The Debt He Owed My Wolf

Chapter 5

Wren

Faye leaves me a robe and steps out to give me privacy, though I can hear her and Kade still talking in low voices in the hallway, just out of what should be normal earshot. I catch fragments anyway: “sixteen years,” “should have known,” “not her fault” – words I've never once heard strung together about myself before, in that particular order, meant sincerely.

I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the door, waiting for someone to come back in and tell me this was all a mistake, that I'm being sent back before the day is even over. Part of me is already rehearsing the apology I'll give Corwin for causing this much trouble, the way I've rehearsed a hundred apologies before for offenses far smaller than fainting in front of a room full of elders.

Instead, Kade knocks.

"You can come in," I say, pulling the robe tighter around myself, bracing without meaning to.

He steps inside, filling the doorway the same way he filled it back at Ashgrove last night, except now his expression is different, less controlled, like something underneath the calm has cracked loose and he hasn't quite decided what to do about it yet.

"This is your room," he says. "Not a shared one. Yours."

I blink at him, certain I've misheard. "Mine."

"You lock the door from the inside if you want to. No one comes in without you saying so first. Not me, not Faye, not anyone in this pack." He says it like it's obvious, like it should go without saying at all, and I feel a strange, sick lurch in my chest as I realize it's never once occurred to a single person to say that to me before, not in twenty-two years.

"Why are you doing this?" I ask. It comes out sharper than I mean it to, almost accusing, like I'm daring him to admit some hidden motive.

He doesn't flinch at the tone. "Because you fainted in front of a room full of elders rather than tell a single person you were in pain. Because your own brother let you bleed for a decade and called it discipline. Take your pick of reasons."

"That's not what I meant." I pull my knees up to my chest, the robe pooling loosely around me. "Why would an Alpha like you want anything to do with someone like me? You could have anyone. Any pack in this territory would hand you their daughter without a single condition attached."

He's quiet for a moment, studying me the way he did last night in the kennel, like he's deciding exactly how much truth I can handle hearing all at once.

"There's a substance called Crimson Wolfsbane," he says finally. "Regular wolfsbane, fed on wolf blood until the leaves themselves turn red. It doesn't grow wild anywhere I've ever heard of. Someone has to cultivate it deliberately, harvest it carefully, and feed it to a target on purpose. A six-year-old doesn't have access to something like that, let alone the knowledge of how to use it correctly. Someone gave it to your parents and let a child take the blame for the rest of her life."

The room tilts slightly, and I grip the edge of the blanket to steady myself. "You think someone did this on purpose. To my own parents."

"I think your brother has spent sixteen years punishing a child for a crime an adult actually committed," he says, voice hard now. "And I fully intend to find out exactly which adult."

I don't know what to do with that information. It sits heavy and unfamiliar in my chest, right alongside the old, familiar guilt that's lived there so long I've forgotten how to breathe around it without that particular weight pressing down.

"There's something else," I say quietly, before I can talk myself out of saying it. "One of the girls downstairs was gossiping earlier. About me. About being your mate."

His jaw tightens, just slightly, betraying more than his voice does. "And?"

"Is it true?"

"Yes."

The single word lands harder than I expect it to, harder than I have any right to let it. "You didn't ask me."

"No," he agrees. "I didn't. And I should have." He crosses the room slowly and sits in the chair by the window, deliberately putting distance between us rather than closing it, which somehow makes this whole conversation easier to sit through. "I'm not going to force a bond on you simply because my wolf recognized yours the second I walked into that dining room. You get to decide what happens next, entirely. All I'm asking is that you let yourself actually heal first, before you decide anything at all about the rest of it."

"And if I decide I want nothing to do with any of this?"

"Then that's your right," he says, and I can hear exactly how much it costs him to mean it fully. "But I'd be lying if I told you it wouldn't break something in me to hear it."

I don't know how to answer that. Nobody has ever handed me a choice this large before, let alone framed it as something that belongs entirely to me, and for a long moment I simply sit there, turning the strange, unfamiliar shape of it over in my hands like an object I don't yet know how to hold correctly.

"I don't know how to want things," I admit finally, quieter than I mean to. "I've spent so long just trying to survive each day that I don't remember how to want anything beyond simply getting through it."

Something softens in his expression, just barely, at the edges. "Then we'll start smaller. What do you want for dinner tonight?"

It's such a strange, ordinary question after everything else we've just discussed that a startled laugh escapes me before I can stop it; the first real one in longer than I can remember having.

"I don't know that either," I admit, still half-laughing.

"Good thing," he says, rising to his feet with the faintest hint of a smile finally breaking through, "we've got plenty of time to figure it out together."

He pauses at the door, one hand on the frame, and glances back at me like he's debating whether to say one more thing before he leaves.

"For what it's worth," he says, "Faye will teach you to read those labels on the medicine bottles, if you want. She mentioned you couldn't. That's not a failing, Wren. It's just one more thing nobody bothered to give you. We can fix that too, whenever you're ready."

The offer sits strangely in my chest, gentle in a way I don't have a name for yet. Nobody has ever offered to fix something about my life like it was simply an oversight, rather than a flaw in me personally.

"Okay," I say, and mean it.

He nods once, satisfied, and steps out, pulling the door most of the way shut behind him, but not fully closed, I notice, as though he wants me to know I could call out if I needed to, without having to get up and open it myself.

I sit alone in the quiet afterward, running my thumb along the edge of the blanket, turning his words over slowly in my mind. You get to decide. I don't know yet what I'll decide, or when, or whether I even trust myself to choose correctly after so many years of having every choice made for me. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, the not-knowing doesn't feel like fear.

It feels almost like room to breathe.