Chapter 69 Fifteen Years
Kattie’s POV
Rhys came to find me the morning after the tribunal opening.
I was in the secondary lounge. Not because it was comfortable — cold stone floor, north-facing window — but because it was removed from the main traffic of the manor and I had needed somewhere to be that didn’t require me to manage my expression for an audience.
He knocked. He didn’t have to. He was Alpha and it was his manor and I had no formal standing in it anymore. But he knocked, and waited, and came in when I said he could.
He closed the door and sat across from me.
We looked at each other.
“I’m not here about the tribunal,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
He looked at his hands.
Such a small thing. Rhys almost never looked at his hands. He was a person who held eye contact as a matter of professional habit, who managed rooms with his gaze, who understood that attention was a form of authority. Seeing him look at his hands said more than most speeches.
“I don’t know how to have this conversation,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I said. “Start somewhere.”
He looked up.
“Was any of it real.” Said carefully. “Not the last few months…. I know what that was. I mean before. When we were twelve, fifteen, twenty. The years before you decided what you wanted and built toward it.” A pause. “Was that real.”
I held the question before I answered it. Not because I was uncertain. Because it deserved that.
“That was the most real thing I had,” I said.
He nodded. Not relief — confirmation. Something he’d needed to verify.
“I knew that,” he said quietly. “I needed to hear it.”
Outside the morning was grey. The north-facing window showed the far wing of the manor and a strip of pale sky. Footsteps passed in the main corridor and faded.
“Can I tell you something,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I spent fifteen years,” I said, “loving the version of you that needed me.”
He went very still.
“You were always strongest when you were carrying something difficult,” I said. “And I was always the person you allowed to carry it alongside you. When you were seventeen and the western border tested us for the first time, you didn’t sleep for four days and I brought food to your study and you didn’t thank me and I didn’t need the thanks. Being there was enough.” I looked at him steadily. “Being necessary was enough. For a very long time, being necessary felt like belonging.”
He didn’t try to redirect it.
“But belonging that depends on being needed…” I stopped. Made myself say the rest. “It isn’t the same as mattering. And I spent fifteen years not quite understanding that distinction.” I held his gaze. “When I understood that she mattered to you in a way that had nothing to do with usefulness — nothing to do with what she could carry or provide, just her presence, the fact of her….that was when I understood what I had built was not what I thought it was.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” I said. “You didn’t ask me to build my life around something you didn’t know I was building. I did that. The choices I made to maintain it….those are mine.” I looked at him directly. “All of them.”
“I should have seen it,” he said.
“You weren’t looking,” I said. “And I made sure of that.” A pause. “I was very good at making sure of that.”
The almost-slip was visible for a moment — a slight change around his jaw, something working behind his expression that he wasn’t suppressing quickly enough.
“I’m going to ask you to leave Moonstone,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“It’s not punishment,” he said. “Staying here, after everything — there’s no version of what comes next where it’s good for you.”
Fifteen years. Every version of him. The difficult ones, the broken ones, the ones nobody else wanted to stand beside. The one sitting across from me now who still looked at his hands when he was saying something that cost him.
“Alright,” I said.
He stood. Didn’t move toward the door immediately.
“The years before all of this,” he said quietly, “I hope you know they mattered to me.”
I looked up at him.
“I know,” I said.
“They mattered to me too.”
He left.
I sat in the room with the north-facing window for a long time.
I thought about twelve. About the river — no, that was Ronan and the east river. I was thinking of the training ground at fourteen, when I broke my wrist and Rhys sat with me for hours waiting for the healer because I didn’t want to be alone. He hadn’t said anything particularly. He had just stayed.
Small things. The collection of small things that become a person’s definition of someone over time.
I was still sitting with that when Sena came in.
She didn’t knock, which was Sena, and the urgency with which she set the folder on the table made preamble feel like waste.
“Archive trace,” she said. “Dane’s team found the backup timestamp. The communication that was modified — the original creation date survived in the system cache.”
I looked at the folder without opening it.
“Say it,” I said.
“It predates the alliance marriage by four months,” she said. “It predates Bella’s arrival. It predates any of your involvement.” She met my eyes. “The original interference plan was written and in motion before any of this began.”
I opened the folder.
The date was clear. Precise. Unambiguous.
Ronan had not built this in response to the alliance marriage. Not in response to me, or to Bella, or to any of the events of the past months. He had been building it and waiting. The marriage hadn’t created the plan.
It had activated it.
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I picked up my phone and sent a message to Bella.
Short. Just the essential piece.
There’s a date on the original document you need to see. He planned this before any of us existed in the equation. That changes what you’re looking for.
I set the phone down.
Rhys had asked me to leave Moonstone.
I would.
But not yet.