Chapter 3

He did not wait for me to answer. He came down the steps and across the gravel with his hands open at his sides, which is a thing he does when he wants to be seen approaching carefully.

Bree did not move.

"Bree," Cassian said. "Give us a minute."

"No."

He stopped. I do not think anyone in Emberfell had said that word to him in four years.

"It is all right," I said. "Go inside. I will find you in a minute."

She went, and she took her time about it, and she looked back twice.

Cassian stood in front of me in the cold with the noise of the long house behind him.

"Kane says your father is stable," he said.

"He is."

"Stable from what?"

I looked at him.

I have tried since to reconstruct what I felt in that second and I cannot do it. There was no anger in it, which surprised me later. There was something closer to what you feel when a familiar road turns out to go somewhere else.

I want to be fair here, because I have spent a long time since trying to be fair about this, and I have not always managed it. He asked the question and he meant it. There was nothing performed in it. He stood in that yard in my father's coat and asked me what my father was stable from, and it was the first time in four months that he had asked me anything about it at all.

"He took two silver rounds in the rogue raids," I said. "Eleven years ago. You know that. You were there for the second half of it."

"I know that. He has been managing it for a decade."

"He stopped managing it in September. His counts fell through the floor and the healers ran out of things to try, and in October I told you that there was one confirmed moonpetal left in the country and that it was going to the Highmarket in November." My voice was very level. I was surprised by it. "I told you twice, Cassian. I gave you the account and the lot number and the ceiling. You said you would handle it."

He stood there for a moment.

"You said it was for Gideon," he said slowly. "You did not say he was dying."

"I said it was for my father and that we had run out of other options. What did you think that meant?"

"I thought it meant he was uncomfortable." He said it without any defensiveness, which somehow made it worse, and it made it worse because defensiveness would have meant he knew there was something to defend. "He has been uncomfortable for eleven years. He has never once let anybody treat him as an invalid. I thought you were being cautious."

"He crashed on the sixteenth."

Cassian's face did something.

"The sixteenth," he said.

"At about nine in the evening. The healer told me to call whoever needed to be called." I kept my hands in my coat pockets because I did not entirely trust them. "I reached for you first. Do you remember what I found?"

He did not answer.

"You had the link shut. Not sleeping, not busy, shut, deliberately, with your shoulder against it, and I stood in a parking lot at eleven at night in the rain reaching for my own mate and hitting a door." I watched him. "How long had it been like that?"

"Since the Highmarket," he said quietly.

"Why?"

"Because I was angry with you."

There it was, four months late, in a cold yard, delivered flatly by a man who had never in six years managed to tell me he was angry at the time it was happening.

And that is worth stopping on, because it is the whole of him.

In six years Cassian Rourke never once raised his voice to me. People used to remark on it. They would say that the two of us never fought, and they meant it as a compliment, and I used to take it as one. It took me until that yard to understand that we never fought because he never told me anything was wrong. He would decide privately that I had done something, and he would file it, and he would go on being pleasant to me for as long as it took, and I would spend a month wondering why the house felt cold and putting it down to the work.

He shut the link on the fourteenth of November and let me walk into that wall on the sixteenth without warning me it was there.

"You could have said something," I said.

"I did not want to have an argument before the coast."

"So instead you closed the only way I had of reaching you, and then you went abroad for a week."

"That is not what it was."

"That is exactly what it was. It is only that you did not think of it as doing something to me." I heard my own voice level out, which is what it does when I am past being able to shout. "You thought of it as taking a break from a difficulty. That is the part I want you to actually hear, Cassian. Every single thing you have done to me for four months, you experienced as not doing anything."

He looked away toward the long house.

"I called you eleven times," I said.

"I called you eleven times," I said.

"You did not."

I took my phone out and I brought up the log and I held it out to him, and he took it and looked at it for a long time. Eleven outgoing calls between nine-forty and one in the morning on the sixteenth of November. Then the twelfth, at one-eleven, connected, four minutes and nineteen seconds.

"Sable answered," I said. "She told me you were in the shower. I asked her to put you on the phone. I told her my father was dying that night and I asked her wolf to wolf."

He was still looking at the screen.

"She said you had a long week," I said, "and asked whether it could wait until morning."

Cassian did not say anything for what felt like a considerable time.

"I never saw any of these," he said.

"I know that."

"I would have—" He stopped and started again. "If I had seen one of them. One."

"I know."

"My phone was on the table. It was on the table all night, I would have heard it." He scrolled up and then down again, as though the log might resolve into a different set of numbers. "There is nothing in my messages from you. There is nothing from the sixteenth at all."

"I know that too."

He looked up.

"Cassian," I said, "you have had a woman living in your house for eight months who answers your phone in the middle of the night and calls it passing on a message. I am not going to explain this part to you. Work it out."

He went very still.

I have thought since about what that stillness was. I have thought about it more than is reasonable. At the time I read it as the beginning of understanding, and I let myself feel something dangerously close to hope, and I have not forgiven myself for it. What it actually was, I think now, was a man rearranging a set of facts until they could sit alongside a conclusion he had already decided not to give up.

Because what he said next was, "She would not have understood how serious it was. She does not know Gideon."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Say that again," I said.

"Maren."

"No, say it again, because I want to be sure I heard it. A woman took a call at one in the morning from your mate, who told her in plain words that her father was dying and asked her wolf to wolf to hand you the phone." I kept my hands in my pockets. "And your answer is that she did not understand how serious it was."

"I am saying she would not have known his condition."

"She knew I was in a hospital parking lot in the rain."

"Maren."

"Say her name one more time in this conversation," I said, "and I am going to go home."

He stopped.

We went back inside because the cold had got into me and because standing in a yard arguing where three hundred wolves could see us was doing neither of us any good. Bree had held my seat. The tables had been pushed back and people were standing in groups with the last of the wine, and Elder Kane had taken a chair near the fire with two of the young trackers sitting on the floor at his feet like children.

Bree took one look at my face and then at Cassian behind me, and she raised her voice just enough.

"Alpha. Since you are here." She said the title with an edge on it that I had never heard her use. "The delegation seat. Maren was named to it in the spring and her paperwork has been filed since March. Give it back to her."

The group around us went quiet.

"Bree," I said.

"No, I would like to hear it." She did not look away from him. "Sable has been in this pack eight months. Maren has run the trade lines and the winter stores and the border rotations for six years and she was named to that seat by the Elder council, not by you. So give it back."

Cassian looked at her for a moment.

"It has been announced," he said.

"Unannounce it. You are the Alpha. You announced it on a Tuesday with no council vote and no notice to the Elder board, so I imagine you can unannounce it on a Thursday."

"Bree, that is not how the seat works."

"It is precisely how the seat worked when you gave it away."

"It is not that simple, and I am not going to conduct this in the middle of the long house." He said it pleasantly. He can be extremely pleasant. "Bree, I understand why you are angry. I would like you to trust that I am handling it."

Then he leaned in toward me, close enough that his shoulder came against mine, and he lowered his voice to the register he uses when he is being kind.

"This seat matters so much to her," he said. "She came back with nothing. Let her have the two years. Once I am settled on the coast I will send for you, and we will sort all of this out properly."

I turned my head and looked at him from about six inches away.

I had been his mate for six years. I had marked him in front of four hundred wolves and given him a title he had no blood claim to, and I had watched him grow into it and become, in most rooms, the most impressive person present. I had loved him with a steadiness I was quietly proud of.

And he stood there eight days out from a sealed rejection notice and told me that he would send for me.

"Elder Kane," I said.

Kane looked up from the fire.

"Maren."

"Bree has raised the delegation seat. I want to say in front of witnesses that I am not contesting it and that I do not want it back." I said it clearly. "Please have that entered."

Kane's eyes moved from me to Cassian and back.

"There are other seats," he said carefully. "Not the coast, but there is the Larkmoor exchange in the spring, and there is the northern survey. I knew your father for fifty years, Maren. Let me make some calls. You should not be sitting in this territory for the next two years."

"That is generous."

"It is not generous. It is overdue." Kane put both hands on the arms of his chair. "I will tell you something, Maren, and I do not much care who hears it. Your father sat that coastal seat at thirty and he came back and ran this pack for twenty-six years on what he learned there. You were named to it by the Elder board in March, unanimously, and I signed the paper myself. In fifty years I have never seen a seat reassigned by an Alpha without a vote, and I intend to say so at the winter session whatever else has happened by then."

"Elder," Cassian said.

"I am eighty-one years old, Alpha Rourke. You may take that up with me in the spring." Kane did not raise his voice at all. "Maren. The Larkmoor exchange. Say the word and I will have it before the month is out."

"All the same." I picked up my coat off the back of the chair. "I will not be able to take it. I have something in the spring."

Kane waited.

Bree said, "You have what in the spring?"

The fire cracked. Somebody laughed at the far end of the long house, at something else entirely, a whole room away.

I turned the band on my right hand once with my thumb, which is a habit I had picked up in the three weeks I had been wearing it and had not yet noticed I had.

I took a breath and said it. "A mating,”