The Second Time I Chose Me

CHAPTER 5

Three weeks into the summer, I was faster, sharper, and permanently sore.

Dayo ran me through two sessions every day early morning for physical conditioning and combat basics, late afternoon for what he called strategic positioning, which was his way of describing how to move through social situations where someone was trying to get something from you without announcing it.

"Every room has an agenda," he told me, during a session that involved sitting across from him while he asked me questions. "Your job is not to answer the question you're asked. Your job is to understand the question underneath it."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean…" He leaned forward. "Why are you so quiet lately, Zara?"

I looked at him. "Because I'm thinking."

"Wrong."

"What?"

"That answer gives me information I can use. It tells me you're processing something, that your guard is up, that you might be emotionally off-balance." He spread his hands. "Try again. I ask you: why are you so quiet lately?"

I thought. "I'm tired from training." I kept my face easy. "Dayo runs me into the ground."

He smiled. "Better. Now I only know you're tired. Which I already knew. I've gotten nothing."

I turned this over. "What if the question underneath is something I can answer? What if being honest is the right move?"

"Then you be honest. But it's a choice you've made consciously, not a reflex." He looked at me steadily. "The difference between those two things is the difference between strategy and vulnerability."

I thought about Callum. I thought about every time, in my first life, I had answered the question I was asked without pausing to understand what was underneath it. Every time I'd given him access to my fear, my doubt, my devotion, treating honesty like it was the same as safety.

It wasn't. Honesty was a tool. Safety was something you built.

My father found me at the edge of the eastern fields that evening, after dinner.

The sun was going down over the tree line and the air had that particular quality it had at the end of long days used up and soft, like the world was settling. I was sitting on the fence watching the younger pack wolves run practice drills in the field, and he came and leaned on the fence beside me.

We sat in silence for a while.

"Dayo says you're picking things up faster than he expected," my father said.

"Dayo told me I was mediocre at best this morning."

"That's Dayo's version of impressed."

I glanced at him. He was looking at the field, and there was something in his face that I recognized the particular look of a person building up to something they'd been holding.

"What?" I said.

"Callum Reeves' father called me today."

The fence under my hands went very still. Or maybe I did. "Why?"

"Because he knows you're here." My father's voice was neutral, but I knew him too well. There was something tight under the neutral. "And he wanted to discuss as he put it the situation."

"He knows we're mates."

"He suspected before. After you left the Ironveil pack lands so suddenly, he's moved past suspecting." My father finally looked at me. "He's proposed a meeting. End of summer. Before the academic year starts. Pack leaders, both families. To discuss the bond."

My stomach dropped. "You said no."

"I said I would consider it."

"Dad…"

"Because if I say no outright, he knows we are actively avoiding it. And then instead of a scheduled meeting with terms we can prepare for, we get an ambush." He turned to face me fully. "I know what you want. I am going to help you get it. But I need you to understand that the Alpha of the Ironveil Pack has held that territory for twenty-two years through exactly the kind of strategic patience we're trying to build in you." He held my gaze. "He is not Callum. He is not Priya. He is something else."

I thought about what my father said in his office the first day, he's been expecting you.

"What does he want?" I asked.

"His son to come into his full power. An Alpha needs his mate bond for that, even briefly. Even if it's rejected afterward."

"That's not happening."

"I know." My father's hand came down on my shoulder, solid and sure. "But we have to be smart about how it doesn't happen. Because if we simply refuse and he escalates, we are in a conflict between two packs, and that spills onto people who have nothing to do with us."

I looked out at the field. The young wolves were finishing their drills, breathless and laughing, falling against each other with the easy carelessness of people who didn't know yet that the world had edges.

"What if I'm the one who ends the meeting?" I said.

"What do you mean?"

"What if I walk into that meeting fully prepared, fully positioned and I am the one who controls how it ends?" I turned to look at him. "Not running from it. Not avoiding it. Standing in the middle of it and deciding the outcome."

My father studied me for a long time.

"That is an enormous amount of confidence," he said.

"I have six weeks left with you and Dayo." I held his gaze. "Tell me what I need to know."

He was quiet. The field below us was emptying out, the last of the young wolves calling out to each other as they headed in.

Then my father nodded once, slowly.

"We start the law and procedure work tomorrow," he said. "And I am going to tell you everything I know about Gregory Reeves, because knowing your enemy is not optional." He pushed off the fence. "Come in when you're ready."

He walked back toward the pack house, and I turned back to the last light on the field.

End of August. A meeting I hadn't expected. Gregory Reeves, who had apparently known I was coming before I even arrived.

And somewhere in the Ironveil Pack lands, Callum, who was seventeen the last time I saw his face looking down at me with horror in his eyes, the horror of a man who had just understood, too late, exactly what he had done.

He was eighteen now. He would be feeling the pull of the bond, confused by the distance, not understanding why his mate had disappeared.

Let him wonder.

By the time I walked into that meeting room, I would know more about his father's operation than his father thought possible. I would know pack law forwards and backwards. I would know exactly what I was allowed to refuse and exactly how to refuse it.

Gregory Reeves had been expecting me.

He had no idea what he was expecting.