HIS BROTHER'S WIDOW SMELLS LIKE MY MATE

CHAPTER FOUR: In Which Kael Is The Last To KnowEverything, As Usual

Kael Veltharr — POV

I am not a complicated man.

This is not false modesty. I have run this pack since I was twenty-two. I understand territory, hierarchy, strategy, the mechanics of alliance and threat and the long business of keeping a large number of wolves from destroying each other. I am good at this. I am methodical and calm and I make decisions with the kind of clarity that comes from knowing exactly what matters.

I do not, apparently, understand my wife.

This is the conclusion I have arrived at after three years of marriage and three days of watching Taviel look at Seren with an expression I cannot decode.

It is not hostile. That would be simpler. I could explain hostility — she feels displaced, she feels threatened, the arrangement is awkward. I have a whole speech prepared for hostility. I have been preparing it for a week.

It is not hostile.

It is something else. Something careful and intent and private, like she is reading something only she can see.

Taviel has never been unreadable to me before.

I knocked on the door of the east wing office after dinner.

She was at the desk, going over healer's reports, her reading glasses on her nose (she refuses to wear them around the pack; she considers them a tactical vulnerability; I find this deranged and also incredibly endearing).

She looked up.

"Can I help you?" she said, in the voice that means I am not annoyed, I am very much annoyed, I am choosing to address this through tone management.

"I wanted to check in," I said.

"I'm fine."

"You've said that six times today."

"Because I've been asked six times today."

I came in. I sat in the chair across the desk, the one she keeps there because she runs pack business from this room and sometimes she needs to have Uncomfortable Conversations in it. I wondered briefly if I was about to have one.

"Is this about Seren being here?" I asked.

Taviel took off her reading glasses. Set them on the desk. Looked at me with the particular patience of someone deciding how honest to be.

"I'm managing it," she said.

"That's not a no."

"No. It's not."

I leaned forward. "Tav. I need you to tell me if this is hurting you. I made this decision and I should have talked to you first—"

"Yes," she said. "You should have."

"—and I'm sorry I didn't. Truly. I thought I was doing the right thing."

"You were doing a right thing," she said. "Seren needed a place and you provided one. I understand that." A pause. "I just would have appreciated knowing before she arrived."

"I know."

"In future," she said, with the precision of a woman who has chosen every word, "decisions about who lives in our house are joint decisions."

"Agreed." I meant it.

She looked at me for a moment longer than felt quite casual. Something in her eyes — a weight I didn't have a name for.

"Is there something else?" I said.

"No," she said. And she put her reading glasses back on and turned back to her reports.

I went to check on Seren before I slept.

She was in the garden — the small one off the kitchen, the one Taviel keeps meticulously maintained, because Taviel is someone who controls the things she can control. It was late and cold and Seren was sitting on the bench in her too-light coat, face up to the sky.

"You'll freeze," I said, from the doorway.

"Wolf. I run warm." A pause. "Come and sit."

I sat.

We were quiet for a moment. The sky above the packhouse was clear, the moon three-quarters full, the stars sharp.

"This is strange," Seren said. "Being here. Davan talked about Veltharr territory so much. It's strange to finally see it."

"Strange good or strange bad?"

"Strange familiar," she said. "Like I've dreamed it."

I looked at her.

She had her eyes closed, face still tilted up, and in the moonlight she looked like someone letting themselves be held by the night.

Something moved in my chest.

I filed it immediately, firmly, under grief-adjacent and not to be examined.

"He loved it here," I said.

"I know." She opened her eyes. "He loved you. He talked about you more than you probably know."

My throat tightened.

"He was," I said, and then stopped, because there is no sentence that finishes that adequately.

Seren nodded. She didn't push me to finish. We just sat, two people who had lost the same man differently, and let the night hold that between us.

I went to bed.

I did not examine the thing that had moved in my chest.

I am not a complicated man.

From across the hall, in the east wing office with the light still burning, Taviel sat at her desk and stared at a healer's report she had not read a single word of in forty minutes.

She heard me walk past her door.

She heard me go to the garden.

She heard Seren's voice, low and soft, and my voice answering.

She took off her reading glasses and pressed the heels of her hands against her closed eyes.

"Moon Goddess," she said quietly, to no one, to everything, "I genuinely cannot tell if you're helping me or finishing me off."

The packhouse marker stone, buried in the eastern wall, flickered once.

Taviel did not see it.

She put her glasses back on and went back to work.