The Second Time I Chose Me

CHAPTER 10

Ten days before the meeting, Callum Reeves showed up at Crestfall.

Not officially. Not with his father's delegation or a formal request or any of the protocol that an inter-pack visit required. He showed up alone, in a car he'd clearly driven himself, and he stopped at the outer gate and asked the wolves on duty if he could speak to Zara Cole.

The duty wolves called my father. My father called me.

I stood in his office and processed this information.

"He came alone," I said.

"Yes."

"Without telling his father."

"He used his own vehicle. Not a pack car." My father's voice was controlled. "The duty team said he's been there twenty minutes. He hasn't pushed. He's just waiting."

I thought about what it meant that Callum had driven to Crestfall alone, without authorization, and was sitting at the gate waiting quietly instead of pressing his Alpha weight on the people keeping him out.

In my first life, I'd have run to that gate.

"What do you want to do?" my father asked.

"I want to know why he came before I decide anything." I looked at him. "Send Dayo to talk to him first. Not me. Dayo goes, finds out what he wants, comes back."

My father nodded once. "And if he won't talk to Dayo? If he insists on you?"

"Then he goes home." I kept my voice even. "I don't negotiate under pressure. Not from anyone."

It was the most important thing Dayo had taught me. Urgency is a tool someone else is using. When a situation is designed to make you feel like you have to decide right now, the correct response is almost always to slow down.

Dayo came back twenty minutes later and sat across from me in my father's office with the careful expression he wore when something had surprised him.

"He knows about the meeting," Dayo said.

The room went still.

"Gregory told him?" my father asked.

"No. He found out through the council secretary." Dayo paused. "Through Alec Marsh."

I stared at him.

"Alec Marsh told Callum about the meeting," I said slowly.

"More than the meeting." Dayo looked at me. "Callum knows about the agreement. The forged one. He knows his father built it." He held my gaze. "He said, and I'm repeating exactly, 'I need to talk to Zara because I think my father is about to do something I can't undo and I don't know what to do about it.'"

The office was very quiet.

I thought about Alec Marsh, twenty-four years old and scared, holding a forged document with his fingerprints on it. I thought about what it would cost a junior council secretary to tell an Alpha's son that his father had built a lie.

Everything. It would cost everything.

Which meant either Alec Marsh was braver than I'd given him credit for, or he'd calculated that Callum finding out was safer than carrying the secret alone, or both.

Or Callum had found out another way and Alec had simply confirmed it when asked directly by someone with Alpha authority.

I stood up.

"I'll see him," I said.

My father looked at me sharply.

"Not alone," I said. "Dayo stays. And I want the conversation outside, not in the building."

My father stood too. "Zara..."

"He came here without his father. He asked to talk. He used the word can't." I looked at my father steadily. "He's not here as Gregory's son right now. He's here as someone who just found out what his father is." I paused. "I know what that feels like."

Not from this life. From the other one. From the morning I'd been strapped to a table and understood, in the worst possible way, what kind of man I'd believed in.

I walked to the outer gate with Dayo two steps behind me.

Callum was leaning against his car, arms crossed, and he straightened when he saw me coming. I recognized him with a bodily jolt I didn't let reach my face, the broad shoulders, the dark hair, the grey eyes that I'd once thought looked trustworthy until they didn't.

He was eighteen. He looked younger than I expected and older than he should.

We stood on opposite sides of the gate.

"Zara Cole," he said. Not a question.

"Callum Reeves," I said back. Same tone.

He looked at me for a moment. The bond was doing what it did, pulling, pulling, and I could see him feeling it, could see the confusion of encountering someone he was drawn to who was standing at a complete closed distance from him. He'd expected, I guessed, something softer. Someone who would meet the bond with the bond.

"You know why I'm here," he said.

"Tell me anyway."

He looked at Dayo briefly, then back at me. "My father built a document. An agreement, dated ten years ago, that says your father consented to a formal bond arrangement between us." He held my gaze. "I know it's not real."

"How?"

"Because I know my father. And I know that if the agreement were real, he wouldn't be hiding it from me." His jaw worked. "He's been hiding this whole plan from me. The approach to your family, the messenger on your birthday, all of it. I found out because Alec, because someone showed me." He paused. "I'm not here to claim anything. I'm not here on his behalf. I'm here because I think you deserve to know that not everyone in the Ironveil Pack is moving against you."

I looked at him carefully.

He was telling the truth. I knew his face too well not to recognize when he was telling the truth, and I hated that I knew that.

"What do you want me to do with that information?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I just, I couldn't let the meeting happen without you knowing."

"I already knew," I said. "About the document. About your father's timeline. About most of it."

He stared at me.

"I've been preparing for two months," I said. "I know about the file he opened when I was seven. I know about the succession pressure. I know about the forgery and who built it." I watched his face go through things rapidly. "The only thing I didn't know until today was whether you were part of it."

"I'm not."

"I know that now."

He was quiet for a moment. The gate between us seemed very literal suddenly, very deliberate.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"Walk into that meeting and end it on my terms," I said. "Not his."

Callum looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I felt the full weight of the bond doing what it was designed to do, reaching, seeking, trying to collapse the distance between us. I felt it and I did not move.

"What do you need from me?" he said.

Not what can I do. What do you need.

It was such a small distinction. It was enormous.

"Nothing right now," I said. "But I want you to go back to Ironveil and act like this conversation didn't happen. Stay close to Alec Marsh. Make sure he's protected." I held his gaze. "And when the meeting happens, tell your father you're attending."

"He'll want me there to formalize the bond."

"I know." I didn't blink. "Be there anyway."

He searched my face for whatever he was looking for. I don't know if he found it.

"Okay," he said finally.

He got in his car. I watched him drive away until the car was gone and the road was empty and the only sound was the wind moving through the trees at the gate.

Dayo stood beside me.

"That was not what I expected," he said.

"Me either." I turned back toward the pack house. "He's not his father."

"No," Dayo said. "He's not."

"That complicates things."

"Or simplifies them," Dayo said. "Depending on what you plan to do."

I walked back toward the pack house and thought about a clause on the fourth page of my terms document, the one I'd written at midnight about Callum, and about whether what I'd seen at that gate today changed it or confirmed it.

I thought it confirmed it.

I also thought about Alec Marsh, who had risked everything to tell an Alpha's son the truth, and about Sera, who was watching from inside the archive, and about a twenty-two-year plan that had just developed its first real c***k.

Not from me. From the people Gregory had used and underestimated.

He'd built everything on the assumption that the pieces on his board would stay where he put them.

He was wrong.

I went inside and picked up my pen and started on the fifth page.