Chapter 14 014

Chapter 14 014

MEIRA

I made it to my room before it hit me.

I closed the door behind me and stood there with my back against it and just breathed for a second. The hallway was quiet. The house was quiet. My father's car was long gone down the drive and everything had gone still again like none of it had happened.

But it had happened.

I pushed off the door and sat on the edge of the bed and put my face in my hands.

My father had taken a man's entire life. His pack, his land, his name, everything Edmund Vael had spent thirty years building — my father had walked in like a friend and taken all of it. Buried him in lies in front of a council. Left him with nothing. And two years later that man was dead.

I had grown up in that house. Eaten at that table. Walked on that land. Never knowing any of it.

And Darius had grown up watching it happen. Seventeen years old with no wolf and no pack and a father who never got back up. He had spent fifteen years turning himself into the man my father would eventually have to come to. Building everything from nothing, pointing all of it at one thing.

And I was that thing.

Not a person. A move.

I knew that. He'd told me from the beginning and I had accepted it and told myself I was fine with it because I had no other choice. But sitting in that study listening to him lay it all out and watching my father try to talk around it and look at me like I was something he could still manage — something had cracked open that I didn't know how to close back up.

The tears came without warning.

Not the quiet kind. The kind that come from somewhere deep and don't ask permission, the kind that had been building for longer than just today. For the ceremony and Kaelan's cold voice and Isabella's hand on her stomach and my father on that platform offering me up and the four years before all of that when I had tried so hard to be enough and never once managed it.

I cried until my chest hurt. Until there was nothing left to push out and I was just sitting there on the edge of the bed wrung out and empty and quiet.

I pressed both hands to my stomach.

Still here. Both of you still here.

That steadied me. It always did.

I sat there for a while after the crying stopped, just breathing, letting everything settle back down. The room was still, afternoon light coming in through the gap in the curtains, the house quiet around me.

I thought about my father's face when Darius said the name. Ironwood Pack. I had watched the color change in him, that flicker of something he couldn't hide fast enough. He had known exactly who Darius was the moment he heard the name and he had sat there and tried to negotiate anyway. Tried to get me back not because he wanted me but because losing me to Darius made him look weak.

That was it. That was all I had ever been to him. A reflection of how he looked to other people.

I got up and went to the bathroom and ran the tap cold and pressed a wet cloth to my face and stood there looking at myself in the mirror.

Red eyes, blotchy skin, hair a mess. I looked like someone who had just cried everything out and was figuring out what came next.

Good. That was exactly what I was.

I washed my face properly, fixed my hair, changed my shirt. Took my time about it. By the time I was done I felt like myself again, or at least the version of myself I was building here, the one that was still figuring out its shape but was getting steadier every day.

I went downstairs.

Cora was in the kitchen and looked at my face when I came in and said nothing, which was exactly right. She put the kettle on and I sat at the table and waited.

"Where is he," I said.

"Study," she said.

I nodded.

She put a cup in front of me and I drank half of it and then got up and went down the hall.

I knocked once and pushed the door open.

Darius was at the desk. Papers in front of him, pen in hand, but he wasn't writing. He was looking at the window. He turned when I came in.

I came in and closed the door behind me and stood there.

"I want in," I said.

He looked at me. "You are in."

"Not the way you mean," I said. "Not as the thing you're using. As someone who chose this. Who knows what it is and wants to be part of it."

He was quiet.

"He took your father's pack," I said. "He took your family's name. And he spent my whole life making me feel like I was nothing so I'd never look too closely at what he actually was." I held his gaze. "I'm done being something that happens to other people's plans. I want to be in this one on purpose."

Darius looked at me for a long moment. The way he always looked at me, steady and unreadable, taking his time.

"What does that mean to you," he said. "Being in it."

"It means you tell me things," I said. "Not everything, not if you're not ready, but enough. It means I'm not standing in doorways overhearing conversations that involve my own life." I paused. "And it means when my father comes back, and he will, I'm not upstairs waiting to be kept out of it. I'm in the room."

He held my gaze.

"You understand what you're asking," he said. "Your father isn't going to come back quietly. This gets harder before it gets easier."

"I know."

"You're pregnant."

"I know that too," I said. "I'm not asking you to put me in danger. I'm asking you to stop treating me like I need protecting from the truth."

Something shifted in his face. That small movement I had started to notice, the one that came and went too fast to read properly.

He put the pen down.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat.

He leaned forward and put his arms on the desk and looked at me straight.

"My father had a second in command," he said. "Man named Croft. When Nicholas moved against the Ironwood Pack, Croft helped him from the inside. Fed him information, undermined my father's decisions, made sure the council accusations had enough detail to stick." He paused. "Croft is still alive. Still in your father's inner circle."

I stared at him. "You never told me that."

"No."

"Why are you telling me now."

He looked at me for a second. "Because you asked to be in the room," he said. "So now you're in the room."

I sat with that. The weight of it, the realness of it. This wasn't just my father and old land anymore. There were people, names, a whole structure underneath it that had been running quietly for fifteen years.

"What are you going to do about Croft," I said.

"I'm working on it."

"Does my father know you know about him."

"No."

"And when he finds out."

"That's when things get interesting," he said.

I looked at him across the desk. This man who had been carrying this for fifteen years, who had built everything around it, who had taken me in as a move in a game my father didn't know he was already losing.

I had come here with nothing and no choice. But I was choosing now. Fully, with everything I knew, I was choosing to stand in this.

"Okay," I said. "So what's next."

For the first time since I had met him, something that was almost a smile crossed his face. Brief, barely there, gone before I could be sure of it.

He picked the pen back up.

"I'll tell you when I'm ready," he said.

I almost smiled back. "That's not good enough."

"No," he said. "It isn't." He looked at me. "Give me tonight. Tomorrow morning, before anyone else is up, come to the study. I'll tell you everything."

I nodded and stood up.

I walked to the door and stopped with my hand on it.

"Darius."

He looked up.

"Your father would be proud of what you built," I said. "I just thought you should hear that."

I didn't wait for a response. I pulled the door open and went back down the hall.