ThorneVale

Chapter Four

Del found him in the pack house's back room an hour after the rite ended, and Callum knew from the sound of her footsteps in the hall, quick and hard, that she hadn't come to offer comfort.

"You have got to be joking," she said, shutting the door behind her harder than it needed to be shut. "Tell me you did not just do what I think you did."

"You were there. You saw what I did."

"I saw you reject a bond in front of the entire pack like it meant nothing." Del crossed the room and planted herself on the other side of his desk, arms folded, dark eyes bright with a fury that had been building since she was fourteen years old and had watched their father hollow himself out over a grief he never let himself name properly. "Do you have any idea what that looked like? What it did to her?"

"I know exactly what it did to her." Callum kept his voice level with an effort that cost him more than he'd let his sister see. "That's not the part I can afford to think about right now."

"Then what part are you thinking about, because from where I'm standing it looks like you just sentenced a woman you've never met to the wane, over something that hasn't even happened yet."

"It happened to Mom." The words came out flatter than he meant them to, worn smooth from years of not saying them out loud. "It'll happen to her too, eventually, if the Circle finds out she's mine before I've had the chance to protect her properly. You know that. You were there for enough of it to know exactly what I'm trying to prevent."

Del's expression cracked, just slightly, the anger giving ground to something older and more tired. "I was eight," she said. "I don't remember most of it. I remember Dad stopped talking for a while. I remember you stopped sleeping in your own room for about a year." She sat down heavily in the chair across from him, some of the fight going out of her shoulders. "I'm not saying you're wrong to be scared, Cal. I'm saying you didn't have to do it like that. In front of everyone. You could have pulled her aside. Talked to her. Given her some explanation instead of just a door slamming shut in front of half the town."

"An explanation puts her at more risk, not less. The less she knows, the less there is for the Circle to pull out of her if they ever get close enough to try."

"The wane doesn't care about your risk assessment." Del's voice sharpened again, the argument they'd clearly circled before finding its old grooves easily. "She's going to get sick, Callum. Really sick, if this drags out. You know what that looks like. And you just told her nothing, gave her no warning, no context, nothing to prepare for what her body's about to do to her."

Callum didn't have a good answer for that, because she was right, and they both knew it. He'd made the calculation the way he made every difficult calculation, weighing one danger against another and choosing the one he thought he could survive watching happen. But Del's version of the math had never quite matched his, not since their mother died, because Del had grown up believing that secrets were a kind of violence too, one that didn't announce itself as clearly as a blade but cut just as deep given enough time.

"What do you want me to do," he said finally, quieter than before. "Walk it back? Tell her it was a mistake, complete a bond I'm not ready to protect properly?"

"I want you to at least be honest with her about why. She deserves that much, even if you're not ready for the rest of it." Del stood, straightening her jacket, the particular motion of a woman ending a conversation on her own terms rather than his. "Her name's Wren, by the way. Since you clearly didn't bother to ask before you rejected her in front of the whole town."

She left before he could respond, the door clicking shut behind her with considerably more control than it had when she'd come in, which somehow felt worse than if she'd slammed it.

Callum sat alone in the quiet office for a long while afterward, the map of pack territory still rolled up on the desk where he'd left it that afternoon, the whole conversation with Marcus about Ashen Circle scouts feeling suddenly, uselessly small next to what had just happened in that clearing.

He thought about his mother, which he tried not to do more often than necessary, because the memories that surfaced were never the good ones first. He thought about the particular sound his father had made, once, three days after the funeral, when he thought no one was in the house to hear it. A sound with no words in it at all, just grief with nowhere left to go.

He thought about the way Wren had looked at him in the clearing, before he'd said anything, in the half second where the bond had been nothing but pure and unguarded recognition, and he made himself set that image aside too, because it was dangerous in a way none of the Circle's scouts along the northern boundary had managed to be in years.

He had rejected her to keep her alive. He believed that. He would keep believing it, he told himself, for as long as it took to actually make it true.

But sitting there in the dark office with Del's words still hanging in the air, her name's Wren, he understood for the first time that belief and rightness were not necessarily the same thing, and that he had just bought himself a debt he didn't yet know how he was going to pay.

Outside, past the pack house's windows, the moon hung high and bright over the ridge, indifferent to the mess he'd made beneath it.