Chapter 40 Finneas
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Finneas
Luca called at six in the morning. I was already awake, lying in bed with Andrea’s back against my chest, her breathing slow, my hand on the belly where Alex had finally stopped kicking an hour ago.
“What?” I whispered, sliding out of bed carefully.
“Conrad Ashtor called a meeting last night.”
I walked into the hallway and closed the bedroom door behind me. “Talk.”
“Twelve families. Former allies of your father’s. He held it at his home, private, invitation only. My contact inside said he framed it as a discussion about the pack’s future. Leadership, tradition, whether the current King is making decisions that serve the pack or just himself.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“It gets worse. George has been at the pack hall every day this week. Talking to junior Alphas, the young ones whose families lost standing when you called off the engagement. He’s telling them the pack needs a King who respects tradition.”
“And Lorraine?”
“Coordinating from outside. She’s the one who organized the guest list for Conrad’s meeting. Three fronts, Finn. Father, son, daughter.”
I leaned against the hallway wall and closed my eyes.
Conrad Ashtor. My father’s right hand for twenty years.
The man who sat at the council table before I was born, who had more connections in the pack than anyone outside the crown.
He’d been quiet since the engagement was called off, which I’d taken as acceptance.
Stupid of me. Conrad didn’t accept things. Conrad repositioned.
“How long before George has enough for a formal challenge?”
“Weeks. Maybe less if Conrad keeps pulling families.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“I want eyes on all three. Every meeting Conrad holds, every Alpha George talks to, every damn route Lorraine takes around the perimeter.”
“Already on it.” A pause. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to talk to the elders. Not at the council table. At their houses, on their ground. If Conrad is working them from one side, I need to work them from the other before this thing has legs.”
“Finn. One more thing. If this goes to a challenge, it’s George who steps up. He’s young but he’s been training hard. Don’t underestimate him.”
“I won’t.”
“And Andrea and the baby. If it comes to it.”
My chest tightened. The thought of them in danger made my wolf push against my ribs so hard I had to breathe through it. “If it comes to a challenge, they’re your first priority. Not me. Them.”
“Understood.”
I hung up. Stood in the hallway outside my bedroom door, listening to Andrea shift in her sleep, and felt the fury settle into my bones like concrete.
Fuck Conrad and his private meetings. Fuck George and his recruiting trips. Fuck Lorraine and her refusal to accept that I was never hers. Eight goddamn years I’d given this pack and now a family that coasted on my father’s name was trying to take it because I fell in love with a human.
I got dressed and drove to Brennan’s house. No security, no Luca. Just me, showing up at the most senior elder’s door before eight in the morning.
He opened it and stared at me for a full five seconds before stepping aside.
“You’re at my house,” he said.
“I need to talk to you. Not at the council table. Here.”
“You could have summoned me.”
“I’m not summoning. I’m asking.”
He poured me coffee in a mug with a chipped rim. We sat at his kitchen table, a scarred oak thing older than I was.
“There’s a challenge coming,” I said. “The Ashtors are organizing. I need to know where this council stands when it happens. Not the polite answer. The real one.”
Brennan drank his coffee. “You’re worried.”
“I’m prepared. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
I held his gaze. “The fated bond is the foundation our laws are built on. If the Ashtors use tradition as a weapon against a fated pairing, they’re attacking the very thing they claim to defend. I need to know you see that.”
He was quiet. Thinking. Brennan had served three Kings. He understood that tradition wasn’t a wall. It was a river, and rivers changed course.
“Your father would have handled this differently,” he said.
“My father never had a fated mate.”
“No. He didn’t. That matters more than most people realize.” He set his mug down. “You have my support. Not because you asked. Because the bond is real and I’m not fool enough to stand against it.”
I left with his word.
The second elder was harder. Traditional, skeptical, been on the council longer than anyone except Brennan. She asked pointed questions about pack security, whether a human Luna could participate in the bonding rituals, what happened when the pack needed a Luna who could shift.
“She can’t shift,” I said. “She can’t fight in wolf form. But she walked into a council chamber full of Alphas and didn’t flinch. Andrea doesn’t need to shift to be strong.”
She studied me over her tea. “You’re in love with her.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not always enough.”
“No. But the fated bond is. And so is she.”
She told me she’d think about it, which meant she was leaning yes but wanted me to sweat.
Aldric was the easiest. I barely got through my opening before he held up his hand.
“I’ve met her. I spent twenty minutes talking to her after the last council session and she asked more questions about pack governance than most Alphas bother with.” He paused. “She has my support.”
Two yes-es and one maybe. I’d take those odds.
I thought about Andrea. The way she looked this morning in the nursery doorway, wearing my shirt, belly round, laughing at me for briefing our son on pack politics.
She knew about Lorraine at the perimeter because I’d shown her Luca’s text.
She knew Margaret broke in. She’d handled both with more spine than half my council.
But Conrad rallying twelve families behind closed doors, George recruiting Alphas like he was building an army, a formal challenge taking shape while she painted a nursery?
She didn’t know that. And I wasn’t putting it on her.
She was thirty weeks pregnant, happy for the first time in months, and I’d be damned if I shattered that again.
I’d handle this. I’d handled my father’s death at twenty-four with half the council questioning my authority. I could handle three Ashtors with a grudge.
I went back to my mansion and immediately went to find her.
Andrea was in the nursery with a paint roller, a color chart taped to the wall, and a smudge of yellow across her nose. She looked ridiculous and beautiful and the sight of her in that room, our son’s room, hit me the way it always did, right in the center of my chest.
“You’re late,” she said. “I started without you.”
“I can see that. You have paint on your face.”
“It’s a look. Don’t change the subject. Grab a roller.”
I took the roller from her because she shouldn’t be reaching above her head at thirty weeks and she protested immediately.
“I can paint a wall, Finneas.”
“I know you can. You’re also growing a human being. Let me do the high parts.”
“I’m pregnant, not incapacitated.”
“Sit in the chair. Direct me. You’re better at telling me what to do anyway.”
She narrowed her eyes but sat. And then she directed with the intensity of a field general.
“More on the left. No, my left. You’re leaving streaks. Slower. Slower than that.”
“If I go any slower I’m going backward.”
“Then go backward. I want even coverage.”
I painted. Got paint on my forearm, my shirt, my jaw somehow.
She photographed each one with her phone, grinning behind the screen, and I gave her a look that was supposed to be stern but probably wasn’t because she was sitting in a chair in my oversized t-shirt with her belly round under the fabric and yellow paint on her nose and she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
The messy hair, the bare feet tucked under her, the way she held the phone with both hands like documenting my paint disaster was the highlight of her week.
My wolf was so content it was practically purring.
I wanted to cross the room and kiss the paint off her nose and then keep going, but she was directing me with the authority of a woman who would not tolerate interruptions to her nursery vision.
She caught me staring. “You’re dripping.”
I looked down. Paint on the floor. “Your fault.”
“How is that my fault?”
“You’re distracting.”
“I’m sitting in a chair.”
“Distractingly.”
She gave me the dimple. I went back to painting before I did something that got paint on both of us.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn’t check it. It buzzed again five minutes later. I kept painting. A third time and Andrea looked at me.
“You can check it.”
“It can wait.”
It could wait. The nursery was yellow, the color she picked because she refused blue or pink.
The crib was assembled in the corner. The wolf stuffed animal from Luca sat on the dresser.
My phone was full of messages about Conrad’s alliances and George’s recruiting, but I was not going to let the outside into this room.
Not now. This room was for my son, for Andrea, for the life I was building on the other side of whatever war was coming.
That night, in bed, her belly pressed against my stomach, her face close to mine in the dark.
Her hair was still damp from the shower, smelling like the coconut shampoo she’d switched to because the vanilla one made her nauseous now.
Her green eyes were open, watching me in the low light, and I traced the line of her jaw with my thumb because I could do that now, because she let me, and every time she let me it felt like a gift I hadn’t finished earning.
“You know I’m going to forgive you soon, right?”
My breath caught. “Yeah?”
“Not yet. But soon. I can feel it coming and I wanted to warn you so you don’t do something stupid and ruin it.”
“I’ll try not to.”
“That would be a first.”
I put my forehead against hers. She closed her eyes. The baby kicked against my stomach through the space between us, strong, insistent, like he was seconding whatever his mother just said.
“I’ll be here,” I said.
“I know.”
She fell asleep with her forehead against mine, her breath evening out, her hand loosening where it had been gripping my shirt.
I watched her face relax, the tension leaving her jaw, her lashes dark against her cheeks.
I looked at her and I saw my whole world.
She was carrying my son, she was about to forgive me, and I was lying in the dark with a storm building outside these walls wondering if I’d get the chance to receive it.
The phone on the nightstand had six unread messages from Luca. Conrad held another meeting today, larger than the last. George talked to four more junior Alphas. And Lorraine had been spotted at the south perimeter for the first time, a new position, closer than any of her previous routes.
Andrea breathed slow and even against me. The nursery down the hall was painted yellow. The baby was quiet. The forgiveness was coming.
And outside the walls, the Ashtor family was closing in.