ThorneVale

Chapter Nine

Marcus found him at the northern boundary the next morning, checking a section of fence that didn't strictly need checking, which Marcus pointed out within the first thirty seconds of arriving.

"You're avoiding the house," Marcus said, falling into step beside him along the tree line. "Which is a strange choice, given you spent last night there."

"I'm working the perimeter. The Circle's still active."

"The Circle's been quiet for four days. You're working the perimeter because it's easier than sitting with whatever's happening in your chest right now, and we both know it." Marcus said it without heat, the flat observation of a man who'd known Callum long enough to see through most of his usual maneuvers. "How is she?"

"Stable. For now." Callum kept walking, eyes on the tree line rather than on his second, which didn't stop Marcus from watching him with an attention that felt entirely too perceptive. "Proximity helps. Del's right about that much."

"Del's right about most things when it comes to this, if you want my honest opinion, which I know you don't."

"I never said I didn't want it."

"You never say you want it, and then you do the opposite of it anyway, which amounts to the same thing." Marcus stopped walking, forcing Callum to stop too or leave the conversation unfinished, which after six years of partnership Marcus knew perfectly well he wouldn't do. "Cal. I watched what happened to your father after your mother died. I was there for most of it, same as you. I understand exactly what you're trying to prevent, better than almost anyone left in this pack. But I need you to hear something, and I need you to actually hear it this time instead of filing it away with everything else you don't want to look at directly."

Callum said nothing, which Marcus took, correctly, as permission to continue.

"Your father didn't fall apart because he loved your mother. He fell apart because he lost her, and grief doesn't care whether the love that caused it was wise or foolish or dangerous. If you keep this woman at arm's length for the next month, the next year, however long you think it'll take you to feel safe enough to let her in, you're not preventing the danger. You're just choosing a slower version of the same loss. She wanes either way, Cal. The only difference is whether you're standing close enough to actually protect her when the Circle finally makes its move, or whether you've spent so long keeping distance that you're not in position to do anything at all when it matters."

The words landed harder than Callum wanted to admit, settling into the same place his sister's accusations had settled the night before, an argument he recognized the shape of because some quieter part of him had been making it too, in the small hours, when the careful architecture of his self control tended to slip.

"I don't know how to do this without repeating what happened to them," he said finally, and the admission cost him more than he expected it to. "I've built the last six years around not being the reason someone I love becomes a target. I don't know how to just set that down because Del thinks I should."

"Nobody's asking you to set it down entirely. You're allowed to be careful. You're allowed to increase security, to plan, to do every practical thing your instincts are telling you to do." Marcus's voice had gone quieter, less argument now and more something closer to plain fact, offered without judgment. "What you're not allowed to do, not if you actually want to keep her alive and not just keep yourself safe from watching her die, is shut her out of the decision entirely. She has a right to know what she's facing. She has a right to choose whether she wants to face it standing next to you or not."

Callum looked out over the tree line, the morning light cutting long shadows across the boundary he'd walked a hundred times without ever quite finding the answer he needed there. "And if she chooses not to. If I tell her everything and she decides the risk isn't worth it."

"Then at least it was her choice. Not yours, made for her, in a clearing, in front of the whole town." Marcus clapped a hand briefly on his shoulder, the gesture of an old friend rather than a subordinate. "You're a good Alpha, Cal. You make hard calls well, most of the time. But this isn't a pack decision. It's hers. You've been treating it like the first kind of problem when it's actually the second, and I think some part of you already knows that, or you wouldn't have spent all morning pretending to inspect a fence that's been fine for three weeks."

Callum didn't have an answer for that, not one that held up under the plain weight of Marcus's assessment, and the two of them finished the perimeter walk in a silence that felt less companionable than usual, weighted with a decision Callum knew he was going to have to make soon whether he felt ready for it or not.

He thought about Wren, wrapped in blankets by the fire the night before, pale and furious and trying so hard to hold herself together through something she didn't yet fully understand. He thought about the half second in the clearing when the bond had first snapped into place, before fear had closed his face into the mask he'd worn for it, the pure unguarded recognition that had felt more like coming home than anything had in years.

He didn't know yet how to tell her the truth without handing her, along with it, the full weight of exactly what loving him might cost her.

But Marcus was right, and he knew it, in the same place he knew most uncomfortable truths, quiet and persistent and impossible to fully outrun.

She deserved the choice. Whatever she decided to do with it.