Chapter 48 The Reserve
Kattie’s POV
The drive from the pack border to the city took just over two hours.
I had made it in less. Tonight I was not rushing.
I was thinking.
The satchel on the passenger seat held three things: a personal correspondence set, a bound record copied from the deep archive over several months, and a small sealed container I had kept in my possession for two years without using.
The record was the important one.
It detailed the original bonding ritual conducted at Rhys’s father’s request.
Not the standard succession bond. The second one. The one nobody in the current pack generation knew about because it had been conducted quietly, documented in a secondary archive, never added to the main record.
Because what it documented was a compromise.
Rhys’s father had interfered with his son’s bond.
Not the way I had — not through herbs or gradual suppression. He had done it once, decisively, at the moment of Rhys’s first bond reading, when the bond had pointed toward someone his father considered unsuitable. A human girl from outside the territory. He had commissioned a redirecting ritual that suppressed the bond’s primary signal and let another take its place.
The original bond had fought back. Rhys’s wolf had always been stronger than his father anticipated. Eventually the suppression weakened.
What I had done, years later, was not create interference from nothing.
I had found interference that already existed.
And reinforced it.
That distinction mattered to me.
Even now.
Even if nobody else would see it that way.
I looked at the road.
The city lights were visible in the distance. I was meeting Elder Dowan of the outer council — a man who had been waiting years for something that could legitimately challenge Moonstone’s Alpha authority. I had kept him at arm’s length until now.
I was done keeping him at arm’s length.
I told myself the information I was bringing wasn’t a weapon. I had told myself this carefully, in my room, before I packed the satchel. It was disclosure. It was truth. Rhys’s bond had been manipulated before I ever touched it — his father had done the original damage. What I had done was continue something that was already broken.
The truth deserved to be known.
The part I was careful not to look at too directly was what happened to Rhys after Dowan had it.
I thought about him.
Not the Alpha. Not the pack’s center of gravity that everyone oriented around.
Rhys. The one I had known at twelve, who had been serious and slightly awkward and genuinely terrible at accepting help from anyone. Who had learned, over years, to accept it from me.
Who had stood in a hall full of his pack and said her name in a tone I had never once, in fifteen years, heard him use for anything.
The grief arrived cleanly.
That was almost worse than if it had been complicated.
He was not coming back. I had understood that fully in my room, in the hour after the session. Whatever I had built between us — through time, through patience, through everything I had given, it was not the same as what was happening to him now.
It had never been the same thing.
That was the part I had always known.
The part I had chosen, every day for fifteen years, not to know.
She had walked into his pack and his wolf had recognized something in five weeks that fifteen years hadn’t produced between us.
I turned off the main road.
I was not doing this out of revenge.
I needed to believe that.
She destabilized him. Whatever he thought he felt….a human with no wolf blood, no pack standing, an arrangement built on political necessity — she would unravel everything he had built. His authority. His pack’s stability. The Moon Goddess’s structure that the entire pack ran on.
I was protecting him.
That was what I told myself.
I was protecting him from something he couldn’t see clearly yet.
The way I had always protected him.
The way he had never once asked me to.
The outer city lights were bright. I pulled onto the side street where Dowan’s meeting house sat and turned off the engine.
I sat in the quiet for one minute.
I thought about Bella’s face in the archive room — focused, still, the look of someone who had been underestimated so many times they had stopped expecting anything else.
I thought about Rhys’s voice in the hallway saying her name.
I thought about fifteen years.
One minute.
Then I picked up the satchel.
Opened the car door.
And stepped out into the cold.
By morning, there would be no containing it.