Goodbye.... My Ex Alpha Mate Want Me Back

Chapter 13

Sera POV

I called my father two days after returning to Nightfang.

I had promised I would, and I kept to my promises, even the small ones, especially the small ones, because the small promises were the ones that built the kind of trust that mattered later.

He picked up on the second ring like he had always done.

"Sera." His voice was warm, the way it always was. But underneath the warmth, something else. A texture I knew well from twenty-three years of conversations with this man.

"Papa," I said. "You sound tired."

A pause. Just slightly too long.

"I'm fine," he said.

"Papa."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"It's nothing urgent," he said. "Just — old business. Surfacing again the way old business does."

I sat down slowly in the chair by my window. Outside, the black river caught the last of the afternoon light and turned it silver.

"What old business," I asked.

Alpha Gregory was quiet for a moment.

When he spoke, his voice had changed. Lower. The voice he used for difficult matters, the voice I remembered from late nights as a child when he thought I was asleep and talked to my mother's portrait in the hallway.

"Years ago,” he said, "before you were born — there was a dispute. Border territory between Redfang and a neighbouring pack. The dispute should have been settled through negotiations but It wasn't."

"What happened?"

"A duel," Gregory said. "Between myself and the Alpha of that pack. Named Cassius."

Sera's hand went still around her teacup.

"It didn't end cleanly," Gregory continued. "We were both badly wounded. Neither of us yielded. The elders intervened before either of us could finish it — declared a truce, redrew the border in a way that satisfied no one fully, and sent us both home to heal."

"And Cassius," Sera said slowly, "didn't consider that truce finished."

"Cassius," Gregory said, "has spent thirty years considering that truce an insult. He lost territory he believed was rightfully his. He lost the duel — by the elders' ruling, if not by blade. And he has spent three decades waiting for Redfang to be vulnerable enough that the matter could be revisited."

Sera looked out at the river.

"And now," she said quietly, "Redfang and Nightfang are bonded together. Which makes us less vulnerable than we've been in generations."

"Which makes the window for Cassius to act," Gregory said, "smaller than it has ever been. If he intends to move at all, it would be now. While the bond is new. Before it settles into something unbreakable."

The room was very quiet.

"Papa," I said carefully. "Has something happened? Specifically?"

Gregory hesitated.

"Reports," he said. "Nothing confirmed yet. Movement near the southern border. Contacts being made — quietly, carefully — with packs that have no obvious reason to be in contact with Cassius's territory. Old allies of his, reactivating."

"Reactivating for what?"

"I don't know yet," Gregory admitted. "That's what worries me."

I thought about the letter sitting in the locked drawer of my desk. The one I hadn't told Ralph about yet, not properly, not with the full weight it deserved.

//The prophecy dies with the bloodline. Step back or we remove you.//

I thought about the border incident Ralph had mentioned once, briefly, weeks ago, before quickly changing the subject.

I thought about timing. About how everything,, the letter, the border movement, Cassius's old grudge surfacing now of all times — fit together with a precision that felt less like coincidence and more like a plan finally beginning to move.

"Papa," I said slowly. "Do you think Cassius would use someone close to me? Someone inside Nightfang, or — connected to me some other way?"

The silence on the line stretched.

It stretched long enough that I knew, before my father said anything at all, what the answer was.

"Cassius," Gregory said finally, "has always preferred to fight from inside a house rather than outside it. It's how he won what little he won thirty years ago. It would be foolish to assume he's changed his methods."

I closed my eyes with the understanding of what all of this meant.

"I have to go," I said. “I love you, Papa."

"Sera—"

"I'll call you tomorrow," I said. "I promise."

I ended the call before he could say anything else, because I could hear in his voice that he wanted to apologise — for the old wound, for the danger it had quietly attached to me without I ever choosing it, for thirty years of a grudge that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the family I'd been born into.

I didn't need the apology rather I needed information.

I sat for a long moment with the phone on my lap.

The fortress was quiet around me in the late afternoon way it had, staff moving through distant corridors, the low murmur of pack life continuing outside her window.

I thought about the letter, thought about the border incident.

I thought about the name — Cassius — that my father had said like it was a wound that had never properly closed, and I thought about how that name might connect to a sealed letter addressed specifically to me, by name, in a fortress three hundred miles away.

I had been planning to tell Ralph about the letter eventually. When I had more information. When I'd built the picture out further and had something concrete to bring him instead of fragments.

I looked at the connecting door to his study.

For three days I had been doing this alone. Researching alone. Carrying it alone. Telling myself it was because I needed more before I brought it to him — but underneath that, if I was honest, was something else. The old habit. The year of Stonecrest. Carry it yourself. Don't be a burden. Don't bring problems to a man who might decide you're more trouble than you're worth.

Ralph was not Henry.

I had known that for weeks now. I had felt it in a hundred small moments — the knee, the tea, the way he said I'm telling you today about the leak before I'd even had to ask.

I stood up as I crossed to my desk, unlocked the drawer, a

nd took out the letter.

Then i walked to the connecting door and didn't hesitate to knock Ralph study room.