Chapter 44
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Finneas
The challenge grounds were on the eastern edge of the estate, a natural clearing ringed by old growth oaks where pack disputes had been settled for longer than the Kingsley name existed.
My father fought his first challenge here when he was twenty-six.
His father before him. The ground was packed earth, worn smooth by generations of wolves.
It smelled like pine sap and adrenaline and history.
By the time I arrived the clearing was full. Hundreds of wolves, shifted and human, filling the treeline, the open ground, the rising slope at the north end. The tension was a physical thing, a hum in the air that pressed against my skin like static before a storm.
Luca was beside me, running through security one final time. “Patrol on north and south entrances. Six guards on the perimeter. I’ve got eyes on Conrad and Regina in the crowd, east side, near the staging area.”
“George?”
“Far side. Staging area. Conrad was with him ten minutes ago.”
“And Lorraine?”
“Haven’t spotted her. Could be anywhere in this crowd.”
I scanned the clearing. I found Andrea before I found anyone else.
She was near the front, standing with Luca’s second, her hand on her belly. Dark blue dress. Hair down, blonde waves against her shoulders. She looked small surrounded by wolves. She looked like she belonged there anyway.
I’d told her to stay inside. She told me to go to hell. That was the end of that conversation, and honestly, I hadn’t expected anything different.
She caught my eye across the clearing. No wave, no smile, nothing soft. Just her gaze, locked on mine, and I could read her from fifty feet the same way I’d read her from across the office for two years. I’m here. I’m not leaving. Go do what you have to do.
My chest ached looking at her. Thirty-four weeks pregnant, standing in front of hundreds of wolves, refusing to hide. Stubborn, gorgeous, mine.
George was on the opposite side with Conrad behind him.
Lorraine’s older brother, late twenties, broad-shouldered, sharp-jawed, built like his father but with twice the arrogance.
He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, restless energy rolling off him.
The dangerous part wasn’t his strength. It was the recklessness, the look in his eye that said he’d rather die than walk away empty-handed.
Conrad stood behind him with his hand on George’s shoulder.
Calm, composed, the face of a man who’d been playing pack politics since before I was born.
I watched him lean in and say something to George and I wondered if he actually believed his son could win or if he was gambling his kid’s life on a political bet he’d lose either way.
The crowd shifted. A murmur started at the treeline and rippled inward, heads turning, bodies stepping aside. I saw it before I saw her: the crowd opening and Margaret walking through the gap.
She was dressed in black. Full makeup, hair perfect, posture straight, carrying herself the way she used to at official functions when my father was alive. She looked like a Luna. She still believed she was one.
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. Security should have caught her at the perimeter. But hundreds of wolves had streamed in from every direction in the last hour and she’d walked in with the crowd. Timed it the way Lorraine timed everything: precisely, for maximum damage.
I started toward her. Luca grabbed my arm.
“Wait.”
“She’s not supposed to be here.”
“I know. But if you drag her out in front of the pack, she becomes a martyr. Let her talk. She’ll hang herself.”
I hated that he was right.
Margaret walked to the center of the clearing. The crowd went quiet. Hundreds of wolves watching a woman in black who used to be their Luna.
“My pack,” she said, and her voice carried the way it always had, pitched to reach the back row, every syllable placed exactly where she wanted it. “I am Margaret Kingsley. Wife of Paul. Mother of your King. I was your Luna for twenty years.”
She was good at this. She’d always been good at this. The grief in her voice measured to the drop, my father’s name landing exactly the way she intended. She talked about tradition, about legacy, about the pack my father built. She didn’t name Andrea. She didn’t need to.
“Your King’s father built this pack on strength,” she said. “He chose his allies wisely. He chose his Luna wisely. And now his son is being asked to fight for a choice that Paul would never have made.”
Murmurs. Agreement from some, uncertainty from others. I could feel the crowd tilting, her voice pulling at the wolves who remembered my father, who grew up under his rule.
Then she turned to George. Looked at him across the clearing with an expression I knew, the one she used to give me when I was a child and she wanted me to know she was proud. She’d never given it to anyone but me.
“George Ashtor is Paul’s godson. A true Alpha. A man raised in tradition, raised to serve this pack.” Her voice rang out across the clearing. “He has my full support. And if Paul were standing here today, he would have George’s back too.”
The words knocked the air out of me.
My own mother. Standing in front of my pack, backing the man challenging me for my crown. Telling hundreds of wolves that my dead father would have supported my opponent. Using the memory of the man who raised me as a weapon aimed directly at my chest.
I couldn’t move. My own mother just endorsed the man trying to take my crown.
In front of my pack. Using my dead father’s name to do it.
The hurt came fast, before the anger, filling my chest until I couldn’t breathe.
She was my mother. She was supposed to be on my side.
That was the one thing that was supposed to be simple.
My fists were clenched at my sides. I wanted to drag her off the grounds. I wanted to roar. But Luca’s hand was on my arm and he was right, if I reacted I gave her power.
And underneath the rage was something worse.
Grief. Not for the mother she was. For the mother she could have been.
Because there were moments, rare ones, scattered across a childhood spent mostly with tutors and servants.
Her hand straightening my collar before a pack function when I was six, her perfume close, her voice saying stand tall, you’re a Kingsley.
A birthday card she signed herself instead of having the staff do it.
The one time she came to my room after a nightmare, sat on the edge of the bed, didn’t say anything, just sat there until I fell back asleep.
Small things. Scraps I’d held onto because they were all I had of her.
She wasn’t always this. Or maybe she was, and I just didn’t want to see it.
Watching her stand in this clearing backing another man’s son over her own, I wasn’t sure anymore which version of her was real.
Then Andrea moved.
She stepped forward. Away from Luca’s second, away from the safety of the crowd’s edge, into the open ground of the clearing.
My heart stopped.
She was walking toward the center. With her hand on her belly, walking into the space between two hundred wolves with no protection, no weapon, no fangs or claws. Just herself.
My wolf surged forward so hard my vision blurred. Luca’s hand tightened on my arm. “Let her,” he said quietly.
I wanted to go to her. My wolf was screaming at me to get between her and Margaret, to carry her out of the clearing the way I’d carried her to the hospital.
But Andrea wasn’t walking toward danger.
She was walking toward something she’d chosen.
I could see it in her spine, in the set of her jaw, in the way her hand rested on her belly.
She stopped a few feet from Margaret. Two women in the center of a wolf clearing, one in black who used to be Luna and one in blue who was becoming one. Margaret’s face tightened. Andrea’s was calm.
“You talk about tradition,” Andrea said, her voice clear across the clearing. “About Paul. About what he would have wanted.” She looked at Margaret. “Should we tell the pack what you did to honor his memory?”
Margaret’s composure cracked. Just a flash, a flicker of panic behind the mask, gone so fast most wolves wouldn’t have caught it. I caught it.
“You faked a terminal illness,” Andrea said.
“You told your son you were dying. You checked into a hospital, hooked yourself to machines, and used his grief to pressure him into a marriage he didn’t want.
And when he found you walking around your garden in full health, you told him it was for his own good. ”
The crowd shifted. The murmurs changed pitch, curiosity sharpening into something harder. I could feel it, the mood turning, wolves looking at Margaret with new eyes.
“That’s a lie,” Margaret said, but her voice had lost its carry. Thin now, defensive, nothing like the woman who’d commanded the clearing thirty seconds ago.
“It’s not,” Andrea said. “Your son confronted you. You admitted it under his Alpha command. Every word of it.”
Margaret looked at me. For one second her mask was completely gone and I saw my mother, just my mother, caught, exposed, looking at her son for help she knew wouldn’t come. My stomach turned.
I didn’t speak. I didn’t nod. I didn’t have to. My silence was the confirmation and every wolf in the clearing knew it.
Andrea turned back to the crowd.
“I know I’m human,” she said.
Her voice was clear and it carried across the clearing. She hadn’t been trained to project the way Margaret had. The wolves were just that quiet.
“I can’t shift. I can’t fight beside your King in wolf form. I don’t have centuries of tradition backing my name.” She paused. “But I want you to know who I am.”
The clearing was silent. My throat was tight. She was doing this. She was actually doing this, standing in front of my entire pack, nearing the end of her pregnancy, claiming them.
“I’m the person who tells your King when he’s wrong. Not because I’m brave, but because somebody has to, and the people who were supposed to do it spent thirty years telling him what he wanted to hear instead.”
She glanced at Margaret. Margaret’s jaw went rigid. She was right. She was the only person who’d ever told me the truth without calculating what she’d get for it.
“I’m his partner. Not because of a title, or a bloodline, or because someone decided it for us. Because he chose me and I chose him back. Every day. Including today.”
She turned back to the crowd. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes were burning and I didn’t care who saw.
“I don’t have claws or fangs or any of the things you were raised to respect in a Luna. What I have is this.” She put both hands on her belly. “Your King’s son. Growing right here. And I’m standing right here. And I’m not going anywhere.”
The clearing went so quiet I could hear the trees breathing.
Then Brennan stepped forward from the front row, the oldest elder, the wolf who’d called her Luna three days ago, whose word carried more weight than anyone’s in this clearing. He looked at Andrea. Held her gaze. Then he dipped his head. Slowly. Deliberately.
Another wolf followed, then another. Heads dipping across the front row, spreading backward through the crowd like a ripple through water.
I watched it happen with my throat so tight I couldn’t swallow. My mate. My human mate, standing in the center of a wolf clearing, telling a pack that wasn’t born to be hers that she wasn’t leaving. And they were bowing.
I loved her. I’d never loved anyone the way I loved her right then, watching her do what no Luna in the history of this pack had ever had to do.
Margaret stood perfectly still while the crowd turned away from her, head by head, wolf by wolf. Andrea looked at her, didn’t flinch, didn’t gloat, just held her gaze until Margaret took a step back, then another, and security closed around her and escorted her off the grounds.
She went without screaming this time. Without fighting. The crowd wasn’t looking at her anymore and for Margaret, that was worse than anything I could have done to her.
The clearing settled. Andrea walked back to Luca’s second. Her hands were shaking. I could see them from across the clearing, the tremor she’d hidden while she was speaking now visible in the way she pressed them against her belly. She’d been terrified the entire time. She did it anyway.
George stepped forward from his side. Conrad’s hand left his shoulder. The crowd parted between us.
This was it.
I walked to the center and every step was heavier than the last. I was walking away from Andrea. Away from the belly where my son was kicking, toward a fight that could leave her standing in this clearing without me. The bond pulled in my chest with every foot of distance between us.
I passed her on the way. She was standing where she’d spoken, hand on her belly, face tight, green eyes bright with tears she was refusing to let fall.
I stopped in front of her.
“Go stand with Luca,” I said.
“I know.”
“I love you.”
She reached up and touched my jaw, her fingers cold against my skin. “I know. Go.”
I held her gaze for one more second. The green of her eyes, the set of her jaw, the dimple that wasn’t showing because she wasn’t smiling. Then I turned and walked to the center of the clearing and didn’t look back.
George was waiting. Young, coiled, breathing hard through his nose, jaw locked. I met his eyes. He held them. Either brave or stupid and I was about to find out which.
I thought about Andrea’s voice carrying across the clearing. Brennan bowing. The baby kicking under her hands. The yellow nursery. The reading nook. The Post-It in my jacket pocket. All of it behind me. All of it depending on what happened next.
I shifted.
The wolf took over, massive, black, amber-eyed. The world sharpened, colors flattening, scents exploding, every sound amplified. I could smell George’s fear underneath his adrenaline. I could smell Andrea’s perfume from thirty feet away, coconut and something floral, the scent that meant home.
George shifted across from me. Gray wolf, smaller, leaner, hackles raised, lips pulled back over teeth.
Two wolves in the center of the clearing. Hundreds watching. Andrea at the edge with her hand on her belly and Luca beside her.
The gray wolf snarled.
I was still.