Chapter 14: Mate Bond
848 Words
Tyler’s POV
I stepped forward and looked at Dylan directly and kept my voice level because losing my temper in front of the elders was not something I was going to do today, “you need to stop with the accusations Dylan, right now, because if you say one more time that I threatened Sophie to stay in my pack, I will make sure you understand exactly what it means to be standing on an Alpha’s land without permission, your pack or not.”
Dylan almost laughed, his jaw loose and unbothered: “You’re bluffing, my sister is in your pack, refusing to listen to her own brother and that tells me everything I need to know about what you’ve been doing to keep her here, and today that stops.”
He turned to the elders, spreading his hands open like he was presenting something reasonable, “I’m asking the elders to warn your Alpha, release my sister today or I will have no choice but to cause chaos for both packs.”
The room erupted.
Every elder talking at once, voices overlapping, some demanding clarity, some already taking sides, the whole thing dissolving into noise faster than I could contain it, and I was about to speak when Sophie’s voice cut through everything like a blade.
“Dylan shut up!”
The room went quiet.
She was standing near the doorway, her jaw set, her eyes blazing, and she looked at her brother with the kind of stillness that meant she had run completely out of patience, “I have told you multiple times, I am not going home, nobody is forcing me to stay here, nobody threatened me, and nobody, I mean nobody, is going to force me to leave my mate, I don’t care who is asking.”
She crossed the room and came to stand beside me, her shoulder almost touching my arm, and looked at the elders with her chin up, “Tyler is my mate, I am choosing to stay, that is the beginning and the end of this conversation.”
Dylan’s expression shifted, something harder moving in behind the frustration, “Sophie stops the performance….”
“There is no performance,” I said, and I let the Alpha weight sit fully in my voice now, calm and absolute, “Sophie and I are mated, that is not a story we are telling for this room, that is what it is, so I would like someone to explain to me why her brother is standing in my pack trying to dissolve a mate bond, because I genuinely don’t understand what gives him that right.”
Dylan looked at the elders and pointed at me, “your Alpha has a dysfunction, everyone in this room knows it, and now suddenly he has found a mate? Open your eyes, he’s using my sister to cover up the rumours about him, he found a girl, pushed her toward himself so the talk about his dysfunction would die down, and Sophie is too blind to see it.”
The room went very still.
I felt Sophie shift beside me but before I could speak she turned to face her brother fully, “it doesn’t matter.”
Dylan blinked, “what?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” she said clearly, “Tyler having a dysfunction does not change one single thing about how I feel or what I have chosen, so whatever point you were trying to make with that, it didn’t land.”
One of the elders leaned forward, his voice careful and measured: “Sophie, we want to hear from you directly, do you have any issue with your mate’s condition?”
Sophie looked at him without hesitating for even a second, “no, I don’t, Tyler is my choice and my choice is final, a dysfunction doesn’t stop love and it doesn’t stop a mate bond, nothing about this changes my answer.”
The elder nodded slowly and sat back.
Dylan exhaled through his nose, and then tried a different angle, his voice dropping lower, more urgent, “Sophie listen to me, Marcus is already at our pack waiting, our border is at risk, our pack needs this alliance, why are you being so stubborn about this, why are you making everything harder than it needs to be?”
“Marcus is your choice Dylan,” Sophie said, and her voice didn’t waver, not even slightly, “Tyler is mine, those are two very different things and I need you to understand that, I will not leave my mate to go and be with a man my brother picked for me, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
Dylan looked at her for a long moment, something moving across his face that looked almost like genuine loss underneath all the frustration, and then he looked at me, hard and measuring, like he was deciding something.
“No, you will be going with me today.” Dylan tried lounging toward Sophie but my guard surrounded him immediately.
“Lock him up.”
- Writer
