Chapter 271 Brothers Divided Again
POV: Callum | Brennan townhouse, Kensington
The townhouse is the location Cormac suggested for the conversation, which is the choice of someone who understands that certain conversations need to happen in neutral territory and who selected the place that belongs to both of them rather than to either of them specifically, the family home rather than the Rookeries operational building or the True Pack's East End location, and the selection tells me something about how Cormac is thinking about this, which is as a brothers' conversation rather than as a political confrontation, and the telling is useful even though what I am feeling does not fully accommodate the distinction.
Moira and Finn are here. This is not what I expected and it is also not something I am going to address before the conversation that needs to happen, because addressing it would produce a detour and the conversation does not have room for detours.
Finn is in the corner of the sitting room with a book, which is the position a seven-year-old takes when the adults are doing something that does not include him but which he has decided to remain proximate to, and he is reading with the specific quality of someone who is reading and also tracking everything happening in the room, which is a quality I recognize because it is the quality I had at seven in this same house in this same kind of situation, and the recognition produces something in my chest that is not the thing I came here to feel.
"You said you chose me over power," I say. I say it to Cormac directly, which is the only way I know how to have this conversation with him, the direct version rather than the one that builds toward it through safer territory.
Cormac does not look away. This is the five-year version of Cormac, the one who has learned that looking away from the difficult thing is the thing that made him the person he was before and which he does not do anymore. "I know what I said," he says. "I also said I couldn't control what they do with Finn. I chose the option that gives me control."
"You're leading a pack against me," I say. "You are the Alpha of True Pack, whose stated purpose is to install your son in my position. Tell me what word other than betrayal fits that."
"The word is protection," Cormac says. He says it with the flat quality of someone who has made this argument to himself many times and who knows it is correct and who also knows it does not look the way correct things are supposed to look. "Old Gray's True Pack was going to exist whether I joined it or not. The eighty wolves were gone regardless. The nine-year plan was in place regardless. The difference between me leading it and Old Gray leading it is the difference between a man who is going to let Finn choose at sixteen and a man who has been designing what Finn becomes since before Finn arrived in London."
"Or," I say, "the difference is that now it has legitimacy it didn't have before. An Alpha who was born to the position, with a pureblood heir, leading the traditional faction. That is considerably more credible than Old Gray leading eighty wolves in the East End."
"Yes," Cormac says. "It is. And it is also more controlled."
"By you."
"By me," he says. "Which is better than the alternative."
We look at each other across the sitting room of the house we grew up in and I feel the specific quality of this argument, which is that both of us are right about the facts and that the facts do not resolve into a single correct position because the facts are the kind that produce two different correct positions depending on which frame you put around them.
"You took the leadership of the faction that is trying to remove me from my position," I say. "You did this without telling me you were going to do it, without consulting me, without giving me the chance to tell you that there was another option we hadn't found yet."
"Was there?" Cormac says.
"I don't know," I say. "Because you didn't give us time to look."
The argument escalates the way arguments escalate when both people are managing something large and when the management is not fully successful, the voices not louder but the quality more pressured, the specific escalation of two people who have been through enough together to know exactly where the edges are and who are approaching them, and I am aware of approaching them and I am not stopping because the thing I am feeling is real and it deserves the room.
"You're leading a pack against me," I say again, because this is the thing that is sitting in the center of everything else and which has not been addressed by anything Cormac has said, "and you are asking me to believe that is not what it is."
Cormac steps forward with the specific quality that physical movement has when it is happening in the space of an argument that has been conducted from a distance, the space collapsing between us in the way it collapses before something happens, and my body responds to it with the specific response that five years of the same community and two years of genuine trust do not fully erase, which is the oldest response, the one from before the Rookeries, the one from the trial.
"Stop."
Moira's voice from the doorway has the quality that Moira's voice has in moments of necessary intervention, which is the quality of someone who is not asking but telling, and the telling lands in the room with the specific weight of a person who understands exactly what is happening and who has made the assessment that it needs to stop.
"Finn's watching," she says.
We both turn.
Finn is not in the corner with the book. Finn is in the doorway to the hall, which is where he has been, and the expression on his face is the expression that I have not seen on Finn's face before, which is the expression of a child who has just seen something happen that has revised his understanding of a situation he thought he understood.
He is crying, which is the specific silent quality of a child who did not plan to cry and whose body did it anyway without consulting the plan.
"I don't want you to fight," he says. He says it to both of us, to the room, to the sitting room of the house that is his grandfather's house, in the voice that is not performing anything because seven-year-olds in this state do not perform. "I don't want to be Alpha if it means this."
He turns and he runs, which is what the outline told me was coming and which is still the specific quality of something large arriving that you knew was coming and which arrives anyway with its full weight, and the front door is open before either of us has moved and the sound of his feet on the townhouse steps is the sound of a situation that has just changed its shape.
Cormac and I look at each other for one second and the argument is not over and neither of us is wrong and both of us are moving.
Finn is gone.