The alpha's chosen rogue

Chapter Six — The Message

I found out about my father on a Tuesday.

Not because anyone told me directly — that would have required someone in Blackthorn Pack to treat me like a person who deserved information, and most of them were still in the careful, watchful stage of deciding whether I was worth the effort. I found out because I was walking past the meeting building at the wrong moment and the window was cracked and Caden's voice carried when he was trying to keep it from doing exactly that.

"He sent an envoy." Lyra's voice, flat and controlled. "Arrived at the south border an hour ago. Ironveil Pack seal."

A pause.

"He's requesting a formal dialogue." A beat of silence I could hear the weight of. "Regarding the return of pack property."

Pack property.

I stood very still outside the window. The stone wall was cold against my back and the morning air smelled like pine and frost and I kept my breathing even and measured the way I'd learned to in the years of standing in rooms where people talked about me like I wasn't there.

"He knows she's here." Caden's voice. Quiet. The specific quiet of something being held under pressure.

"Word travels," Lyra said. "We knew it would."

"Send the envoy back." Flat. Decided. "No dialogue. No response."

"Caden." And the fact that she used his name instead of his title told me how long they'd known each other, how much she was allowed to push. "Ironveil is not a small pack. If Voss decides to escalate—"

"Then he escalates." The sound of something being set down hard on the table. "And we respond accordingly. But I am not returning her."

Silence.

"She's been here five days," Lyra said carefully.

"I'm aware of how long she's been here."

"And you're already—"

"Send the envoy back, Lyra."

A long pause. Then footsteps toward the door and I moved — quickly, quietly, around the corner of the building before the door opened, pressing myself against the stone and holding my breath while Lyra's footsteps faded in the other direction.

I stood there for a long moment.

Pack property.

That was what I was to my father. Not a daughter he'd miscalculated. Not a mistake he'd made in anger. A resource he'd failed to properly inventory. And now that the inventory had changed — now that something about me had value — he wanted the spreadsheet corrected.

I walked back to my room and I sat on the edge of the bed and I did not fall apart because falling apart was a luxury that required feeling safe enough to reassemble yourself afterward and I was not there yet.

But my hands shook. Just slightly. Just once.

Then I pressed them flat on my knees and I breathed and I thought about what Caden had said.

I am not returning her.

Not she can stay if she wants. Not the rogue has rights under our law. Just: I am not returning her. Like it had already been decided. Like it was not a negotiation.

I thought about that for a long time.

Then I went to find Elder Maren, because I had a power I didn't understand and a father who wanted to use it and an Alpha who seemed determined to stand between those two things whether I'd asked him to or not, and if any of that was going to end in a way I could live with, I needed to know what I was working with.

She was in the herb garden on the northern side of the compound, doing something patient and unhurried with a bundle of dried stems that I couldn't identify from a distance. She didn't look up when I approached but she said, "I wondered when you'd come," which I was beginning to understand was just how she spoke to people.

"My father sent an envoy," I said.

"I know."

"He called me pack property."

She was quiet for a moment. Still working the stems between her fingers. "How does that make you feel?"

"Like I want to learn to control this thing inside me as fast as possible," I said. "So that my value is something I hold and not something other people fight over."

She looked up at me then. And whatever she saw in my face made something in her expression sharpen — not approval exactly. More like recognition.

"Sit down, Seraphina," she said.

I sat.

"Then let's begin."