Chapter 15 15

Chapter 15 15
Chapter Fifteen

June's POV

We spent the first hour at the kitchen table.

Cassian laid out what he knew methodically, the way I was learning he did everything, without drama and without softening. Adrian had left BloodMoon territory heading east, which put him on the road toward Shadow land. Gordan was still camped at the ridge with three remaining wolves. The other three had gone back, presumably to escort Adrian in.

"He'll come to the gate himself," Cassian said. "He won't send anyone else for this part. It's personal now."

"It was always personal," I said. "He just needed the legal framing to feel in control of it."

Cassian nodded. "When he arrives I'll meet him at the boundary. Alpha to Alpha, formal and witnessed. He'll want to project reasonableness at first. That's his pattern from what you've told me."

"He's very good at it," I said. "He can seem completely measured while he's dismantling you. By the time you realise what's happening you've already agreed to three things you didn't mean to."

"He won't have that room with me." Cassian's voice was even. "I know the approach. And I'm not carrying anything he can use."

I looked at him across the table. "He'll try to speak to me directly."

"Yes."

"I want to be there."

The silence that followed was not refusal. It was consideration, which was different, and I had learned to read the difference.

"Not at the gate," Cassian said finally. "But close enough that if you choose to speak, you can. On our terms and on our ground."

I accepted that. It was reasonable and I knew it.

We spent the next hour going through what I remembered. I told it as precisely as I could, pulling up details I had packed away carefully in the back of my mind during two years of quiet survival. The undisclosed territory agreement with Harrow pack. The financial discrepancies I had noticed in documents left open on Adrian's desk on three separate occasions. The meeting I had sat through between Adrian and two visiting Alphas where a boundary adjustment had been agreed verbally that never appeared in any council record.

Cassian listened and Ryker, who had appeared quietly at some point with a notebook, wrote.

When I finished Ryker looked at his notes and then at Cassian. "This is enough for a formal council inquiry if it's substantiated."

"It would need corroboration," I said. "My word alone as a rejected mate won't carry sufficient weight. Adrian will frame everything I say as grievance and bitterness."

"Your word plus the mate claim registration plus any documentation we can pull," Cassian said. "And there may be others in BloodMoon who know pieces of this. People who stayed quiet because there was no safe place to speak."

I had not considered that. The thought sat in me strangely, both hopeful and heavy. How many people had stayed quiet in the same way I had, not from complicity but from the absence of anywhere safe to put the truth.

After Ryker left, Cassian took me out to the yard.

Not to train, though I could see in the way he moved that training was part of how he thought through problems. Just to walk the boundary of the immediate grounds. He showed me the layout with a quiet thoroughness. Where the pack members were positioned at different hours. Which entry points were watched and how. The small details that added up to something solid.

I paid attention carefully.

Not because I planned to run but because knowing the shape of a place made it feel like somewhere you belonged rather than somewhere you were merely being kept.

"Your wolf," Cassian said as we rounded the far corner of the yard. "How much has she recovered."

I considered it honestly. "She's stronger than she was a week ago. She's present in a way she hasn't been in months." I paused. "I don't know if I could shift fully. I haven't tried."

"You don't need to for anything I'm planning," he said. "But knowing where you are with it matters."

We stopped near the eastern tree line, far enough from the boundary to be well within safe ground. The pines were close here and the air was cooler, carrying that particular mineral coldness of deep forest.

"He marked Paige on the eastern altar," I said, not sure why I said it right then except that the trees reminded me of the BloodMoon ceremony ground. "I was in the hall outside. I felt it happen through what was left of the bond. Like something being pulled out of me without anesthetic."

Cassian was very still beside me.

"I fell down in the hallway," I continued. "No one came. Everyone was inside for the ceremony." I looked at the pines. "I lay on that floor for I don't know how long before I got up and started walking."

"That's when you ran."

"That's when I ran."

He turned to face me and I turned to face him and we stood in the cold tree-filtered light looking at each other with the particular honesty that had been building between us since the beginning.

"He's going to stand at my gate in two days," Cassian said quietly, "and present himself as a reasonable man with a legitimate grievance." His eyes held mine. "I need you to know that I have never been more certain of anything than I am of this. Whatever he says when he gets here, however he frames it, the answer is no. Full stop. Non-negotiable."

My throat tightened.

"I know," I said.

"I want you to know it here," he said, touching his chest once. "Not just in your head. Here."

I breathed in the cold pine air and felt Elara press forward warm and certain.

"I know it here too," I said.

He held my gaze for one more moment, then turned back toward the house.

I followed him in out of the cold, and for the first time in two years the walls around me felt like protection rather than a trap.