Claimed By Silver

Chapter Twenty-Three: What I Can't Compete With

Freya’s POV

I don't tell Naomi about Veera. I can't, obviously — not the wolf, not the assassination attempt, not any of it — but I find myself thinking about her more than I expect to in the days that follow, turning over that image of her in my head at odd moments, unable to fully shake it.

"You've been quiet," Naomi says, over lunch on a day I've barely tasted my own food. "Quieter than usual, even for you lately."

"Just thinking."

"About the mystery man?" She says it lightly, though there's real curiosity underneath it, the same curiosity she's carried for weeks now, patiently waiting for me to offer more than I have.

"Something like that." I push food around my plate, unable to voice the actual shape of what's sitting in my chest. I met the woman he almost chose instead of me, and she's beautiful in a way I don't think I'll ever be, and she's spent decades loving him, and some small, ugly part of me can't stop wondering what would have happened if the bond had never found me at all.

I don't say any of that. I just shrug, and Naomi, sensing I'm not ready to share more, lets it go the way she always does. "Whatever it is," she says instead, "you know I'm here. Whenever you're ready to actually tell me the whole story instead of these little fragments you've been feeding me for weeks."

"I know. Thank you." And I mean it, even though the whole story is so far from anything I could actually explain to her that the gap between what she imagines and what's actually happening feels almost comic, if it weren't so exhausting to carry alone.

That night, Sterling notices immediately that something's still sitting wrong in me, the way he notices everything now.

"You've been distant," he says, settling beside me on the couch, silver eyes searching my face. "Since Veera's apartment. Talk to me."

"It's stupid."

"Nothing you feel is stupid to me. Tell me anyway."

I hesitate, embarrassed by the smallness of what I'm about to admit, but he waits, patient, unhurried, and eventually the words come anyway. "She's beautiful, Sterling. Not just pretty. Beautiful in a way that seems almost designed to be impossible to look away from. And she's known you for decades. She understands things about your world I'll never fully understand, whatever we build together. I keep thinking about what it means that you almost chose her, before any of this, before the bond forced your hand."

"The bond didn't force anything," Sterling says quietly, taking my hand. "I want to be precise about that, because I think you're conflating two different things. The bond determined who I felt compelled toward. It didn't determine who I actually wanted, in the ordinary sense two people want each other. I had decades with Veera, Freya. Decades of opportunity to choose her, freely, without any bond compelling me one way or the other. I never did. Not once. Not even when everyone around us assumed I eventually would."

"Why not?"

He's quiet for a moment, considering the question seriously rather than offering an easy, comforting answer. "Because something in her has always felt calculated to me, even before I had proof of it. Every kindness felt measured, weighed against what it might earn her eventually. I don't say that to be cruel — I think she genuinely believes she loves me, in whatever way she's capable of loving anyone. But it never felt like being known, the way it does with you. It felt like being managed."

"And I don't feel that way? Managed?"

"No." He says it with such immediate certainty that some of the tightness in my chest finally starts to loosen. "You've never once tried to manage me, Freya. You've fought me, argued with me, told me plainly when I've done something wrong — the knife, the watching, all of it. You've never once tried to shape yourself into whatever version of a person you thought I wanted. That's what I actually fell in love with. Not just the bond. You, specifically, in all your inconvenient, stubborn honesty."

"I called you a monster the first week we met."

"You did. Repeatedly." A ghost of a smile crosses his face. "I found it strangely endearing, even then, though I'd never have admitted it at the time. Veera has never once, in the entire time I've known her, called me anything other than exactly what she thought I wanted to hear. There's something exhausting about being agreed with constantly, Freya. I didn't fully understand that until you gave me the alternative."

Something in me eases at that, old insecurity loosening its grip slightly, though not entirely. "I still don't understand how you can be so certain. That what we have is more real than what you could have had with her."

"Because I've lived both possibilities," he says simply. "One of them, for decades, felt like performance. The other, for the past few months, has felt like the first honest thing I've been allowed to want for myself in a very long life. I don't need the bond to tell me which one is real, Freya. I already know, independent of anything the bond demands of either of us."

"What was it like," I ask carefully, "growing up expected to end up with her? Did you ever imagine it? A life with her instead."

Sterling considers the question seriously, giving it the weight it deserves rather than dismissing it to spare my feelings. "I imagined it the way you imagine an obligation, not a desire. A life that would have been comfortable, politically sound, exactly what my father would have approved of. I never once imagined it with any hunger attached to it. That absence should have told me something decades ago, if I'd been paying proper attention to my own life instead of simply drifting through what was expected of me."

I sit with that a while, letting it settle properly, some of the ugly comparison in my chest finally quieting into something more manageable. "Thank you," I say eventually, "for being patient with me about this. I know it probably sounds ridiculous, being jealous of a woman who tried to have me killed."

"It's not ridiculous," Sterling says, pulling me closer. "It's human, and you're allowed the occasional ordinary insecurity even in the middle of something as extraordinary as everything else we're dealing with. I'd be more concerned if none of this affected you at all."

Grant calls the next morning, before I've even finished my coffee, voice tight with a different kind of urgency than before.

"I found something," he says. "Financial records. Nothing conclusive yet, but there's a transfer, three weeks before the hearing, from an account I'm fairly confident belongs to our father, routed through two intermediaries before it reaches an account Veera controls."

"Is it enough," Sterling asks, already reaching for his coat.

"Not yet. But it's more than we had yesterday, and I've got someone looking into the intermediary accounts now, trying to trace the full chain properly." Grant's voice carries careful optimism, tempered by experience. "Give it a few more days. If this holds up, we may finally have something concrete enough to bring back to the Council."

Sterling relays this to me, and I feel something shift in my chest — not relief exactly, not yet, but the first real sense that Veera and Marcus's careful protection might not hold forever, that patience and proper investigation might eventually catch up to what instinct has already told all of us is true.

"A few more days," I say. "Do you think it'll be enough?"

"I don't know," Sterling admits. "But I'd rather spend these days building a real case than sitting here waiting for whatever they try next. Grant's right to be thorough. If we move too soon, without solid proof, we hand them exactly the ammunition they need to discredit everything we've built."

I nod, letting myself lean into him, some of the anxious energy of the past few days finally finding somewhere useful to settle — not erased, but at least given a direction, a purpose, something more productive than simply waiting to be attacked again.

"Whatever happens," I say quietly, "I'm glad you told me the truth about Veera. About all of it. I don't think I could have survived not knowing, waiting for her to strike again without understanding why."

"I promised you honesty," Sterling says, pressing a kiss against my temple. "I intend to keep that promise, whatever it costs either of us going forward."

We sit together a while longer, the morning light stretching slowly across the room, and for the first time in days I let myself believe, cautiously, that the ground beneath us might actually hold, however precarious it's felt since Veera's name first entered our lives.