The Second Time I Chose Me

CHAPTER 4

He made me wait.

Not deliberately, he stood up, walked to the window, stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his shoulders set in that particular way that meant he was choosing words carefully. My father was not a man who spoke carelessly, and the things he chose to think through before saying were always the things that mattered most.

Dayo didn't move. He sat in the chair by the wall with his arms crossed and his face neutral in the particular way it went neutral when he already knew what was about to be said.

"Twenty-three years ago," my father said, "your mother and I were not yet together. I was twenty-two, newly named heir of Crestfall, and I was sent to an inter-pack summit as part of my father's delegation." He paused. "Gregory Reeves was there. He was thirty and already Alpha, his father had died young, and he'd stepped into power fast. He was impressive. Everyone thought so."

I waited.

"There was a dispute at the summit. A smaller pack, the Ashvale pack from the coast, was being pressured to cede some of its southern territory to Ironveil. Gregory said it was a resource issue. The Ashvale Alpha said it was a takeover dressed in formal language." He turned from the window. "I sided with Ashvale. Publicly. In front of the whole council."

"What happened?"

"Ashvale kept their territory." My father's jaw moved. "And two years later, they were gone. Pack dissolved. Alpha family scattered. Official cause was an internal conflict that escalated beyond repair." He looked at me. "I have never believed that."

The room was very quiet.

"He dissolved a pack," I said.

"I believe he did." My father came back to his desk and sat down. "I have no proof. I have never had proof. But Gregory Reeves has a long memory and patience that most people mistake for restraint." He held my gaze. "When your name first came up in connection with Callum's bond, two years ago, Gregory reached out to me. Friendly. Collegial. Talked about our sons and daughters growing up, about the future of both packs. It felt like an olive branch."

"But?"

"But Gregory Reeves does not extend olive branches. He extends leashes." My father's hands were flat on the desk. "I think he's been watching you specifically because he knows you're mine. And I think the bond with Callum is something he intends to use, not celebrate."

My mind was moving fast, laying pieces down next to each other the way Dayo had started teaching me without knowing he was teaching me anything yet.

Gregory's messenger at breakfast. The voicemail. The pre-collected phone number.

The bond as a leash. Not on Callum. On me. On my father through me.

"He wants Crestfall," I said.

"He wants influence over Crestfall," my father corrected. "Through you."

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment. In my first life I'd been so consumed by Callum, by the bond, by loving him, by trying to understand how someone who looked at me the way he did could destroy me the way he did, that I had never once looked at the wider structure around him.

His father's design.

Callum had been a weapon Gregory aimed without ever telling him what he was being aimed at.

That didn't make what he did acceptable. But it made it make sense in a way it hadn't before.

"I want to be trained," I said. "Not just physical. Pack law. Negotiation. How to read what's under what people say. Everything Dayo knows and everything you know." I looked at my father. "If Gregory Reeves wants to use the bond as a lever, I want to be the person who shows up to whatever meeting he arranges and removes the lever entirely."

My father was quiet for a moment.

"That's not a defensive strategy," he said.

"No."

"That's a direct play. You'd be walking into his plan and dismantling it from the inside."

"Yes."

He looked at Dayo.

Dayo tilted his head slightly. "She's got the instincts for it. Whether she has the skill base is what the next two months are for."

"Two months," my father said. "And then what?"

"And then I walk into whatever room Gregory Reeves wants to put me in," I said, "and I walk out on my own terms."

My father looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I could hear the fire in the wall grate, the distant sound of the pack settling into evening.

Then he nodded.

"Dawn," he said. "Both of you."

I stood. Dayo stood. I was almost to the door when my father said my name.

I turned.

He was still behind his desk, and he looked older suddenly, or maybe just more visible, the grief and the guilt and the long years of it sitting on his face without the careful management he usually kept them under.

"I should have told you about Gregory years ago," he said. "I thought protecting you meant keeping you away from it. I understand now that I just left you in the dark."

I thought about my first life. About how true that was and how much it had cost.

"You're telling me now," I said. "That's what matters."

I left him there and walked down the hallway toward the room I'd be sleeping in, and I was so deep in my own thoughts that I almost walked directly into Cassidy.

She was leaning against the wall outside my door with her arms crossed, red-brown locs loose around her face, looking at me with the particular expression she had when she'd been waiting long enough to have an opinion about it.

"An hour," she said. "I've been here an hour."

"I was talking to my dad."

"I know. I could tell by the way everyone in the pack house was walking quietly past that office." She looked at me. "Are you okay?"

The question was simple. She asked it simply. And something about the simplicity of it, about Cassidy asking it, Cassidy who had been my best friend in both lives and who did not know that and was still standing here, cracked something open that I'd been keeping sealed all day.

"Ask me in August," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.

She studied me. Then she pushed off the wall and pulled me in, no warning, just arms around me, and I let it happen because I was tired and because she was one of the only people in either life who'd ever just held on without needing me to explain myself first.

"Okay," she said into my shoulder. "August."

She pulled back and held my face in her hands briefly, freckled cheeks and sharp eyes that saw too much, and then she let go and said: "Food. I made it myself. You're eating it."

She turned and started down the hallway and I followed her, and she was already talking, about the pack's training schedule, about the beta's son who'd embarrassed himself at the last run, about nothing in particular, the warm ordinary noise of someone who was glad I was there.

I let it wash over me.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I didn't take it out. But I felt it, and I knew without looking that it wasn't a number I recognized.

Gregory Reeves was already following up.

He wanted me to know he was patient. That he could wait. That he would still be there when I thought I'd gotten far enough away.

I kept walking. Kept listening to Cassidy. Kept my breathing even and my face easy and my mind very, very sharp.

Let him be patient.

I was just getting started.