Chapter 11 Two Months
Isabella moves first.
She crosses to the doorway, takes Callum's arm with both hands, and steers him toward the empty chair across from me with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done exactly this before — absorbed his instability before anyone else could clock it, rerouted the momentum into something that looks like a normal entrance.
She sits beside him. Her smile has about sixty percent of its usual wattage.
"You remember Lachlan," she says to Callum, her voice smooth, filling the room with pleasant noise. "Same university. He came to our wedding."
It takes Callum a few beats to rebuild himself into the version of himself he prefers to be in public.
The jaw loosens. The shoulders drop a centimeter. He looks at Lachlan the way you look at a man when you're pretending you weren't just standing in a doorway losing your composure.
"Of course," he says. "Good to see you, Lachlan." A beat, calibrated to land casual. "Though I didn't realize there were plans being made. What's the occasion?"
My father, beside him, says something vague about things still being discussed.
Isabella's fingers close around Callum's arm, a small precise pressure.
Moira suggests moving to the sitting room, and Lachlan looks at the table and stays where he is.
"While we're all here," he says. He sets both hands flat on the table, unhurried. "Fifteen percent of Nightridge's territorial assets transferred into Rowan's name before the ceremony. Three private properties, her choice of location." A pause. "I'd like to hold the mating ceremony in two months."
My father turns to me.
Across the table, Lachlan's hands move off the tabletop and onto his lap.
I'm not looking directly at him, but I catch it in my peripheral vision — fingers curling into a fist, releasing, curling again. A man running through the same motion on a loop and trying not to be visible about it.
"The timeline seems rushed." Callum's voice arrives. Measured, reasonable, the voice of someone making a procedurally sound point. "An alliance between two packs is a significant undertaking. It might be worth taking time to negotiate the full scope."
I don't look at Callum.
I reach for the pitcher and top up Lachlan's glass. Then I say, "Two months works for me."
The sound Callum's chair makes against the floor is the kind of sound that stops a room.
Everyone at the table goes still. The pause is long enough that no one can pretend they didn't hear it or didn't understand what it meant.
Isabella's eyes go bright. Not with tears yet, but with the precondition for them — the readiness of a woman who knows exactly when to deploy this particular response. Her voice comes out small.
"Callum?" She tilts toward him. "You don't want them to — you're not happy about this?"
The sound of his name in that register does what it's apparently designed to do. I watch his focus realign, pulled back by some internal mechanism that overrides whatever just broke the surface.
He reaches up and touches the side of her face. A careful gesture, an explanatory one.
"No," he says. "Of course not. I just think two packs coming together deserves more than a rushed schedule. It's a big commitment."
Isabella turns her face into his palm.
I'm not interested in analyzing them. What they feel, what they want, none of it concerns me anymore.
This house has an atmosphere and I've had enough of it.
"I'll get the medicine." I push back from the table and go to the kitchen.
The pot is where I left it this morning, covered, still warm. I ladle it into a bowl and stand in the kitchen for a moment, listening to the murmur of the dining room, the low sound of Moira filling the air with carefully positioned pleasantries.
I bring the bowl back.
Callum sees it before he registers anything else. I watch his posture shift — the almost undetectable straightening that happens when the body decides something before the mind confirms it. He knows this smell. Of course he does. I made it for a year.
He turns his head toward Lachlan, and the look he gives him has a shape to it I recognize: the shape of someone who thinks they've just been handed the last word in an argument.
Across from him, Lachlan's face hasn't moved at all. But under the table, the fabric of his trousers pulls tight across the knee. I see the edge of it, the crease forming where his hand has gathered the material and is holding it.
I walk back to the table.
Callum stands. The movement has the slight excess of someone who's been waiting to make it, a degree too ready, a fraction too smooth. His hand comes up.
I pull the bowl back.
"Don't trouble yourself." My voice comes out the same temperature as the rest of the room. "The bowl is hot."
I step past him and set it down in front of Lachlan.
"Try this. If it helps, I'll make more."
Lachlan looks up at me.
In the time I've known him, I've seen his face do nothing, and near-nothing. Right now it does something else. He smiles, small, unguarded, and doesn't move to take it back.
He picks up the bowl with both hands.
Behind me, Callum is standing with his arm still half-extended, reaching for something that is no longer there.