Chapter 21 Finneas
— · —
Finneas
I sent peonies to her desk every morning for a week.
No card. I didn’t know what to write that would be enough, so I just sent the flowers and watched through the glass as she arrived each morning, saw them, touched the petals.
She didn’t look at me. Not once. She was professional, distant, did her job flawlessly, gave me absolutely nothing.
It was killing me in a way the bond strain never had because this silence was my fault.
I stopped responding to Lorraine entirely. Texts, calls, emails, all of it, dead air. When she emailed about a pack social event I didn’t respond. When she called the office line I let it ring. Three days of that before she cornered me.
The quarterly social at the pack hall. Families mingling, elders drinking too much, Luca keeping an eye on the younger wolves who always got restless at these things.
I was talking to one of the beta liaisons about a housing issue near the southern district when Lorraine appeared at my elbow.
Red hair pulled back, sharp smile, her hand landing on my arm like it belonged there.
“Can we talk?”
“Not right now, Lorraine.”
“You haven’t returned any of my messages.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been ignoring me.”
She steered me toward a quieter corner of the hall, her hand still on my arm, and I let her because I didn’t want a scene in front of fifty pack members. She turned to face me and the smile was gone.
“What is wrong with you? You’ve been avoiding me for days. You won’t answer my calls, you won’t respond to my emails, you didn’t show up to dinner at your mother’s last weekend.”
“There was no dinner at my mother’s.”
“There was. She invited me and the family. She said you were busy.” Her eyes were hard. “Were you busy, Finneas? Or were you somewhere else?”
I looked at her and I saw two people at the same time.
The woman standing in front of me now, entitled and sharp, claiming a relationship I never offered.
And behind her, the girl who was at every family dinner, every holiday, every birthday.
The girl who brought my mother flowers every week for a year after my father died.
Who sat next to me at Paul’s funeral and didn’t say a word because she understood that sometimes being present was enough.
I grew up with her. She was part of the furniture of my childhood, woven into every memory I had before the age of eighteen. Telling her to back off felt less like setting a boundary and more like ripping out a section of the foundation.
But Andrea’s face kept coming back. Sitting at that desk. Watching me walk past with her on my arm. The hurt was louder than any childhood memory.
“Lorraine, we’re colleagues. We’ve always been colleagues. Whatever you think this is between us, it isn’t. It never was.”
Her face cracked. The hardness split open and there was real hurt underneath, raw and quick, before she covered it.
“We grew up together. Our families have been planning this since we were children.”
“Our mothers have been planning this. I never agreed to any of it.”
“You never said no either.”
That landed. Because she was right. I never did. Dodged, deflected, avoided for years. Let her and Margaret and Regina build a fantasy on my silence because saying no meant a fight I didn’t want. That was on me.
“I’m saying no now.” I held her eyes. “I don’t see you that way, Lorraine. I never have. And I need you to stop telling the pack we’re together, because we’re not.”
Her jaw tightened. Her eyes went bright and for a second I thought she was going to cry, which would be worse than anger because I’d never figured out how to handle her tears without caving. But she didn’t cry. She straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin. The mask clicked back into place.
“You’ll change your mind,” she said, and walked away.
I watched her go and I didn’t feel relieved. I felt like I’d cut off something that had been part of me since childhood, even if it was a part that never fit right.
The call came the next evening. I was in the study at the estate when my phone lit up.
I knew before I looked at the screen that it was Margaret.
Lorraine had gone straight to her mother, Regina Ashtor, who had been best friends with Margaret since before either of us were born.
Regina went straight to Margaret. The gossip chain in their families had always been faster than any communication system I’d ever built.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Finneas.” Clipped. Past the gentle patience from last week, back to default. “Lorraine called me in tears.”
“I spoke to her at the gathering. I told her the truth.”
“The truth? You humiliated her, Finneas. In front of the pack.”
“I pulled her aside for a private conversation. Nobody heard it.”
“She heard it. Her mother heard about it ten minutes later. I heard about it ten minutes after that. You told that girl, who has been like family to us for thirty years, that you don’t see her as a woman?”
“Yes I did. Because I don’t. I never have.”
“Finneas...”
“Mother, I need you to hear this. I have never seen Lorraine as a woman. She was like a little sister to me, and recently not even that. Whatever you and Regina planned, whatever you imagined for us, it’s not happening. It was never going to happen.”
Silence. Long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call was still connected. Then her voice came back trembling.
“Your father wanted this.” Her voice broke.
“He and Conrad planned it together. They talked about it, Finneas, about joining the families, about what it would mean for the pack. And then your father was taken from me and I’ve been holding onto his vision for eight years because it was the last thing we talked about before he died. ”
My jaw ached. She was crying on the other end of the phone and every sob reached inside me and pulled.
My father’s name in her mouth did things to me that nothing else could, because I couldn’t argue with a dead man’s wishes.
I couldn’t stand across from his ghost and say you’re wrong.
All I could do was sit here gripping the phone while my mother weaponized the worst night of both our lives.
And it was working. Even knowing what she was doing, it was working, because the guilt didn’t care about logic. The guilt just sat on my chest and pressed.
“I’m sorry about Dad.” My voice was rougher than I wanted it to be. “I miss him too. Every damn day. But this isn’t what he would have wanted. He would have wanted me to be happy, and she doesn’t make me happy.”
“How do you know? You’ve never given her a real chance.”
“I know because I know. This is my decision, Mother. Not yours, not Dad’s, not Regina’s. Mine.”
She was crying now, softly, and every sob pulled at me, tugged at the foundation I’d spent weeks building.
Because no matter how many times she did this, I could never fully separate what was real from what was calculated.
She lost her husband. She was lonely. She loved me.
All of that was true. And she was using all of it to get what she wanted.
“I love you,” I said. “But this conversation is over.”
I hung up. My hand was shaking when I put the phone down.
Luca was in the doorway. Leaning against the frame. He’d heard the whole thing.
“Damn,” he said quietly. “Never heard you hang up on her before.”
“First time.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like shit.”
“Yeah.” He pushed off the frame, walked in, dropped into the chair across from the desk. “But you did the right thing. She’ll survive. They’ll both survive. Andrea deserves someone willing to say no to his mother for her.”
I rubbed my hands over my face. He was right. I also knew my mother was sitting in her house crying, she was sitting in hers furious, and the two of them were going to come at me from a different angle because that’s what they did. I held the line tonight. But the war wasn’t over.
I went to her desk the next day. She was professional, distant, peonies from that morning pushed to the side to make room for her laptop. She didn’t look up when I stopped in front of her.
“Can we talk? After hours. My office.”
She kept typing for a few seconds, which felt deliberate. Then she looked at me, her face giving me nothing, not anger, not warmth, just flat professional blankness that was worse than either.
“Fine,” she said, and went back to typing.
I stood there for a second longer than I should have, then went back to my office and spent the rest of the day watching the clock.
After hours. The floor emptied out, the lights dimming to the low after-hours setting. She walked into my office and closed the door behind her. Sat in the chair across from me, arms folded, spine straight. Not making this easy. I didn’t expect her to.
“I told Lorraine it’s over,” I said. “At the pack gathering, face to face. I told her I never saw her as anything more than a colleague and I told her to stop telling people we’re together.”
“And?”
“And I told my mother the same thing. She called, she cried, she brought up my father. I didn’t give in. I hung up on her.”
Andrea’s arms uncrossed slightly. “You hung up on your mother?”
“First time in my life.”
She was quiet, studying me, measuring what I was saying against what I’d done. I could see the scale tipping but it hadn’t balanced yet.
“This is your last chance,” she said. “I need you to hear that. Not a warning, not a threat. A fact. You do this again and I’m gone.”
“I hear you.”
She looked at me for a while, weighing, deciding. Then she asked something I didn’t expect.
“Why her? Out of everyone, why did your mother pick Lorraine? And why did you let it go on so long?”
Quieter than the ultimatum. More personal. She wasn’t just holding me accountable. She was trying to understand.