Chapter 25 The Heir Walks Away #2
I pulled my old duffel from the top shelf and filled it with jeans, thermals, two flannels that were actually mine, socks, a pair of work boots that had seen real dirt.
I left the ceremony clothes. Left the jacket.
Left the watch Conrad had given me when I turned twenty-one, still in its leather case on the dresser.
The room smelled of cedar and furniture polish, unchanged since I was a boy. I stood in the doorway for a minute, looking at the neatly made bed and the half-empty closet, and thought about Nora packing her tools into her Ford in the Iron River garage at three in the morning.
She’d taken what was hers and nothing else. I understood that now.
I carried the duffel downstairs. Conrad wasn’t in the garage anymore.
I heard his voice in the study, on the phone, already revising whatever plans my refusal had ruined.
The pack link hummed around me, and I felt the moment when someone, probably the enforcer Lyle, noticed I was in the house and sent a wordless query to Conrad.
The response came back cold and precise: He’s leaving.
I set my hand on the front door and stopped.
Delia.
Her scent wasn’t in the house. She had returned to Iron River after driving to Pine Harbor and standing with Nora beside the closed service bay. She carried her share of the wreckage the three of us had made, and she carried it without me.
I could call her, tell her I’d given up the title, the territory, the future we’d imagined when we were young and stupid and certain that wanting something was the same as deserving it, ask her to wait, promise that I’d find a way back to her once the bond resolved and the pieces settled.
I didn’t.
Delia deserved better than another promise from a man who’d already proven his promises were worth shit.
If I called her now, I’d only be trying to feel less alone, to have someone tell me I’d done the right thing.
She’d given me almost two years of secret hallway kisses and back-seat whispers and an unwavering faith that our love was worth what it cost. I’d repaid her with a body that wouldn’t respond to her and made her watch the bond drag me through another woman’s pleasure.
I owed Delia the truth, and the truth was that I had nothing to offer her. Not today.
I opened the door and walked out.
? ? ?
Conrad was standing beside my truck.
He’d come around through the side door while I was upstairs.
His arms were crossed, his expression unreadable.
Behind him, two enforcers stood at a respectful distance.
Neither was Lyle, but I had trained with both of them.
They had called me by name at pack runs and shared beer around the bonfire after the autumn hunt.
Neither of them looked at me.
“One more thing,” I said. I set the duffel in the truck bed and turned to face my father. “If anyone from Copper Point goes near Nora Keane again, whether at the gathering or anywhere else, I’ll consider us enemies and act accordingly.”
Conrad studied me. Whatever he saw made his mouth thin to a line.
“You’re sick, underweight, half-healed, and alone,” he said. “You have no pack, no territory, no allies, and no standing. What exactly do you imagine you’ll do?”
“Whatever I have to.”
He held my eyes for five seconds. Then he stepped away from the truck.
“You have until noon to clear the boundary,” he said, and walked back inside.
? ? ?
I drove east.
The Copper Point boundary fell behind me before noon.
The pack link faded like a radio signal as I drove out of range.
The distant voices went first, including the enforcers on patrol and the low background hum of a hundred small connections that told me where I stood in the world.
The closer connections followed. I lost contact with the kitchen staff, everyone at the house, and finally Conrad’s iron-hard presence, which I’d felt all my life.
His was the first mind I’d ever touched through the link, the voice that had taught me what pack meant.
Then silence.
I pulled off the road at the first overlook past the boundary and sat in the truck with the engine running and my hands on the wheel and nothing in my head at all.
I had no pack, no link, no father, no territory, and no title. The open bond was the only connection left, its ache constant under my breastbone.
I deserved every bit of it.
The overlook faced Superior. October had the lake dark and restless, whitecaps running to the horizon under a sky the color of old iron. Wind rocked the Silverado on its springs. I could see the shore road stretching east toward Pine Harbor, and west toward the territory I’d just lost.
I didn’t keep driving east.
Pine Harbor wasn’t mine either. Wade had given me a cot and a broom and hull work that paid for meals I could barely keep down, and I’d accepted all of it because the alternative was dying on the road from the bond sickness.
But if I showed up now with no title or pack, cast out by my own father, I would be one more stray at Wade Karlsson’s door.
I wouldn’t ask him for another bunk or another meal until I’d done the one thing I hadn’t managed in a month of better words and borrowed flannels.
At the full moon, both packs would be at the ceremony ground. Gordon and Conrad and Delia and Nora and every wolf who’d watched me reject my mate and choose her sister under the same cold sky.
I would stand there without my title, my father’s approval, or a pack at my back and tell Nora Keane what I should have said the night I destroyed her life. I expected her to turn away, and I would accept that without protest.
I cut the engine. The wind buffeted the cab, and spray struck the rocks fifty feet below the overlook’s guardrail. I had a duffel of clothes, half a tank of gas, and two days to wait.
Through the open bond, I felt Nora faintly, calm and focused. She was probably elbow-deep in someone’s engine, doing the work that had earned her a home I’d never deserved to walk into.
I pulled the flannel tighter around my shoulders and leaned the seat back.
The engine ticked as it cooled in the October air.
The healing bite in my shoulder ached from yesterday’s strain, when I had braced the guide assembly long enough to keep a loose workboat from crushing the woman who’d already told me she might never want what I was offering.
I closed my eyes.
I would stay on this strip of shore, moving between roadside overlooks, until the full moon.
I slept in the truck with the pack link silent in my head.