Chapter 28 029

Chapter 28 029
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Carmen

The morning of the meeting I woke before Xavier.

That was unusual. He was constitutionally an early riser, up before the house most days, already somewhere thinking by the time anyone else found their footing. But this morning I surfaced at five and he was still beside me, one arm across my waist, breathing slowly, and I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and let myself think.

Ares was arriving at ten.

I had met him perhaps a dozen times in my life, which was fewer than you would expect for someone who had spent their entire childhood in his pack, but that was the nature of what I had been there. Invisible when convenient, visible only when there was something to be mocked or punished. He was a large man, grey-haired now, with the particular authority of someone who had never genuinely been challenged and had therefore never developed flexibility. I had watched him silence rooms with a look. I had watched him make grown men recalculate.

I was not a child anymore.

I got up carefully and dressed in the dark and went downstairs.

Rosaria was already in the kitchen. Of course she was. She handed me coffee and looked at my face and said, "Eat something real. Not just the coffee."

I ate.

Bruno arrived at seven with the alert energy of someone who had slept well in anticipation of something. He went over the meeting room configuration with me while Rosaria pretended not to listen and very obviously listened. Small table. Four chairs. No head position, all sides equal. One entrance. Xavier had specified no windows facing the approach road, which was about sightlines and not giving Ares the psychological advantage of watching his own arrival be noted.

"He'll bring Cato," Bruno said. "His Beta. Big man, very quiet, very watchful. Don't let the quiet fool you."

"I won't."

"He also has a habit of addressing the least powerful person in the room first to establish hierarchy." Bruno looked at me steadily. "That'll be you, in his assessment."

"Good," I said. "Then he'll show me his method immediately and I'll know exactly what I'm working with."

Bruno looked at me for a moment. "You know," he said, "when Xavier told me his mate was a human woman from Blood Moon I thought—" He stopped.

"What."

"I thought it was going to be complicated," he said. "I was right, but not in the way I expected."

Xavier came downstairs at eight. He was dressed plainly, no ceremony in it, and he came to where I was standing at the kitchen counter and looked at me thoroughly in the way he did when he was assessing something he cared about.

"How are you," he said.

"Ready," I said.

He nodded. His hand came to the back of my neck briefly, the mark, his thumb resting there for a moment, and I felt the bond settle like ballast.

They arrived at five past ten.

Ares was exactly as I remembered, large and grey and moving with the slow certainty of a man who expected the ground to accommodate him. His Beta Cato was two steps behind and to the right, watchful as Bruno had said, his eyes going around the room once and then returning to Xavier.

Ares looked at Xavier. Looked at Bruno. Then he looked at me and I watched his eyes do the thing I had been waiting for, the brief assessment, the categorization, and then the decision, she's the least significant person here. He smiled, not warmly.

"And who is this," he said. To me. Directly to me. Bruno had been exactly right.

"I'm Carmen," I said. "Your son knew me as the girl without a wolf."

The room went very still.

Ares looked at me with an expression that moved through surprise into something harder. Beside him Cato said nothing and moved nothing.

"I see," Ares said. His voice was measured. "So the mate my son rejected ended up here." He turned to Xavier with the air of a man refocusing on what matters. "Interesting choice."

"She's not a choice," Xavier said. "She's my mate. That's a different thing."

"Of course." Ares sat down without being invited and Cato followed and I sat across from Ares and Bruno sat beside Xavier and the four of us looked at each other across the small table.

Ares opened with Hannibal's reforms. He laid them out as a list of grievances, measured and specific, the language of a man who had been preparing this argument for weeks. The reforms undermined pack cohesion, he said. They introduced instability. They reflected outside influence rather than Blood Moon values. He said this last part looking at Xavier.

"Your son leads his pack," Xavier said. "His decisions are his."

"His decisions are compromised," Ares said. "By sentiment. By exposure to ideas that don't serve Blood Moon's interests."

"Which interests specifically," I said.

Ares turned to me with the patience of a man addressing a distraction. "The pack's strategic interests. Alliances, territorial integrity, the structures that have kept Blood Moon functional for generations."

"The structures," I said. "Including the border routes."

Something shifted in the room. Cato's stillness became a different kind of stillness.

"I'm not certain what you mean," Ares said.

"I think you are," I said. "The undermaintained sections. The specific gaps in patrol coverage. The routes that the trafficking network has used for at least six years." I kept my voice conversational. "I was taken through one of them. I know what they look like from the inside."

Ares looked at me for a long moment.

"You were always trouble," he said quietly. "Even as a child. That family of yours was right to—"

"Be careful," Xavier said. His voice was entirely flat.

Ares stopped.

I looked at him steadily. "I'm not a child anymore," I said. "And this meeting isn't about Hannibal's reforms. It's about whether you close the border routes voluntarily or whether you explain to the king why you didn't." I paused. "We have documentation. Fabrizio is thorough."

The room was very quiet.

Ares looked at me and then at Xavier and something in his face recalculated, slowly, visibly, the way things recalculate when the ground has changed and you haven't caught up yet.

"Perhaps," he said carefully, "we should discuss this further."

"Yes," I said. "Let's."