Chapter 45
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Andrea
I couldn’t feel my hands.
I was standing at the edge of the clearing with Luca beside me, his body angled between me and the crowd, and my hand was on my belly but I couldn’t feel it because every nerve in my body was focused on the two wolves in the center of the clearing.
George was gray, lean, moving in tight circles, teeth bared. He was snarling, low and continuous, the sound vibrating through the ground under my feet.
Finneas was still.
Massive, coal-black, amber eyes locked on George with a focus that made the air feel heavy. He wasn’t circling. Wasn’t posturing. Wasn’t making a sound. Just standing there, watching, the way he watched everything, patient and lethal and completely in control.
Alex hadn’t moved in ten minutes. I was choosing to believe that was solidarity and not distress.
George lunged first.
My hand tightened on my belly so hard my knuckles ached.
The gray wolf launched across the clearing, fast, a blur of muscle and teeth, and Finneas sidestepped.
Just sidestepped, casual, like a man stepping out of the path of a bicycle, except the bicycle was a hundred-and-something-pound wolf with its jaws aimed at his throat.
George’s teeth snapped shut on empty air and his momentum carried him past.
I exhaled. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped breathing.
George recovered, wheeled around, came again. Harder this time, lower, aiming for Finneas’s legs. Finneas let him come. Let him close the distance. I wanted to scream at him to move, to stop standing there like a statue, to do something, and then he moved.
I didn’t see the hit clearly. One second George was lunging and the next he was on the ground with Finneas on top of him, jaws clamped around the back of his neck, pressing him into the dirt.
The speed of it was terrifying. I’d known Finneas was fast, known he was strong, but seeing it like this, the raw power of a wolf pinning another wolf to the ground in a single motion, was different from knowing it.
George thrashed underneath him, claws raking the ground, body twisting, trying to break free. Finneas held him down. Didn’t move. Didn’t bite harder. Just held, his weight pressing George flat, jaws locked on the back of his neck with the patience of a predator who’d already won.
The clearing was silent. Hundreds of wolves watching. My pulse was hammering so loud I could hear it in my ears. My fingernails were cutting into my palms and I was holding my breath again.
“Breathe,” Luca said beside me. Quiet, not looking at me, his eyes on the fight.
I breathed.
George thrashed again, weaker this time. His claws dug furrows in the dirt but the fight was draining out of him. Finneas’s jaws tightened on his neck, not biting through, not drawing blood, just holding, pressing, the full weight of the King on top of the challenger.
George went still. His body sagged against the dirt, then he rolled, slowly, exposing his belly and his throat.
Submission.
Finneas released him and stepped back. I felt the tension leave my body so fast my knees almost buckled.
The pack erupted.
Howling. Dozens of wolves shifting, joining in, the sound coming from everywhere at once.
It vibrated through my chest, through the baby, who kicked so hard I gasped and pressed both hands against my ribs.
Tears were on my face. I didn’t know when they’d started.
I hadn’t felt them, had been too focused on the clearing, on the wolves, on whether the man I loved was going to stand back up.
He was standing. He’d won. The howling was rolling through the trees, I was crying, shaking, and Luca put his hand on my shoulder. Brief, grounding. I was so grateful for it I could have hugged him.
Finneas shifted back. Human, naked, breathing hard.
Someone threw him clothes. He pulled on pants and crossed the clearing toward me, his face wild, eyes bright with the wolf still close to the surface.
A cut on his temple was already knitting shut because shifter healing was still something I hadn’t gotten used to seeing.
I met him halfway. I couldn’t wait. My legs moved before my brain caught up, crossing the grass in my blue dress with my belly, my tear-streaked face. I put my hands on his face, both of them, and held him there.
“You’re okay.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“It’s already healing.”
“You scared the shit out of me, Finneas.”
“I know.”
He pulled me in, careful around the belly, his arms wrapping my shoulders, his face pressing into my hair.
I could feel his heart slamming against my chest, the adrenaline still burning through him, his arms tight, his breathing rough.
The wolf was still close. I could feel it in the tension of his muscles, the heat of his skin.
I held on and let him shake against me until his breathing slowed.
He pulled back. Turned to the clearing. When he spoke, his voice changed.
Not the voice he used with me. Not the office voice or the kitchen table voice. This was the King’s voice. I’d heard it in the council chamber. It settled into your bones whether you wanted it to or not.
“The challenge has been answered. George Ashtor submitted. The crown stands.”
The clearing went quiet. George was on the ground, shifted back, on his knees. Conrad was beside him, pulling him up, his face gray.
“The Ashtor family is stripped of all remaining standing within the Ironridge Pack.” Finneas’s voice carried across the grounds without effort.
“Conrad Ashtor, Regina Ashtor, Lorraine Ashtor, and George Ashtor are hereby formally banished. You have forty-eight hours to vacate pack territory. If any member of the Ashtor family is found within Ironridge borders after that window, they will be met with lethal force.”
He paused. The clearing was waiting for him to finish but he wasn’t done.
“Margaret Kingsley.”
My stomach dropped. I looked at him. His jaw was locked, his eyes straight ahead, his voice carrying the same authority as every word before it. But I was close enough to see his hand, the one at his side, clenched into a fist so tight the tendons were standing out.
“For conspiring against the crown, for aiding the Ashtor challenge, and for breaching the terms of her previous removal from pack grounds, Margaret Kingsley is formally banished from the Ironridge Pack. Effective immediately.”
The crowd went completely silent. He’d just exiled his own mother. In front of the entire pack. With a voice that didn’t waver once.
Margaret didn’t go quietly.
“You ungrateful child.” Her voice cut across the clearing, sharp, shaking with fury. “I gave you everything. I raised you. I held this pack together after your father died while you were too busy chasing a human to do your duty.”
Finneas didn’t respond. Didn’t look at her.
“You’re throwing away your bloodline for a girl who can’t even shift.” She was walking toward him now, pushing past the guards, her composure completely gone, her face twisted. “Your father would be ashamed of you. He would be disgusted. You are not the son I raised.”
My chest tightened. I could see the words landing on Finneas, each one a hit he absorbed without flinching, his jaw getting tighter, the muscle jumping. He still didn’t look at her. The not-looking was costing him more than anything she was saying.
“You’ll come crawling back,” Margaret spat. “When this falls apart, when your human wife can’t give the pack what it needs, you’ll come crawling back to me and I won’t be there.”
Security caught up to her. Two guards, one on each arm, pulling her back. She fought them, actually fought, wrenching her shoulders, trying to shake them off. For a woman in her fifties she put up a hell of a struggle.
“Get your hands off me. I am the former Luna of this pack. I walked these grounds before any of you were born.” She was screaming now, the polished voice gone, replaced by something raw and ugly. “This isn’t over, Finneas. Do you hear me? This is not over.”
They dragged her toward the treeline. She fought them the whole way, heels digging into the dirt, still screaming.
I watched her go, this woman who faked a terminal illness, who manipulated her own son, who backed a challenger over her own child, being hauled out of the clearing like a stranger.
And I felt my heart crack for Finneas, standing beside me, not looking, absorbing every word she hurled at his back.
Whatever Margaret had done, she was still his mother.
Not the warm kind, not the kind who tucked you in or made you breakfast, but the only one he had.
The woman who signed his birthday cards, who straightened his collar before pack events, who sat on his bed once after a nightmare.
Small things. The scraps he’d told me about in the dark, quietly, like admitting they mattered cost him something.
And she just called him a disgrace in front of his entire pack.
Then Lorraine.
She didn’t scream from somewhere hidden in the crowd. She pushed her way to the front, shoving past wolves twice her size, her red hair wild, her face streaked with tears and fury.
“You promised me.” She was looking straight at Finneas, pointing at him.
“You were supposed to be mine. We were supposed to be together. Our mothers planned it, our fathers planned it, everyone knew. And you threw it away for her.” She swung toward me, her eyes so full of hate it made my skin crawl.
“For a human. A nobody. A glorified secretary who got knocked up.”
I didn’t flinch. I wanted to. Every word was aimed at the softest parts of me, the insecurities I’d carried since the first day Lorraine looked at me like I was nothing. But I’d just stood in the center of this clearing and told hundreds of wolves who I was. I wasn’t flinching now.