Chapter 8 The Cold Bed
The word landed without apology.
"Months," Tobias said. "Maybe less."Before he hurts someone
Freda's hands gripped the table edge. The wood felt solid beneath her palms, but nothing else did. She wanted to argue, to push back, to find some other answer buried between his words.
There wasn't one.
She stared at the tree line, where the pines stood dark and still, and let it settle. Months. Maybe less. Not a warning anymore. A deadline.
She had protected Liam from everything she could control , poverty, exposure, loneliness, fear. She had built walls between him and the world and called it safety.
But she could not build a wall between him and himself.
She exhaled slowly. "I'll think about it."
Tobias didn't push. He simply nodded and went inside, leaving her alone with the cold air and the sound of the forest and the weight of a decision she had been running from for five years.
Across the region, Cassandra Monroe opened her eyes to a ceiling she knew too well.
Same crown molding. Same gray morning light pressing through the curtains. Same wide, empty expanse of bed beside her.
She didn't move immediately. She lay still, the way she had learned to, and listened.
Nothing. No sound from the adjoining room. No footsteps in the hall.
He wasn't here. He was never here.
She turned onto her side and pressed her palm flat against the untouched half of the bed. The sheets were smooth. Cold. They had been cold every morning for five years, because Lucian Langford did not sleep in this room. He slept on the narrow couch in his study, and they had never spoken about it once.
She was thirty-one years old.
She was, by every pack standard, exceptional. Blonde, tall, Beta-ranked, from one of the most respected families in the region. She had done everything right , said the right things, worn the right expressions, stood at the right distance beside a man who never reached for her hand.
She rose and crossed to the window. Outside, the pack grounds were beginning to stir. Sentinels rotating. Kitchen staff moving through the courtyard below. Everything in its place, running exactly as it should.
She dressed without hurrying. Dark slacks, a structured blouse, hair pinned back at the base of her neck. She checked her reflection once, briefly, the way you check a building for cracks before stepping inside.
Composure. Always.
Lucian was already at the table when she arrived for breakfast.
He sat beside Thomas, a briefing folder open between them, his coffee going cold at his elbow. He looked up when she entered.
"Morning," he said.
"Good morning." She took her seat across from him.
He looked back down at the papers.
Thomas gave her a small, careful nod. He was always careful around her, the way men were careful around things they didn't fully understand but had learned not to disturb.
She reached for the teapot and poured with steady hands.
"The eastern boundary report came in," Thomas said, sliding a page toward Lucian. "Ironmoor's scouts were spotted again, two miles inside the tree line."
Lucian's jaw tightened. "Same area?"
"Same stretch. Third time this month."
"Pull the night rotation and double it." He turned a page. "I want Reed's team on the perimeter from dusk until, " He paused, glancing up briefly. "I'll brief them at training."
Thomas nodded, already writing.
Cassandra ate. She listened. She offered nothing and was asked for nothing. Across the table, Lucian drank his cold coffee and worked through his papers and did not look at her again.
Pack members filtered through the dining hall in small groups. A few nodded to her. She smiled back , warm, measured, precise. The kind of smile that closed conversations before they could become questions.
She had learned that smile years ago.
Lucian left at quarter past seven.
He said nothing as he pushed back his chair , just gathered his papers, gave Thomas a final word, and walked out. His footsteps faded down the corridor.
No goodbye. No pause at the door. Nothing she could have pointed to as deliberate cruelty. That was the thing about him. It was never cruelty. It was absence. A consistent, disciplined absence that had nothing to do with hatred and everything to do with something she had never been allowed to see.
Thomas gathered his files and made a quiet exit shortly after, leaving Cassandra alone at the long table.
She refilled her tea.
Around her, the hall emptied slowly. Plates cleared, voices faded. Morning moved on without ceremony.
She sat with her cup between both hands and let herself do something she rarely permitted.
She thought.
Not about the territory reports or the Ironmoor situation or the dinner she needed to plan for the regional delegates. Not about the things she was good at managing, the visible, measurable, solvable things.
She thought about Lucian.
Not the Alpha. Not the political match her family had celebrated. The man who slept on a narrow couch rather than share a room with his own wife. The man who said good morning the way you recited a line, consistently, correctly, with nothing living underneath it.
Five years.
Five years of doing everything right, and she had never once seen him look relieved to be home. She had never heard him laugh at something she said. She had never caught him watching her the way people watched things they wanted.
She was not naive. She had known, walking into this arrangement, that it was political. She had told herself that was enough , that respect and function and shared purpose could be a kind of foundation.
But this was not a lack of passion.
This was grief.
Persistent, private, carefully managed grief that had never once lifted in five years. It lived in the set of his shoulders every morning. In the way his eyes sometimes went somewhere else in the middle of a sentence.
Whatever he had lost , whoever he had lost , he had never stopped mourning it.
Cassandra set down her cup.
For the first time in five years, she did not reach for the next task on her list.
She sat very still and asked herself the question she had been too proud, or too afraid, to ask until now:
What is he grieving?
And then, quieter, harder:
Why has it never stopped?
She didn't know. But she intended to find out.
She had given this marriage everything she had.
She deserved to know what she had been competing with.
She pushed back her chair and stood. Smoothed her blouse. Pinned the last loose strand of hair back into place.
There was something buried beneath his silence, something the council had helped keep hidden, something that still held him in its grip.
She would uncover it.
And when she did, she would finally understand what she was truly up against.