Chapter 19 - Finneas
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Finneas
The council chamber was at the estate, and there were five senior Alphas seated around it. I took the head and Aldric was already pushing before his ass hit the chair.
“The Dolan family says the boundary was set three generations back.” He slid a folder across the table. “The Webber family has documentation.”
“What kind of documentation?”
“A hand-drawn map from 1952.”
“Drawn by whom?”
“A Webber.”
“So the Webbers have a map drawn by a Webber that says the land belongs to the Webbers.” I pushed the folder back.
“Bring both families in. I’ll walk the boundary myself and make the call based on actual land markers, not a map someone’s great-uncle drew after a few drinks.
” I looked around the table. “What’s next? ”
A young wolf had shifted in a public park. Ended up on a homeowner’s security camera. I ordered the footage acquired and destroyed and the wolf brought in for a formal reprimand. “If he shifts in public again, the consequence doubles. Make sure he understands that.”
We moved through the rest: a supply chain dispute between two of the southern district families, a request from the healer’s compound for expanded territory, a noise complaint from the construction near the river that I’d already addressed once and was getting tired of addressing again.
I made decisions fast and clean because that was the job.
Listen, weigh, decide, move. My father used to drag these sessions out for hours, turning every agenda item into a philosophical debate about legacy and tradition.
I wasn’t my father. The pack needed answers, not lectures.
The session wrapped in under an hour. Aldric’s permanent scowl softened half a degree, which from him was practically a standing ovation.
The other Alphas filed out talking among themselves, the energy in the room lighter than it had been in months.
I’d been running these sessions since I was twenty-four, sitting in a chair my father’s ass had worn smooth, making decisions for hundreds of wolves who depended on me to get it right.
Some nights the weight of it crushed me. Tonight it fit.
Luca caught me in the corridor after, falling into step beside me with his hands in his pockets.
“Good session,” he said.
“You sound surprised.”
“Last month you missed two briefings. So yeah, the bar was on the floor.” He glanced sideways. “She’s good for you, Finn.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m stating a fact. You’re sharper. You’re sleeping. You made Aldric almost smile, which I didn’t think was anatomically possible.” He paused. “Hell, you even handled the Webber thing without losing your temper. Last time a boundary dispute came up you threw a pen at the wall.”
“It was a pencil.”
“It embedded in the drywall, Finn. That’s not a pencil throw. That’s a statement.”
We pushed through the doors into the night air. The grounds were dark, the treeline black against a sky full of stars. I breathed it in, pine and cold earth, and the tension I’d been carrying in my shoulders all week loosened for the first time.
Then Luca’s tone shifted, dropping the lightness like a coat he didn’t need anymore.
“Lorraine’s been quiet. Two weeks, no pack hall visits, no calls, no scenes. And your mother hasn’t contacted the pack liaison in over a week, which has never happened.”
I stopped walking. “Both of them? At the same time?”
“Both of them. At the same time.”
“Maybe they got tired.”
“Lorraine’s hobby is you, Finn. She doesn’t get tired.
She regroups.” He faced me, hands still in his pockets but his posture had changed, shoulders squared, chin up.
The laid-back mask was gone. “I’m telling you, this is coordinated.
They’re planning. You need to get ahead of this before it gets ahead of you. ”
“I’ll handle it.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“You said soon three weeks ago. Soon is starting to feel a lot like never.”
“I said I’ll handle it, Luca.”
“And I believe you. But you’ve got a blind spot the size of this estate when it comes to your mother, and Lorraine knows how to exploit it. They both do.”
He held my gaze for a beat, and his face said everything his mouth didn’t. I turned and kept walking and felt his eyes on my back the whole way to the car.
At the estate, in my office, my phone lit up with Margaret’s name. I’d been ducking her calls for weeks, texting back one-word answers, and I knew I couldn’t avoid her forever. My mood was good tonight, the wolf calm and quiet inside me. I figured I could handle a conversation.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Finneas! I wasn’t sure you’d pick up.” Her voice was warm, pleased, and my shoulders loosened a little because she sounded like the version of her I missed. The one from before my father died, before she became the woman who cried at every conversation.
“I’m here. What’s going on?”
“Does a mother need a reason to call her son?”
“No. But you usually have one.”
She let that pass with a light laugh. “I was thinking about your father today. About how proud he’d be of you. The company, the pack, everything you’ve built.”
My chest tightened. She always started with my father. “Thank you, Mother.”
“He always said leadership was about making wise choices. Not just the business decisions. The personal ones too. Who you trust. Who you surround yourself with.” She paused. “Who you build a future with.”
“Mother.”
“I’m not pushing, sweetheart.”
“You’re always pushing.”
“I’m thinking out loud. You’re thirty-two. You have the pack, the company, a legacy your father started. I just want to know you’re building with the right people.”
“I am.”
“Are you? Because I hear things, Finneas. I hear you’ve been distracted. Missing briefings. Spending time away from the pack.”
“I’m handling the pack fine. The council session tonight went well. Ask Aldric.”
“I’m not talking about the council. I’m talking about you. About your future. About who’s going to stand beside you when things get hard.”
I was gripping the phone tighter than I needed to. She hadn’t said Lorraine’s name once but I could feel it in every sentence, the shape of it pressing against the walls of the conversation.
“I know who I want beside me,” I said. “And it’s my choice to make.”
Silence. Then her voice shifted. Softer. Wetter.
“Your father chose wisely. He chose me. And we built everything together, Finneas. Everything. And then he was taken from me and I was alone. I’ve been alone ever since.”
My jaw clenched. My father. Always my father.
The memory of him was the one thing I couldn’t argue with, couldn’t push back against, because he was dead and she was still here and I’d watched her fall apart after the funeral.
Held her while she cried for weeks. Took the crown at twenty-four, swore I’d take care of her, the pack, everything.
Eight years of that promise sitting on my chest like a stone.
“I miss him every day,” she continued, voice trembling, and the sound of it went through me like a blade because I missed him too. Every damn day. “And all I want is to see my son settled. Happy. With someone who understands our world. Is that so terrible?”
“No, Mother.” My voice came out hoarse. “It’s not terrible.”
“Then why won’t you let me help?”
“Because I don’t need help choosing who to be with.”
“Finneas...”
“I love you, Mother. But this isn’t your decision.”
A long pause. I could hear her breathing on the other end, the slight hitch that meant tears, and my chest was so tight I couldn’t breathe properly.
Every part of me wanted to give in. To say the thing that would make the crying stop, that would make her sound warm again, that would make me feel like a good son instead of the man who kept disappointing his widowed mother.
I pressed my hand against my eyes and held my ground because Andrea’s face was in my head and her voice was louder than the guilt, barely, but louder.
“I trust you, sweetheart,” Margaret said finally, and the gentleness in it stopped me cold. No tears. No trembling. Just calm, quiet trust, from a woman who had never once in my life given trust without conditions.
“Thank you.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too, Mother.”
I hung up and put the phone down and stared at it. She’d backed off. She invoked my father, invoked her loneliness, pushed every button she knew I had, and when I didn’t break, she just... stopped. Said she trusted me. Smiled in her voice and hung up.
That wasn’t how these calls ended. These calls ended with her crying until I agreed to something. These calls ended with me feeling like shit for weeks. They didn’t end with warmth and trust and a gentle goodbye.
I texted Luca: My mother just called. She was nice to me and said she trusted me.
He responded in ten seconds: That’s the most alarming thing you’ve ever texted me. Did she bring up Lorraine?
I stared at the message. No. Not once.
Luca: Even worse. Get ahead of this, Finn. I’m serious.
I should. I should call her back, push until she told me what was actually going on. Should ask Luca to dig into what Lorraine had been doing for two weeks. Should do anything other than what I did next, which was grab my damn keys and drive to Andrea’s place.
Her place was warm and smelled like garlic and something burning when I let myself in with the key she’d tossed me across the kitchen last week. “Don’t make it weird,” she’d said, and I’d pocketed it without a word because it was the least weird thing that had happened to me in months.
She was at the stove, phone pinned between her ear and shoulder, stirring a pot and talking to Mary. Buddy was lying in the kitchen doorway, chin on his paws, watching her with the devoted patience of a dog who knows food is being prepared. She’d been fostering him again this week.
“No, I can keep him another week. It’s fine. He only tried to eat my shoe once today, which is progress.”
She turned, saw me, and her face changed. The smile spreading, wide and real, the dimple showing. She held up one finger. “Mary, I gotta go. Yeah. Bye.”
She hung up and I was already crossing the kitchen, my hands on her waist, my mouth on hers before she could set the spoon down. She made a muffled sound against my lips and kissed me back, tasting like tomato sauce, and then pulled away.
“I’m at a critical pasta juncture. You can’t just walk in and start this.”
“You had flour on your face.”
“So you kissed me? That’s your solution for flour?”
“Best solution I could think of.”
She shoved me away with the spoon and went back to scraping the bottom of the pot, which was definitely burned.
I leaned against the counter and watched her.
Buddy pressed against my leg from where he’d been lying in the doorway, his tail thumping once on the floor.
I dropped my hand to his head, scratching behind his ears.
The dog leaned into it, trusting in a way he hadn’t been capable of a month ago.
He’d filled out since the first time I saw him at Andrea’s place, ribs no longer visible, coat getting thicker.
He still flinched at sudden movements when Andrea wasn’t in the room, but here, in her kitchen, with her voice and her warmth filling the space, he was calm.
She did that to things. Dogs, cats, wolves, kings.
Made them feel safe without trying, without even knowing she was doing it.
She was muttering about the sauce being “fine, it’s rustic, rustic is a style” and my wolf was so settled it was practically asleep.
We ate on the couch. She was telling me about a new intake at the shelter, a three-legged cat she was already in love with, using her fork to gesture, sauce on her lip that she didn’t know about and I didn’t tell her about because watching her talk with tomato sauce on her face was one of the best parts of my day.
“He has opinions, Finneas. Strong opinions. He hissed at Mary and then immediately fell asleep on Peter’s lap. That’s a power move. That cat knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“You want to bring him home.”
“I want to bring all of them home. I always want to bring all of them home. That’s my problem.”
“It’s not a problem.”
“It is when you work sixteen-hour days and the house is empty most of the time. It’s not fair to them.”
Buddy lifted his head at his name, then put it back down when no food materialized.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it. It buzzed again.
“You can check it,” she said.
I pulled it out. A text from a number I didn’t have saved but recognized immediately. Lorraine.
We need to talk. It’s about your mother.
I read it. My face didn’t change. I put the phone back in my pocket.
Lorraine texting about Margaret. After two weeks of nothing. The two of them connecting in the silence, building something while I sat here eating pasta and pretending everything was fine. Shit.
“Everything okay?” Andrea asked. She was watching me, fork paused.
“Yeah. Just pack stuff.”
“You went tense.”
“I’m fine.”
She looked at me for a beat. I could see her weighing whether to push, could see the question forming behind her green eyes, the same careful calculation she’d been doing for weeks when my jaw tightened or my phone buzzed at the wrong time.
She didn’t push. She went back to the cat story.
I listened, my hand finding her knee, and she leaned into me.
The text sat in my pocket like a coal. My gut was screaming at me to deal with this tonight, right now, before whatever they were building finished taking shape. Luca’s voice in my head: Get ahead of this, Finn.
I stayed on the couch. I ate burned pasta, listened to Andrea describe a three-legged cat’s personality, kept my hand on her knee.
Didn’t check my phone again. Because she was here, warm against my side, telling me about a damn cat with opinions, and I wasn’t ready to let the outside world back in yet. I wasn’t ready to let it touch this.
She fell asleep against my shoulder an hour later, the TV on low, Buddy snoring at our feet.
I sat there in the blue glow of the screen with her weight warm against my side, the phone burning in my pocket.
I knew I was going to regret not answering that text tonight.
Knew it in my bones, the way you know a storm is coming before the sky changes.
I stayed anyway.