Chapter 36 Finneas
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Finneas
I asked Andrea to come to the council meeting over breakfast. She was eating toast with one hand, scrolling through her phone with the other, Buddy lying across her feet under the table.
“I have a council session this afternoon,” I said. “I’d like you to be there.”
She looked up from her phone. “At a council meeting. With the pack elders.”
“Yes.”
“The same elders who have never met a human in an official capacity.”
“That would be them.”
She set the toast down. “What exactly would I be doing there?”
“Standing beside me while I introduce you as my fated mate and the mother of my child.”
“Casual.”
“It needs to happen. The council needs to know about you, about us, about the baby. They’ve been hearing rumors for weeks and I’d rather they hear the truth from me than the version Lorraine’s been spinning.”
She chewed her lip. I could see her turning it over, the nerves fighting with the part of her that never backed down from a room full of people who didn’t think she belonged.
“Will they be hostile?” she asked.
“Some of them will have concerns. Brennan will ask hard questions because that’s what Brennan does. Aldric will be neutral until he decides how he feels. The younger two will follow the room.”
“So I’m walking into a room of wolves who might not want me there and I need to convince them I belong.”
“You’ve been doing that your whole life, Andrea.”
She knew I was right, and she seemed to be contemplating the pros and cons. Then she picked her toast back up. “Fine. But if anyone growls at me, I’m leaving.”
“Nobody is going to growl at you.”
“You say that, but I’ve seen your meetings. You growl at people professionally.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
I didn’t answer because she wasn’t wrong.
The council chamber was the oldest room in the estate, stone walls and an oak table my father’s father had commissioned, iron sconces someone fitted with electric bulbs decades ago that still looked medieval.
I’d grown up in this room, first watching my father preside from behind a servant’s chair, then sitting at the table myself at twenty-four with the crown barely settled on my head.
Five senior Alphas were already seated when we walked in, their attention shifting to Andrea the second she crossed the threshold.
She was in a blue dress that hid most of the bump, hands clasped in her lap.
I could see her thumb pressing hard against her opposite palm, the tell she didn’t know she had.
Nervous, but she didn’t look it. Her spine was straight, her chin level, her green eyes moving around the table like she was cataloging every face and filing it for later.
I introduced her without preamble. “Andrea Grey. My fated mate and the mother of my child.”
Every Alpha at the table turned to her. Five pairs of eyes, five wolves assessing a human who was sitting in a room where no human had ever sat. She was visibly pregnant, completely unprotected, surrounded by shifters who could snap her in half, and she met each of their gazes without flinching.
“Welcome, Ms. Grey,” Aldric said. Carefully neutral.
“Thank you for having me.” Her voice didn’t waver. “I know this is unusual. A human in the council chamber.”
“Unprecedented,” Brennan said. He’d served my father longer than any of them, gray-bearded, patient, an elder who said little and meant all of it.
“Then I’ll try not to set a bad precedent.”
A beat of silence. Brennan’s mouth twitched. Beside me, my wolf was practically preening.
The questions started. Polite but pointed, designed to sound like conversation while probing for weakness.
“How familiar are you with pack hierarchy, Ms. Grey?” one of the younger elders asked.
“I know the basics. Alphas, Betas, Omegas. I know the King leads and the council advises. Beyond that, I’m still learning.
” She didn’t flinch at the admission. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you I understand your world because I don’t.
Not yet. But I’m willing to learn, and I’m not going anywhere. ”
Aldric glanced at me. I kept my face neutral.
Brennan leaned forward. “And the arrangement with the Ashtor family? We’ve heard the engagement was called off.”
“It was,” I said. “The engagement to Lorraine Ashtor is over. It should never have happened in the first place.”
“May I ask why?”
“Because I was never in a relationship with Lorraine. The engagement was a result of pressure from both families that I should have shut down years ago. I’m shutting it down now.”
“And Ms. Ashtor? What is her standing?”
“Lorraine remains a pack member. Her family retains their positions for now. But I want to be clear with this council: there will be no marriage to Lorraine Ashtor. Not now, not ever. Andrea is my mate. That’s not a discussion.”
The room absorbed that. Brennan nodded. Aldric made a note.
Then Brennan asked the other question I’d been expecting. “The child. Do we know if it will be human or shifter?”
“We don’t,” I said.
“And the question of succession, should the child be human...”
“Is not a question. My child is my heir. Human, shifter, Alpha, Beta, Omega. The crown doesn’t discriminate. If the council has a problem with that, the council can bring it to me directly.”
Brennan held my gaze. Five seconds, ten. Then he nodded, a single dip of his chin, the same nod he gave my father when a ruling was accepted.
The elders filed out after. Brennan lingered by the door, watching Andrea, who was still across the room.
She’d cornered Aldric and was asking him questions, leaning in, her whole body angled toward him like whatever he was saying mattered.
She shook his hand when the conversation ended.
Aldric looked mildly surprised by the handshake, which meant she’d treated the most senior Alpha in the pack like a colleague rather than a superior.
Either brave or oblivious, and either way it was the most Andrea thing she could have done.
“She has a spine,” Brennan said beside me.
“She does.”
“Good. You’ll need that.” Then he left.
Andrea crossed the chamber toward me, her hand on her belly, her face flushed with the effort of being composed for an hour. She looked exhausted but pleased, her hair coming loose from the clip she’d put in, the dimple threatening to show.
“Well?” she asked.
“Brennan said you have a spine.”
“Is that good?”
“From Brennan, that’s practically a love letter.”
“I shook Aldric’s hand. Was that okay? He looked surprised.”
“You treated him like a colleague. He’s not used to that.”
“Was I supposed to bow?”
“Some people do.”
“I don’t bow.”
“I know. That’s why Brennan likes you.”
She smiled, the real one, full dimple, and my chest ached the way it always did when she aimed that at me. I wanted to pull her close, press my mouth against her temple. I kept my hands at my sides.
That evening I went looking for her and found her in the reading nook, curled up on the window seat with a book open on her knee and Buddy sprawled on the floor beside her.
She was reading aloud, doing the accent, pausing to argue with the characters about their decisions.
Buddy’s tail thumped against the floor every time her voice rose.
I leaned against the doorframe and listened. Her voice had always done something to me, the warmth of it, the way she dropped into characters without any self-consciousness. If she knew the effect she had on me she’d probably use it as leverage, so it was better that she didn’t.
She looked up and caught me.
“Stalker.”
“Guilty.”
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to hear the accent.”
“The accent is part of the experience.” She shifted over on the window seat. “Sit down. Chapter seven. You’re reading the next one.”
I sat on the other end of the seat. She handed me the book, open to the right page.
“Out loud?”
“That’s how reading aloud works.”
I read. My voice was wrong for it, too deep, too flat, no talent for character voices. She corrected me twice in the first paragraph.
“The heroine doesn’t sound like a tax attorney. Put some feeling into it.”
“I’m putting feeling.”
“You’re putting monotone.”
I tried again. Buddy lifted his head and gave me a look that was unmistakably judgment.
“Even the dog thinks you’re bad at this,” Andrea said.
“The dog doesn’t have literary opinions.”
“That dog has better taste than half the men I’ve dated.”
“That’s a short list.”
“Quality over quantity.”
She laughed, leaned against my shoulder, said “keep going.” So I kept going, reading badly, her warmth against my arm, Buddy at our feet. Her hair smelled like vanilla and the weight of her against my side was the closest to peace I’d felt in months.
A few pages in she stopped correcting me. I looked down. Her eyes were closed, her breathing slow. She’d fallen asleep against me.
I kept reading, quieter now, barely a whisper, for the sleeping dog and the woman on my shoulder who was not my partner, not my mate, not anything she was willing to name yet.
I read until the chapter ended, then closed the book and sat there with her weight on my arm, not moving, not wanting to.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it free carefully, tilting my body just enough to reach without shifting my shoulder.
Lorraine. East side of the estate. Third time this week.
The warmth of the room receded behind the cold focus that clicked into place when someone threatened what was mine.
How close?
Close enough for the cameras. She’s not approaching. She’s circling. Different route each time.
Lorraine was still pack. Still had every right to walk the territory. But circling the King’s estate at night, varying her routes, that wasn’t a walk. That was reconnaissance.
She was with someone last time. Male. Couldn’t ID from the footage.
George?
Possibly.
George Ashtor. Lorraine’s older brother, not the younger sibling most people assumed because Lorraine’s personality took up so much oxygen that people forgot George existed.
He’d been living in the northern territories for years, running security for a smaller pack, which was a polite way of saying he’d been pushed out of civilized pack life because he couldn’t stop picking fights with anyone who looked at him wrong.
Bigger than Lorraine, meaner, with a protective streak toward his sister that bordered on obsessive.
He’d never liked me, made no secret of it, thought I was soft for running a company instead of leading from the field.
If Lorraine had called him home, it meant she’d stopped crying and started planning, and George was someone who turned plans into action without asking questions first.
Double the patrol on the east side. Pull footage from all three nights. I want her routes mapped.
On it. You want me to bring her in?
No. She hasn’t broken any rules. She’s pack. She’s allowed to walk the territory.
For now.
For now. But keep watching.
I put the phone down. Andrea was still asleep on my shoulder, her hand curled loosely against my chest, her face open in a way I only saw when she wasn’t guarding herself.
Beyond the estate walls, Lorraine was circling with George beside her.
Two Ashtors with a grudge and enough desperation between them to do something stupid.
My wolf stirred, ears up, watching the dark beyond the window. I looked at Andrea’s face, at the bump where my son was growing, at the book closed between us and the dog snoring at our feet. If anyone came for them, there would be no council ruling, no formal process, no second chance.
But not tonight. Tonight she was asleep against my shoulder, the reading nook smelled like paper and vanilla, and I wasn’t moving until she woke up.