnership with a strong Alpha family made sense on paper, and paper was how I’d been trained to make decisions.
Then Andrea walked into that interview room and my wolf recognized her and everything I thought I knew went to shit in three seconds.
“I’ll handle it,” I said.
It sounded hollow. Luca’s face said everything.
That night I shifted and went to Andrea’s.
She wasn’t in her usual spot, was instead on the top step with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them, making herself small. Red-rimmed eyes, puffy face, and when she saw me her expression crumpled for a second before she pulled it back together.
“Hey, Fin.” Her voice was thick.
She didn’t reach for me right away. I pushed my head against her arm until she uncurled enough to let me in, pressed my body against her side. Her hand dropped onto my back and just held there, still, resting.
“I took Buddy back today.” She stared straight ahead at the dark yard.
“He was doing so much better. He let me hold him this morning, like really hold him, arms around his neck, and he didn’t shake at all.
Then I had to hand the leash to Mary and walk out and he just stood there watching me leave, Fin.
Stood there and watched me walk away and I sat in my car and cried for twenty minutes like an absolute disaster. ”
My jaw clenched. I hated this. Hated hearing the thickness in her voice and not being able to do a damn thing about it, hated being four-legged and silent when every part of me wanted to shift back and pull her in and tell her she wasn’t a disaster, she was the best person I’d ever met.
“My house is so quiet.” Her voice dropped. “I come home and there’s just nothing. No sound, no one. I call my grandma on Sundays because sometimes that’s the only day all week I hear a voice that isn’t work.”
My wolf pressed forward so hard my vision blurred for a second.
She was lonely. Genuinely, deeply lonely, and she was saying it to a dog because she had nobody else to say it to.
I wanted to howl, wanted to shift right here on this porch and grab her face and tell her she’d never be alone again if she’d let me, that I’d fill every quiet room and every Sunday and every goddamn second she felt like nobody was there.
She leaned her head against the railing post. “Finneas brushed my shoulder the other day. In the hallway, walking past me to the conference room. His hand touched my shoulder and I know it was an accident, I know that, but my whole arm went warm and I just stood there like a complete idiot for god knows how long. Someone from accounting had to ask me if I was okay.”
It wasn’t a goddamn accident. I’d spent ten minutes planning that brush.
Waiting until she was in the hallway, adjusting my stride so the back of my hand would graze her shoulder as I passed.
A Lycan King orchestrating a hallway collision like a teenager.
Pathetic. And then I replayed it for the rest of the day: her skin warm through fabric, that freeze mid-step, the catch in her breath barely audible to anyone but me.
I almost turned around right there. Almost said her name and let everything crack open in a hallway at two in the afternoon.
Kept walking instead. My hand burned for a fucking hour after.
She laughed, but it was tired. “I have a crush on my boss and I confess it on my porch to a stray dog. That’s where my life is at, Fin. Twenty-five years old, living alone, talking to you about a man who probably doesn’t think about me for a single second outside of work.”
Hell. Fucking hell.
I thought about her constantly. At council, in the shower, at 3 am when my wolf wouldn’t let me sleep.
Her margin notes in pink pen and the way she cocked her hip when she argued with me and how her laugh sounded through the glass and how she looked when she was concentrating, pen behind her ear, bottom lip between her teeth.
Every goddamn second of every goddamn day, and she was sitting here telling a dog that I probably didn’t spare her a thought.
She reached for her book but only half-heartedly. Read a few pages in a flat voice, none of the usual energy, and after one chapter she closed it and set it aside.
“I don’t want to read tonight. I just want to sit here.”
So we sat. The neighborhood was quiet around us, her hand on my back, neither of us moving. A car passed on the next street and somewhere in the distance a dog barked, a real one, and Andrea’s fingers twitched against my fur before going still.
What she’d said was sitting in my chest like a fist. Twenty-five and alone and confessing her feelings to a stray on a porch.
What she didn’t know was that I had a pack of hundreds and a company with thousands of employees and I had never felt less alone than right here.
Every room I walked into was full of people who bowed or deferred or calculated.
Nobody in my entire goddamn life talked to me the way she did.
Argued with me, made me laugh, made me want to be something better just by being in the same room.
I could fix this. All of it. Tell her the truth, shift back right here on this porch, show her who Fin really was, explain the bond and the mate pull and every lie I’d been living for two years. End her loneliness tonight.
But that would also terrify her, break every rule my kind had about revealing ourselves to humans, and destroy the trust she had in the one version of me she actually felt safe with.
So I didn’t. I stayed still and I kept my mouth shut and I let her sit in the quiet with her hand on my fur and I hated myself for every second of it.
After a long time her breathing changed, slower, deeper, and her head tipped sideways against the railing post.
She wasn’t alone. Not really. She had me, even if she didn’t know it yet, and that was the part killing me slowly every single night.
My wolf was harder to control with every visit, the distance between what I wanted and what I allowed myself shrinking each time she said my name on this porch.
The pressure had been building for months and I could feel it constant in my chest, an ache that didn’t ease when I shifted back, that followed me into work and council and every minute in between.
I stayed until she woke, stiff and blinking. Stayed while she went inside with one last pat on my head and a mumbled goodnight. Then an hour after the lights went off, just sitting on her damn porch in the dark like a man who’d lost every shred of self-preservation he ever had.
I was going to break. Soon. And I wasn’t sure anymore that I wanted to stop it.