The Second Time I Chose Me

CHAPTER 3

Dayo arrived in three hours, not four, which meant my father had probably called him before my mother even hung up.

He was out of the car before it stopped, long braids swinging, grinning the way he always grinned, like the world was a joke he was in on and everyone else was still catching up.

"You look like you've been thinking too hard since six a.m.," he said, taking my bag without being asked.

"I've been thinking since before six."

"Even worse." He tossed the bag in the trunk. "Your father has called me three times since I left the pack house. Twice to make sure I was driving fast enough and once to ask if I'd arrived yet when I was still forty minutes out."

Despite everything, I laughed. It came out rougher than I meant it to, but Dayo caught it and softened slightly, just for a second, before the grin came back.

My mother stood in the doorway. I went to her and she held me and I let her, pressing my face into her shoulder, feeling the slight tremble she was working to hide.

"Call me when you get there," she said into my hair.

"Every day," I said back.

I got in the car. As Dayo pulled out, I watched the house get smaller through the window. Priya's face appeared in the upstairs window, just for a moment, watching us go. I looked back at her until the car turned the corner and she disappeared.

Dayo let me have twenty minutes of silence, which told me he was smarter than most people gave him credit for.

Then: "You want to talk or you want music?"

"Neither yet."

"Okay." He turned on music anyway, low, something instrumental. "Let me know."

I watched the city give way to highway, highway to open land, the landscape opening up the way it always did when you drove east toward Crestfall territory. I thought about Gregory Reeves' voicemail. I thought about the timestamp, 7:52 a.m. Before his man had even left our house.

He'd had my number before he sent that messenger.

Which meant he'd been collecting information about me before this morning. Maybe well before.

In my first life, I hadn't known Gregory was the architect of anything. I'd thought he was distant, formal, occasionally cold, the way powerful Alphas sometimes were with their sons' mates. I'd thought he was simply someone who tolerated me because the bond left him no choice.

I'd been so wrong.

"Dayo," I said.

"Mm."

"What do you know about Gregory Reeves?"

A pause. Not a surprised pause, a considering one. "Why?"

"Because he called me this morning. Personally. Before I'd ever met him."

The car was quiet for a moment.

"He called you," Dayo said.

"Had my number already. Smooth voice. Completely unbothered. Wished me happy birthday like we were old friends." I looked at him. "What do you know about him?"

Dayo's hands adjusted on the wheel. Not nervously, the way someone adjusts when they're deciding how much to say.

"He's been Alpha of Ironveil for twenty-two years," he said. "Longer than most. Which means either he's brilliant, or he's removed everyone who could challenge him, or both." He glanced at me. "We've crossed paths twice at council summits. Both times he knew things about our pack that he had no official reason to know."

"He collects information."

"He builds pictures," Dayo said. "That's different. Information is a fact. A picture is a strategy."

I thought about that. About my number in his phone before breakfast. About the messenger sent not to introduce himself but to show me he could access my home at will. About the voicemail designed not to threaten but to make me understand, quietly, that I was already inside a frame he'd built.

He'd been building a picture of me.

The question was how long he'd been building it, and what he planned to do with it.

We drove in silence for another hour. Then the landscape shifted again, the particular quality of the eastern forest coming in through the windows, pine and something cool and deep underneath it, and I felt the tension in my shoulders change, not disappear, but become something I could carry differently.

Crestfall. Safety, in the way that my bones understood before my brain caught up.

My father was on the steps.

I was out of the car before Dayo stopped it. My father came down the steps in two strides and caught me the way he used to when I was small, both arms, completely solid, the kind of hold that felt like the world couldn't move around it.

He didn't say it was okay. He didn't say I was safe. He just held on.

I let myself have exactly thirty seconds of it.

Then I pulled back and looked up at him. The grey at his temples. The eyes that were mine but older and carrying things mine hadn't had to carry yet.

"You look tired," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You look tired," he said again, gently, which was his way of saying I see you and you don't have to perform right now.

I followed him inside. Dayo came behind with my bags, and the pack house folded around me, woodsmoke, pine, metal polish from the training room floors. Every visit since I was a child, this smell had meant safety. It still did.

My father led me to his office. Dayo came in. The door closed.

They looked at me and waited.

And I had a decision to make, how much to say, how to say it, how to give them enough to help me without telling them something that made them look at me like I'd broken.

"Gregory Reeves called me this morning," I said. "Before his messenger even left our house. He had my number. He was watching the visit happen in real time."

My father's eyes sharpened. "What did he say?"

"Nothing threatening. That's what made it threatening." I kept my voice even. "He's been building a profile on me. And I don't think this started today."

"No," my father said slowly. "It didn't."

I went still. "What do you know?"

He looked at Dayo. Something passed between them, the look of two people deciding simultaneously that a conversation they'd been delaying was no longer something they could afford to delay.

"Gregory Reeves has been watching this family for years," my father said. "I thought I understood why. I'm beginning to think I was only seeing part of it."

"What's the part you were seeing?"

"The bond. His son needing a mate to come into his full Alpha authority. You being the likely match." He leaned forward. "What I didn't account for was that Gregory would move before the bond activated. Before you even had a chance to feel it."

"He's not waiting to see what I choose," I said.

"No." My father's voice was quiet. "I don't think he is."

The office was very still. Through the window, the eastern training fields caught the last of the afternoon light.

"Then we don't wait either," I said. "I need to know everything. About Gregory, about how pack law works in bond disputes, about what my actual rights are if I choose to refuse." I looked at my father steadily. "All of it. Starting tonight."

My father looked at me for a long moment.

"There's something I need to tell you first," he said. "About Gregory and me. About something that happened a long time before you were born."

He said it like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and had finally found the right place to set it down.

The room felt very small suddenly.

"Tell me," I said.