Chapter 7 The Rules of the Pack
Bella's POV
I slept in pieces.
An hour, maybe, then a gap where I lay looking at the ceiling and listening to the manor settle around me. Then another shallow stretch — the kind of sleep that leaves you more aware of the night than before you closed your eyes.
The amber eyes hadn’t reappeared when I checked the window again. Just trees. Just dark. But the image stayed with me the way certain things do when you’re too tired to push them out.
When Mira knocked at first light and told me the Alpha was requesting my presence, I was already upright, already dressed, wearing the particular expression of someone who had decided around three in the morning to simply get on with things.
“Now?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. He is waiting.”
———-
I followed her down a hallway that smelled like pine and something older. Stone that had absorbed years of something — cold, or wood smoke, or just time itself.
She stopped at a door near the corridor’s end, knocked once, and stepped aside.
Rhys was standing behind his desk. Not sitting. He had a folded paper in his hand and didn’t look up when I walked in.
I stood just inside the door and waited.
He put the paper down and looked at me.
“Close the door,” he said.
I did.
He gestured at the chair across the desk. I sat. He stayed standing — and I suspected that wasn’t accidental.
“There are things you need to know,” he began. No good morning. No how did you sleep? Nothing resembling small talk.
"Alright," I said.
He clasped his hands behind his back. “You are not to enter the deeper forest alone. Not the training grounds, not the eastern woods past the second fence. Not for any reason.”
“Okay.”
“If a pack member is rude to you —” A pause, like he was choosing the next part carefully. “You don’t retaliate. You don’t challenge. You don’t provoke.”
I blinked. “What if they provoke first?”
“Walk away.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
“And if walking away isn’t an option?”
“Make it one.”
His tone was perfectly even — the way someone sounds when they’re explaining a rule they didn’t write but also aren’t going to debate. Which almost made it more frustrating.
“What else?” I asked.
“The terms of the alliance stay within the inner circle. Not with servants, not with anyone who approaches you out of curiosity.” He picked up the paper briefly, then set it back down. “Loose words cause problems here.”
“Understood.”
He nodded once and reached for a second document. The kind of reach that signals a conversation is over.
I didn’t move.
He looked up.
“Was there something else?”
“Yes, actually.” I kept my voice even. “You’ve told me what I can’t do. Is there anything I can do? Or do I figure out the rest on my own?”
Something shifted in his expression. Small — a tightening around his eyes that might have been annoyance, or might, if I was being generous, have been something close to surprise.
“The main grounds,” he said finally. “Garden, hall, common areas. You have free movement there.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s all I needed.”
I was about to stand when the door opened.
No knock. Just opened — because whoever was on the other side clearly didn’t think they needed one.
An older man walked in. Silver-haired, broad-shouldered for his age, wearing the kind of expression that had probably been disapproving since birth. He looked at Rhys first, then found me, and stayed there.
The temperature in the room shifted. Or maybe that was just my imagination adjusting to the weight of that stare.
“Elder Caius,” Rhys said. Careful. Not warm.
The elder walked further in without being invited, which seemed to be a habit of powerful men regardless of whether they were wolf or human.
“I’ll be brief,” he said. His eyes were still on me. “I’m only saying what the council has already said amongst themselves.” He turned to Rhys. “A human wife. No wolf blood. No mark. No confirmed bond.” Each thing delivered separately, like charges read aloud. “This is not what the Moon Goddess intended for her Alpha.”
I sat with my hands very still in my lap.
“She is an insult to the tradition of this pack,” he continued, his voice flat and absolute. “The people are already talking.”
I waited for Rhys to explain. To walk through the reasons — the alliance, the peace, the necessity. All the things that had been handed to me like a transaction had been completed and I was the item exchanged.
Instead, he said two words.
“We’re done.”
The elder’s jaw tightened. “Alpha —”
“I said we’re done, Caius.”
The room fell quiet. The kind of quiet that settles heavy.
Elder Caius looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at me once more — not with anger exactly, more with the particular pity of someone who has already decided an outcome and finds the waiting vaguely sad. He turned and walked out without another word.
The door clicked shut.
I sat there and looked at the space he’d just left.
After a moment, I looked at Rhys. He’d gone back to his document, or was looking at it, at least.
“You didn’t correct him,” I said quietly.
He didn’t look up. “I dismissed him.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.” I kept my voice steady, because the alternative was letting the tightness at the back of my throat come forward, and I wasn’t doing that here. “He called me an insult. You stopped him from continuing. You didn’t tell him he was wrong.” I paused. “You didn’t call me your Luna.”
Rhys set the paper down slowly.
When he looked at me this time it was different. More direct. Something in it I didn’t have a name for yet — not cold, not warm, somewhere in between that was harder to read than either.
“You are my wife by alliance,” he said. “That is what you are to this pack right now.”
Right now.
I heard those two words sit at the back of the sentence. I let them sit there.
I stood up, smoothed the front of my shirt, and nodded once.
“Right,” I said simply.
I walked to the door and let myself out.
He didn’t call me back. Didn’t say my name.
And for some reason — that was the part that stayed with me.
———-
I didn’t go back to my room.
The narrow corridor at the back of the manor was quieter, and I followed it without a real destination. I just needed the movement. The air inside tasted like stone and wood polish and I wanted something that wasn’t that.
I heard the voices before I reached the end of the corridor.
A relaxed female voice. The easy sound of a conversation that assumed it was private.
I slowed.
“…three weeks, honestly. A month, being generous.”
Kattie.
“She barely said two words at the ceremony,” another voice added. “Looked like she was at a funeral.”
Light laughter.
“Because she knows,” Kattie said. Her tone was pleasant. Settled — the tone of someone stating something so obvious they don’t need to raise their voice. “She can’t belong here. You can put a human in the right building, dress her in the right things — it doesn’t change what she is. You cannot make this pack accept what the Moon Goddess didn’t send.”
More laughter. Easy and full.
I stood with my back flat against the stone wall and let their voices move past me in waves.
Then I straightened up.
And kept walking.