Chapter 22 Sisters
Nora POV
The truck that came down the service lane that afternoon was too clean for Pine Harbor.
I was at the workbench fitting a new gasket onto a bilge pump housing when I heard it. The engine sounded newer and better maintained than the yard’s aging diesels or any local rig, and it didn’t belong here. My hands stopped.
Delia got out of the driver’s side wearing a wool coat I’d never seen and boots that had never touched mud.
Her light auburn hair was brushed and pinned like she was headed to a pack gathering, but the skin beneath her eyes was bruised purple with exhaustion, and she’d lost weight in her face.
She looked like someone who’d dressed carefully for a fight she wasn’t sure she could win.
She stood beside her truck for a long moment, scanning the yard. The service bays. The boat cradles. The stack of fish crates that still hadn’t been fully restacked after the fight. The stains on the concrete that scrubbing hadn’t lifted.
“Nora.” Her voice carried across the lane.
I set the bilge pump down and pulled the shop rag from my back pocket. My hands were black to the wrists. Delia’s were pale and shaking.
I could have ignored her. Let Bette ask her business from the office window, or waited for Wade to appear in the doorway behind me.
He always did when something unexpected arrived at the yard.
But Delia had driven hours on the shore road to get here.
She hadn’t called first, which meant she didn’t trust a phone for what she needed to say.
“Over here,” I said, and walked toward the service bay I’d closed for the afternoon.
The overhead door was down, and the concrete apron beside it was sheltered enough from the wind that we could stand there without freezing.
It was also far enough from the office and the open lanes where Rafe was scraping his hull that nobody would overhear.
Jules appeared in the kitchen doorway of the pack house uphill. I caught his eye and shook my head once. He stayed.
Delia crossed the lane toward me. Up close she looked worse. Her careful makeup couldn’t hide her red-rimmed eyes, and her jaw was set the way mine got when I was trying not to cry. She’d been crying in the car. I could smell the salt under her perfume.
We stood three feet apart beside the closed bay door. Three weeks since she’d pressed her hand to the passenger window of my truck while I drove away.
“You look different,” she said.
“I work outside now.”
“You worked outside at Iron River.”
“Not like this.” I waited. The rag in my hands smelled like solvent, and the wind off Superior carried its usual October bite. I was not going to make this easy for her.
Delia pulled her coat tighter. “Do you know what you’re doing to him?”
“Which him?”
Her mouth thinned. “Rafe. He’s sick, Nora. He’s barely standing. He drove here alone because nobody at Copper Point would help him, and he looks like he hasn’t eaten in a month. All because you won’t say four words.”
“He looks like that because he rejected his fated mate in front of both packs,” I said. “The words aren’t medicine, Delia. They’re mine.”
“They’re yours,” she repeated, like she was tasting something rotten. “That’s what this is about? Ownership? You’re keeping the bond open because it’s the last thing you can hold?”
It stung because it was close. “You took everything else that night,” I said.
“You took the treaty. You took my mate. You took the future I’d spent my entire life preparing for, and you did it with Dad and Conrad holding the door open so you could walk right through.
So yes. The words are the last thing from that night that’s still mine, and I will spend them when they are worth something to me. Not to you. Not to Rafe. Not to Dad.”
Delia’s chin came up. For a moment she looked exactly like Gordon when someone challenged him at a pack gathering, that rigid, offended authority that said how dare you. Then it broke, and something rawer showed through.
“You think I got what I wanted?” she said.
“You got Rafe.”
“He can’t touch me.”
The wind gusted between us. Somewhere down the lane, metal rang against fiberglass where Rafe was working. I stared at my sister.
“He told me,” I said carefully. “At the yard, when he first came. He said his body wouldn’t let him.”
“His body.” Delia laughed, ugly and short.
“That’s one way to put it. Rafe has never taken me to bed, Nora.
Not once. Not the night of the ceremony, not any night after.
We’ve tried. We’ve tried more times than I want to count.
He kisses me and it’s good, it’s real, and then something in him just stops.
Goes cold. He gets sick. Every single time. ”
She said it flat, the way people talk when they’ve repeated something so often the shame has been ground smooth.
“Three weeks,” Delia said. “We’ve been sleeping down the hall from each other in the same house while he gets thinner and sicker and everyone at Copper Point finds out.
Conrad couldn’t keep it hidden. The healer talks, the enforcers who guard the house talk, and now Iron River knows too.
The Alpha’s younger daughter stole the wolf promised under the mating treaty and can’t even get him into her bed.
” She swallowed hard. “That’s what they’re saying. ”
I didn’t enjoy hearing it. Some part of me, the furious part that had kept the bond open and let Rafe feel my pleasure with Wade and Jules, expected satisfaction from seeing the consequences of what he’d done. Instead, I felt tired and angry, with no sense of victory.
“I’m sorry that’s happening to you,” I said. I meant it. The words came out plain and hard, and they weren’t enough, but they were honest.
“Are you?” Delia searched my face. “Because from where I’m standing, you’ve got men who want you, a job that pays, and a whole pack around you while Rafe wastes away because you won’t close the bond. You got out. I’m the one still sitting in it.”
“You chose to sit in it.”
“I chose Rafe. I chose him because I love him.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she pressed her lips together until they went white.
“I know,” I said.
Delia stepped closer. The perfume hit me again, something lilac, and beneath it the faint salt of tears that hadn’t dried yet.
“Do you know what it was like, Nora? Watching you at every family dinner being told you were the responsible one, the dutiful one, the one Dad could count on? You were his warhorse. He relied on you for everything. And I was just pretty. I was just Delia, who smiled at visitors and wore nice dresses and never got asked to do anything that actually mattered.”
“Dad loved you more,” I said. “Everyone could see it.”
“Dad loved what I was useful for,” Delia said. “Softening rooms. Charming guests. Making him look like a father instead of just an Alpha. You think that’s the same as being needed? You think being the decoration felt better than being the one he trusted?”
I had no answer for that. The wind picked up, driving spray off the harbor that dampened the concrete around our boots. Mine were scarred and oil-stained. Hers had never seen a job site.
“When Rafe noticed me,” Delia said, quieter now, “when he started finding reasons to talk to me at the treaty visits, I knew what he was. I knew he was yours. And I told myself I didn’t care, because for once in my life somebody wanted me for more than my charm or my looks.
He loved me, and I thought being chosen would matter more than being fated. ”
She paused. Her hands were shaking inside her coat pockets.
“And part of me loved that it was yours,” she said. “Part of me loved taking something from the daughter Dad actually respected. That’s ugly. I know it’s ugly. But you asked me to tell you the truth in that garage, and I didn’t give it to you. So here it is.”
The silence between us filled with wind and the distant sound of Rafe’s scraper. I looked at my sister, at the tears she was fighting and the set of her jaw and the way her fingers gripped the inside of her pockets like she was holding herself upright.
I did not put my arms around her.
I wanted to. The reflex was so old it felt physical, the same pull that had made me French-braid Delia’s hair before school dances and drive her home from parties when she’d had too much and sit up with her in our kitchen at Iron River when thunderstorms made her anxious.
I loved her. I had never stopped loving her.
But if I held her I would forgive her, and I wasn’t ready to.
“Thank you for telling me,” I said.
Delia wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm. When she spoke again, her voice had changed. Tighter. More urgent.
“There’s something else. Conrad is leaning on Dad.”
I went still. “Leaning how?”
“Calling. Sending messages through the territory contacts. Telling Dad that you’re a problem that needs solving and that Iron River’s treaty obligations include delivering you to Copper Point for the bond resolution.”
“Conrad wants me dead. Dad wouldn’t agree to that.”
“He hasn’t,” Delia said. “But he thinks you should accept the rejection, Nora. He’s always thought that.
He thinks you’re being stubborn and selfish, that the treaty is more important than your pride, and that ending the bond is the only way to protect Rafe.
Conrad is using that. Every time Conrad calls, Dad gets a little more convinced that if you would just come home and say the words, everything goes back to normal. ”
“Nothing goes back to normal.”
“I know that. You know that. Dad doesn’t want to know it.
” Delia pressed her lips together. “Conrad called the men who attacked this place necessary pressure. Dad was furious about the violence, but he didn’t cut contact.
He’s still talking to Conrad. Still negotiating.
He still thinks there’s a version of this where the treaty holds and everyone walks away whole. ”