The Second Time I Chose Me

CHAPTER 7

I stood at the tree line for a long time.

My name. Eleven years ago. I would have been seven years old.

Gregory Reeves had opened a file on me when I was seven years old.

I looked at the document until I had every detail memorized, then I screenshotted it, deleted the thread the way my father had said, and walked back to the pack house with my face completely neutral and my mind running so fast it felt like a different kind of running from anything Dayo had put me through.

I didn't tell my father that night. Not because I didn't trust him, but because I needed to understand what I was holding before I handed it to someone else. A document like that changed the shape of things. It meant Gregory's interest in me wasn't opportunistic, wasn't about the bond activating and his son needing a mate and me happening to be the match.

It was older than that. Deliberate. Designed.

The question was why a seven-year-old girl warranted a formal file in an Alpha's council records.

I lay in the dark and thought about it until I found the edge of the answer.

My father. His public opposition to Gregory at the summit. The Ashvale Pack, dissolved two years later. Gregory's long memory.

He hadn't started a file on me because of Callum.

He'd started a file on me because of Felix Cole.

I was leverage before I was ever a person in Gregory Reeves' world.

Morning came and I was on the training field at five a.m. and I ran harder than I had any morning before. Dayo noticed but didn't comment, which was his way of saying he saw me and was giving me the space to work through whatever it was physically before he asked about it mentally.

After the run, in the training room, he put me through an hour of combat basics and then stopped.

"Sit," he said.

I sat.

He sat across from me and looked at me steadily. "Yesterday afternoon you came back from that walk with your father and spent the rest of the day somewhere else while your body was here."

"I was thinking."

"I know. I want to know about what."

I made a decision. I told him about the document.

He didn't move while I talked. He had a quality when he was processing important information of going very still in a way that was different from his regular stillness, more deliberate, more interior, like he was simultaneously listening and filing and calculating.

When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.

"Eleven years," he said.

"Yes."

"He's been building the file for eleven years."

"At least. That's the oldest document she sent. There could be more."

Dayo leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "The girl who sent it. Sera."

"Gregory's niece. Archival access."

"Why is she helping you?"

It was the right question. The one I'd been circling since last night.

"I don't know yet," I said. "But I think she's been inside that system long enough to understand what Gregory does with the people he considers useful. And I think at some point she looked at the file with my name on it and made a decision about whose side she wanted to be on."

"That's a theory."

"It's the best one I have."

"What does she want in return?"

I paused. "I don't know that either."

"Then that's your next conversation." He sat back. "You can't build on an asset you don't understand. Find out what she wants. Don't promise anything. Just find out."

I nodded.

"And Zara." His voice shifted slightly. "Your father needs to know about the document."

"I know."

"Today."

"I know." I looked at him. "I wanted to understand it first."

"You understand it enough." He stood. "Show him after lunch. He's going to want to make some calls."

I spent the morning session in pack law. My father had pulled books I didn't know existed, not textbooks, actual council records, archived rulings, the kind of documents that showed how pack law worked in practice rather than theory. How bond disputes had been handled historically. What the formal process of rejection required. What protections existed for wolves in politically complicated bond situations.

The answer, it turned out, was not many. The protections were thin and heavily dependent on the political weight of the families involved. A smaller pack rejecting a bond claim from a larger one was technically legal and practically complicated in ways that could be stretched across years.

Unless the rejecting party could demonstrate that the bond itself had been manipulated. Coerced. That external interference had shaped the circumstances under which the bond formed.

I read that section three times.

External interference. A file opened when I was seven. A stepsister deployed to position herself in my household. A father who may have helped place her there.

Gregory Reeves hadn't just planned for the bond. He'd planned the environment around the bond. He'd arranged the pieces on the board before the game officially started.

If I could prove that, even partially, the legal ground shifted entirely.

I took the document to my father after lunch.

He sat at his desk and looked at it for a long time. I watched his face move through things he was trying not to show me, recognition, anger, something that looked like grief.

"Felix," Dayo said, from the chair by the window.

"I see it." My father's voice was very controlled. "I see it." He set the phone down on the desk and pressed his hands flat on either side of it. "He's been building a case. Not against you, against me. You're the mechanism."

"I know."

"He wants Crestfall under Ironveil influence. He's used the bond as the official reason, but the real reason is twenty-three years old." He looked up at me. "He's settling a score."

"Yes."

"Through my daughter."

"Yes."

The room was very quiet.

Then my father stood up and he walked to the window and he stood there with his back to us for a moment, and when he turned around his face was the face I'd seen once in my first life, only once, at a moment of crisis I barely survived, the face he wore when Felix Cole had stopped managing himself and started deciding something.

"We're going to get ahead of this," he said. "Not react. Get ahead." He looked at Dayo. "I want council contacts. People who have seen Gregory operate before. People who owe me something or owe him nothing." He looked at me. "And I want to know everything about this Sera. Who she is, what she's accessed, why she moved."

"I'll reach out again," I said.

"Carefully."

"Always."

He nodded once. Then something shifted in his face again, back toward the father, away from the Alpha, just for a second.

"You should have been a child," he said. "When he opened that file. You were seven years old and he was already..." He stopped. Pressed his mouth together.

"Dad."

"I know." He straightened. "I know. We work with what is."

I looked at him across the desk, at the document with my name on it lying between us, at the window and the fields beyond it and the ordinary world of Crestfall continuing outside.

"He made one mistake," I said.

My father looked at me.

"He built the whole thing around me being someone who didn't know." I held his gaze. "I know."

My father looked at me for a long, long moment.

Then he said, "Yes. You do."

That night, I sent Sera one message.

What do you want?

Three hours passed. I was almost asleep when the reply came.

To watch him lose.

And then, a second later:

There's a meeting. Two weeks. He hasn't told your father yet. He's going to propose it as routine inter-pack business. It isn't.

I sat up in the dark.

What is it?

The reply took longer this time. Long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer.

Then:

He's going to present a pre-bond agreement. Drafted eleven years ago. With your father's signature on it.

My blood went cold.

That signature is real?

No.

One word. Then nothing else.

I sat in the dark with my phone in my hand and understood that everything I thought I was preparing for had just become something larger.

Gregory Reeves wasn't planning to negotiate.

He was planning to arrive with a forged document and end the conversation before it started.