Bound By The Alpha

Chapter 14: Tobias

It was Callie, of all people, who first noticed the shift in her brother, catching Sienna alone during a fitting for the wedding dress with a question that had clearly been sitting with her for some time.

"Have you noticed anything different about Tobias lately," Callie asked, adjusting a fold of fabric with more focus than the question really required. "He's been distracted. Distant, almost, in a way that isn't like him. I keep wondering if it's just the stress of everything with Duskwood, but it feels like something else."

Sienna considered the question, turning her own recent observations over. She had noticed something, now that Callie mentioned it — Tobias's usual steady focus during strategy sessions occasionally drifting, small pauses in conversation that hadn't been there a month ago, an uncharacteristic quietness in moments that used to draw out his dry, understated humor.

"I've noticed something," Sienna admitted. "I don't know what it is, though. He's not exactly forthcoming about his own feelings, in my experience."

"No," Callie agreed, a little rueful. "Definitely not. Comes from being Beta to two different Alphas back to back, I think. He learned a long time ago that his job was managing everyone else's crisis, not having his own."

Sienna filed the observation away, and found the opportunity to test it a few days later, catching Tobias alone in the study late one evening, both of them reviewing diplomatic correspondence long after Cassian had retired for the night.

"Can I ask you something," she said, setting aside the letter she'd been reading, "and you can tell me it's none of my business, the same courtesy you extended me once."

Tobias looked up, something wary entering his expression, as though he already suspected what was coming. "That's an ominous opening."

"You've seemed distant lately. Callie noticed it too, actually, which is partly why I'm asking. I don't want to pry into something you'd rather keep private. But I also don't want to just watch you carry something alone, the way you never let any of us do, if there's something going on."

Tobias was quiet for a long moment, setting down his own papers with visible reluctance. "It's Alpha Ellery," he said finally, the admission clearly costing him something. "Not — not romantically, exactly. Or not only that. We've been in frequent contact these past weeks, given the alliance negotiations, and I find myself thinking about our conversations long after they've ended. Looking forward to the next diplomatic correspondence more than the actual content probably warrants."

Sienna felt a smile tug at her mouth despite the gravity of the admission. "Tobias, that sounds like exactly what it sounds like."

"I know how it sounds," he said, a little defensive. "But it's complicated. She's an Alpha in her own right, with her own pack to consider. And I'm — I'm a Beta, currently deep in the middle of managing an active regional conflict that her alliance with us puts her at genuine risk over. It hardly seems like the right time to be thinking about any of this, let alone acting on it."

"When is it ever the right time," Sienna said gently. "I met my mate the same night my Alpha rejected me publicly to protect me from a war I didn't yet understand I was part of. I don't think 'the right time' is a real thing most of us actually get to wait for."

Tobias considered that, something in his careful composure cracking slightly. "It's different for me," he said. "You and Cassian had the bond — undeniable, immediate, impossible to fully ignore even through everything else. I don't have that. Just an ordinary, inconvenient feeling that keeps growing despite every practical reason I have to set it aside."

"Ordinary feelings matter too," Sienna said. "I don't think the bond makes love more real, just more immediately undeniable. What you're describing sounds real to me, Tobias, bond or no bond."

He was quiet again, turning the observation over with the same careful consideration he brought to most things. "Has she said anything," he asked finally, a little sheepish at his own question, "in your correspondence with her? About me, I mean."

Sienna smiled, recalling several offhand comments from Alpha Ellery's letters that she'd noted without fully registering their significance at the time — a warmth in the way she referenced Tobias's diplomatic skill, a specific attentiveness to his opinion that had stood out, in retrospect, against her otherwise brisk, pragmatic correspondence style.

"I think you should ask her directly," Sienna said, "rather than have me relay secondhand impressions. But for what it's worth, I don't think you're imagining this being mutual."

Tobias exhaled, something like relief and terror mingling in his expression. "This is absurd," he said. "I'm supposed to be the steady one. The one managing everyone else's crises, like Callie said. Not sitting here getting flustered over a woman's correspondence like some lovesick cub."

"I think even steady people get to have their own complications," Sienna said. "You've spent months making sure Cassian and I got to have ours safely. Maybe it's time someone returned the favor."

---

The opportunity came sooner than Tobias probably expected, Alpha Ellery arriving in person the following week for a scheduled strategy session regarding the growing coalition against Ashgrove and Duskwood, the formal business of the visit providing convenient cover for whatever else might unfold beneath it.

Sienna watched the two of them together during the session with quiet interest, noticing details she might have missed before Callie's initial observation — the way Alpha Ellery's attention consistently returned to Tobias whenever he spoke, the particular care Tobias took in articulating points he knew she'd find persuasive, a dynamic that had clearly been building for weeks beneath the surface of purely diplomatic necessity.

She found an excuse to leave them alone together after the formal session concluded, drawing Cassian away under the pretense of reviewing wedding logistics, though the knowing look he gave her as they left the room suggested he'd noticed the same dynamic she had.

"You're playing matchmaker," he said, once they were out of earshot, something amused in his voice.

"I'm creating space for two people who clearly need it," Sienna said. "There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Slightly," Sienna admitted, laughing despite herself.

Whatever conversation unfolded in their absence, Tobias emerged from it later that evening with an expression Sienna had genuinely never seen on him before — something lighter, almost boyish, at odds with the careful, steady composure he'd maintained through every crisis of the past several months.

"I don't want details," Cassian said, greeting his Beta with obvious amusement, "but I want to note, for the record, that you look considerably less like a man managing a regional coalition and more like a man who just had a very good evening."

"Shut up," Tobias said, though without any real heat behind it, a genuine smile breaking through his usual composure.

"I'm happy for you," Sienna said, and meant it fully, watching some of the accumulated weight of the past months' careful vigilance ease, if only briefly, from Tobias's shoulders. "You've spent so long taking care of everyone else's crisis. It's good to see you have something good happening in the middle of your own life too."

"It's early," Tobias said, though the smile didn't fade. "We're taking it slowly, given everything else happening around us. But — yes. Something good. I'd almost forgotten what that felt like, honestly, buried in all this strategy and danger."

Sienna felt something warm settle in her chest, watching the small, unexpected joy unfold amid the larger, more dangerous story they were all still navigating together — a reminder, she thought, that even in the middle of gathering alliances and preparing for whatever confrontation with Kade still lay ahead, life continued to offer its own quiet, hopeful surprises, for those paying attention closely enough to notice them.