Chapter 17 His Father’s Order
Rafe POV
I woke to pain sharper than the bond’s dull grind I’d lived with for weeks. A deep burn started in my right shoulder and radiated down through my chest with every breath.
I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. Pine boards, not the finished plaster of Copper Point. A lamp burned low on a dresser across the room, and the air smelled like antiseptic, cedar, and someone else’s territory.
Pine Harbor. The pack house.
Memory came back in pieces. Lyle’s men had attacked. I had shifted and thrown myself between that charcoal wolf and Nora. Its jaws had closed on my shoulder before my body hit the steel boat cradle. Gravel had scraped my bare skin as blood ran out of me faster than I could track.
Then I remembered Nora standing over me in wolf form, teeth bared at the retreating enforcers, her auburn fur dark with rain and someone else’s blood. She had protected me after everything.
I tried to sit up. My right arm buckled immediately, and I fell back against the pillow with a grunt that sounded pathetic even to my own ears.
Someone had cleaned the wound, packed it, and wrapped it with gauze and medical tape.
The bandaging was tight and competent, the kind of field dressing a pack that took in strays would know how to do.
Already I could feel the edges drawing together beneath the wrapping.
Wolf healing ran fast when the body had fuel, and someone had gotten broth into me at some point, because the taste of beef and salt coated my tongue.
The room was small. A guest bedroom, spare and clean, with a single bed, the dresser, and a straight-backed chair.
Outside the window, it was fully dark, and I could hear Lake Superior’s waves hitting the rocks in the distance.
The house creaked with the wind. Inside, footsteps crossed the floor below, a door opened and closed, and voices murmured too low for me to understand.
Karlsson’s wolves were patrolling their own house because my father had sent enforcers into their territory.
Through the bond, Nora burned.
Her anger hit me in waves. Hot and focused, the way she got when she was working through a problem and hadn’t found the answer yet. She was somewhere in this house, awake and furious, and every pulse of it tightened my damaged shoulder. I deserved it, but feeling it was harder than knowing I did.
I lay still and let her fury wash over me. After weeks of trying to ignore the bond, block it, reason my way around it, I was too tired and too broken to do anything but receive what she sent.
The bedroom door opened without a knock.
Jules Duquette leaned against the frame. Dark curls, sharp eyes, a bruise darkening along his jaw. He held a glass of water and watched me with wary contempt.
“You’re up,” he said.
“How long was I out?”
“Eight hours, give or take.” He crossed the room and set the water on the chair, staying out of arm’s reach. “The bite went deep but missed the joint. You’ll have full range back inside a week if you don’t tear it open.”
I reached for the glass with my left hand. The water was cold and clean, and I drank all of it before speaking again. “Where’s Nora?”
“Not your concern.”
“I can feel her. She’s angry.”
“Yeah,” Jules said. “She is. You want to know why, or you already got a list?”
The words came out easy, almost friendly, but his dark eyes held nothing warm.
This was the man who cooked dinner and ran the household.
He was also the man who’d driven a wolf into a stack of fish crates hard enough to collapse them and held that wolf by the scruff until the fight was over.
I’d underestimated him when I arrived. I was learning not to do that with anyone in this town.
“I only want to know if she’s safe.”
“Safer than she was when your father’s wolves came through the gate.
Hank’s walking the road. Arvid’s got the hill.
Bette checked the office locks twice.” Jules folded his arms. “You’re here because Wade decided that putting an injured Sutherland on the road while your father may come back would endanger everyone. That’s the only reason.”
“I understand.”
“The way I see it, you drove six hours to ask a woman to fix something you broke, and your father sent a strike team behind you to take her by force. Those two things are connected, and you’re the connection.”
I had nothing to offer that would make him wrong. “I didn’t know he’d send them.”
“You should have known what he was capable of.” Jules pushed off the doorframe. “There’s more broth in the kitchen when you can walk. Bathroom’s down the hall. Don’t wander.”
He left. The door stayed open.
I lay in the borrowed bed and stared at the pine ceiling and thought about my father.
? ? ?
Conrad Sutherland picked up on the second ring. His voice was controlled and awake despite the hour, which meant he’d been waiting for news from Lyle’s team.
“Report,” he said. The way he said it told me everything. My condition did not matter; he wanted to know whether the mission had succeeded.
“Your men lost.” I kept my voice low. The house was quiet, but wolf hearing meant privacy was a fiction. “Seven enforcers, and they got driven off with their tails down. One of them nearly killed me.”
“You weren’t supposed to be involved.”
I drew breath to shout, then caught myself.
Through the wall, I heard someone shift in a chair.
I pressed the phone harder against my left ear and dropped to barely above a whisper.
“You sent seven wolves to seize a woman on another Alpha’s territory.
Without telling me. Without requesting entry.
They shifted first, Dad. They attacked.”
“They were instructed to retrieve Nora Keane and bring her to Copper Point so the bond could be resolved. If the harbor pack chose to escalate, that was their decision.”
“Bullshit. Lyle grabbed her. She defended herself, and then your enforcers shifted and went at everyone in the yard. I watched it happen.”
Silence on the line. He hadn’t been caught in a lie. He was deciding how much truth served his purpose.
“The bond is destroying you,” Conrad said. “You’ve lost weight. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. You cannot fulfill your obligation to Delia or to this pack while that woman holds your future hostage from a fishing town. It was necessary pressure.”
I let that sit. “You mean force.”
“The bond needs to end. By whatever means necessary.”
I sat on the edge of the bed with my wounded shoulder throbbing and my father’s voice in my ear. I heard the threat beneath every reasonable word about duty, legacy, and the pack’s continuity.
“What happens if she still won’t accept?” I asked. “After the next team and the one after that, what’s the endgame, Dad? Are you going to drag her to the ceremony ground and hold her mouth open until the words come out?”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“Answer me.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“A wolf who holds an Alpha heir’s bond hostage and refuses all resolution is a threat to the pack,” Conrad said. “Threats are dealt with. That is the Alpha’s duty and always has been.”
Cold started inside my ribs.
“You’re talking about hurting her.”
“My son and my pack come first. If you can’t see the difference, you’re further gone than I thought.”
“I humiliated her in front of two hundred people, and she’s angry about it. Her anger doesn’t make her a threat. She has the right to refuse.”
“Rights.” Conrad’s voice carried the contempt he reserved for concepts that interfered with outcomes. “Rights don’t heal you. Rights don’t give us an heir. Rights don’t hold this pack together when the other families start asking why my son is wasting away over a mechanic who ran to a stray.”
“No Copper Point wolf touches her again,” I said. “I won’t help them or allow them to act in my name.”
The line went quiet for three full breaths.
“Think very carefully about what you’re saying, Rafe.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying.”
“If you place a rejected mate above your Alpha and your family, there are consequences. The heir’s position isn’t a birthright. It’s an appointment. I can withdraw it. Bring her to Copper Point tonight. If you won’t, I’ll send someone who will.”
The threat landed exactly where he aimed it.
I’d been raised since birth to lead Copper Point.
Every decision I’d ever made, including the rejection, had been filtered through the question of what served the pack’s future.
Losing the heir’s seat meant losing my place in the only structure I’d ever known.
I couldn’t let go of all of that while I sat bleeding in a town that owed me nothing. I could still refuse the immediate order.
“Threaten my position if you want. I am not bringing her to you. And if you send anyone else, I’ll be standing between them and her the same way I did today.”
“You can barely stand at all.”
“Then it should be easy to get past me. Send Lyle back. See what happens.”
Conrad hung up.
I set the phone on the chair and pressed my left palm against my face.
My hand was shaking. Adrenaline, pain, hunger, all of it running through me at once.
Through the bond, Nora’s anger had shifted into something more complicated.
Fury remained, but exhaustion ran through it, the kind that comes after holding a position too long.
I’d just told my father I would protect the woman I rejected.
The woman whose bond I’d begged her to release so I could be with her sister.
The truth was plain: Conrad had been willing to use force on Nora because I had given him the opening.
My rejection, my choice, my ceremony. Everything that followed grew from that root.
Nora had tried to tell me. At the boatyard, before the trucks came. She’d said the open bond gave me a consequence, not a claim. I’d heard the words and understood them as spite. Sitting in this room, with my father’s threat still ringing in my skull, I finally heard what she’d actually meant.
The pain was only part of the consequence. I also had to watch what my choice made possible.