Chapter 10
1045 Words
The drive back to Stonecrest took four hours.
Henry drove.
He shouldn't have. He was in no state to be behind a wheel with his hands gripping it that tight and his jaw set in that particular way that meant everything behind his eyes was loud and none of it was good. Jennifer offered twice to drive and he said no both times and she stopped offering because she had learned over the years that certain versions of Henry were better left alone.
This was one of those versions.
She sat in the passenger seat and looked out at the trees going by and said nothing.
The silence between them was a different kind of silence than they were used to. Their silence had always been comfortable. The easy quiet between them was understandable because the both of them were humiliated in place they shouldn't have been humiliated.
Henry's hands moved on the wheel.
The image kept coming back.
Ralph crouching down.
Just him crouching down on the stone floor of the fortress like it was the most natural thing in the world and putting his hands on Sera's knee and then standing back up to his full height and looking at Jennifer with those dark empty eyes until she had nothing left in her.
Henry had stood fifteen feet away and watched it happen.
He did not moved, he told himself that very firmly. Not because of Ralph's size or his reputation or the two hundred wolves watching or the security team that had appeared from nowhere like they had been waiting for exactly this moment.
Not because of any of that.
He just. Hadn't moved.
He hit the indicator too hard turning onto the Stonecrest road.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The pack house felt wrong when they got back.
Henry couldn't point to anything specific that had changed. Same rooms. Same furniture. Jennifer's things had spread through the space the way water spreads, gradually and completely, and the house had rearranged itself around her presence in the months since Sera left.
But it felt wrong now to him after the humiliation.
He went to his office and sat behind his desk and stared at the wall.
Cain knocked and came in after twenty minutes. His beta. Built like a wall himself, with a blunt honest face and loyalty that show he been through enough with him to have stopped prettying up the truth.
He sat in the chair across the desk without being invited.
"How bad was it," Cain said.
He made the statement as the opening of a conversation they both knew needed to talked about.
Henry said nothing.
"Because I'm hearing things from the Stonecrest wolves who were at the event," Cain said. "And what I'm hearing is not pleasing."
"I know the News would have spread through all pack" Henry said.
"So what do you intend we do."
Henry looked at him.
Cain held the look. He was one of maybe three wolves alive who could hold Henry's gaze without adjusting anything about himself.
"The Great Alpha's daughter," Cain said. "Redfang blood. And she was here. In this house. Making your coffee for a year."
The words landed the way Cain had intended them to. Flat and factual and with all the judgment in the world hiding just behind the plainness of them.
Henry pushed back from the desk.
He walked to the window.
Outside the Stonecrest pack territory rolled out in that neat ordinary way it always had. Middle ground. Comfortable. The territory that had always been enough for him.
He had always thought it was enough.
He thought about Redfang fortress. The size of it. The weight in the air. The way even the stone floors rang differently under your feet like the ground itself understood what it was part of.
He thought about Sera standing in the courtyard in that crimson dress.
He had looked at her and his brain had done that thing again where it kept trying to put the Sera he knew over the Sera he was seeing and they kept not matching. The woman who folded his laundry. The woman who made his coffee without being asked. The woman he had described at a table full of people as quiet and obedient and good for one specific purpose.
That woman had been standing in the ancestral fortress of the most powerful pack in the territory wearing gold on her wrists like she had been born to it.
Because she had been.
How did he miss all that.
The question had been sitting in his chest since the moment Ralph's hand went to her waist and wouldn't leave.
He started blaming something in himself, something that had to do with being wrong. With having looked at something valuable every day and called it ordinary. With being the man in that room who understood last.
He couldn't live with that quietly.
That was the thing about Henry. He had never in his life been able to sit still inside his own mistakes.
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His phone buzzed on the desk.
He crossed the room and looked at the screen.
A number he didn't recognise. Long prefix. Northern territory code.
He picked up.
"Alpha Henry of Stonecrest," said the voice on the other end. Smooth and unhurried. The voice was not familiar to him even though he was trying to match to voice to someone he knows but all his effort to doing that were in futile.
"Who is this," Henry said.
"Someone who shares your interest in the current political arrangement between Redfang and Nightfang," the voice said. "And its potential complications."
Henry was quiet.
He should have ended the call. Cain would have told him to end the call. Any wolf with a clean conscience and a settled life would have ended the call.
Henry did not end the call.
"I'm listening," he said.
Across the room Cain was watching him with an expression that was not quite alarm and not quite resignation but somewhere between them. The face of a man watching someone he cares about walk toward something avoidable.
Henry turned away from him and fa
ced the window.
Outside Stonecrest rolled on in its neat and ordinary way.
"Good," said the voice. "Then let's talk."
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