Blindside

Three: Hollow

Ronan

The drive out to the Hollow took forty minutes from Ronan's place in the city, and every one of them, the noise in his head got a little quieter and the noise underneath it got a little louder. That was the trade. Always had been. Forty minutes to go from a man who played hockey in front of nineteen thousand people to whatever he actually was underneath that.

He didn't love what he actually was underneath that. Not always.

The gate at the tree line still needed the old password-and-scent routine even though every guard on it had known Ronan's face since before he could walk, because Magnus didn't believe in shortcuts, least of all for family. Ronan rolled the window down, let Emil wave him through with a nod that was somehow both casual and deeply respectful, and drove another mile and a half of unpaved road before the house came into view — sprawling, timber-framed, older than the county records technically allowed for, smoke already going in the big stone chimney even though it wasn't cold enough yet to need it. Somewhere past the western fence line, faint enough that a human ear would have missed it entirely, something moved through the underbrush with the unhurried confidence of a creature that knew exactly whose land it was standing on.

His father was on the porch. His father was always on the porch when he wanted to talk about something Ronan wasn't going to enjoy.

"I saw the game," Magnus said, by way of hello, which meant he'd seen the hit, which meant this was going to be a longer conversation than Ronan had energy for tonight.

"It was clean."

"I'm not worried about clean." Magnus set down the folder he'd been reading — legal paper, Ronan recognized the letterhead even upside down and from ten feet away, KANE CONGLOMERATE embossed at the top in a font that cost more than most people's cars — and looked at his son properly for the first time. "I'm worried about a boy who put that much of himself into a hockey hit on a Tuesday. That's not control. That's something looking for a reason."

"It's a contact sport."

"Don't." Just the one word, but it carried the weight Magnus only used when he meant it as an Alpha and not as a father, and those were, Ronan had learned a long time ago, two different men wearing the same face. "The moon's in two weeks. I need you steady before then, not after. Especially now."

Especially now was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Ronan nodded at the folder instead of asking about it directly, which was its own kind of question. "Northgate again?"

"Kane filed an amended proposal Friday. Wants to push the development line another two hundred yards into the east ridge." Magnus's jaw worked the way it did when he was choosing his words instead of just saying what he actually thought, which for Magnus was a rare and telling restraint. "East ridge is denning ground, Ronan. Has been for six generations. He knows exactly what he's asking us to give up."

"Would he, though? Know?" It was an honest question. Ronan didn't actually know how much Julian Kane understood about what his development plans would cost — only that his father had never once, in twenty-five years, called the man by his first name.

"He knows enough," Magnus said, in a tone that closed the subject.

Ronan let it go, same as he always did, because pushing past that tone had never once worked and both of them knew it. He looked out at the tree line instead, at the particular blue-black the Hollow went right before full dark, and thought — not for the first time — that there was a version of his life where he simply ran the pack's timber business and played beer-league hockey on weekends and never had to hold two entire worlds steady at once. He didn't want that version, exactly. He just wondered sometimes what it would feel like to want only one thing instead of everything, all at once.

"You'll be Alpha here eventually," Magnus said, quieter now, like he'd read some of that off his son's face. "Sooner than either of us would like, the way my knees have been. Everything I'm doing with Kane right now, I'm doing so you inherit something worth having. Not a war. A pack with land it can actually stand on."

"I know."

"Do you?" Magnus studied him a moment longer than was comfortable. "Because lately you look like a man carrying something he hasn't told anyone about. I'd like to think, when you're ready, it'll be me you tell first."

Ronan didn't answer that directly, mostly because he didn't have an answer that wouldn't have required explaining things he didn't understand himself yet.

Dinner, at least, was easier than the porch had been. His mother fussed over whether he was eating enough on road trips in a way that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with checking, one more time, that her son was still in one piece after a season that kept trying to prove otherwise. His younger cousins fought over the last of the cornbread. For forty-five minutes, nobody mentioned Kane Conglomerate, denning grounds, or the particular flavor of control Magnus expected from the son who would one day be expected to carry all of his.

Ronan stayed until nearly ten, because that was the rule even on nights he didn't want to be there, and drove back into the city with the windows down and the radio off, because he needed to hear himself think and was already regretting it.

Two hundred yards of ridge line didn't sound like much on paper. Ronan had grown up climbing every foot of it. He knew exactly what his father wasn't saying out loud — that this wasn't really about land anymore, hadn't been for a long time, and that whatever it actually was about, nobody in his family had ever explained it to him. He'd stopped asking around age twelve, when the question had started making his father's face do something none of Ronan's usual tricks could fix.

Whatever it was, it had teeth. He could feel that much in how carefully his father hadn't said Julian Kane's first name.

He thought, for one unwelcome second at a red light on the edge of the Hollow's boundary, of a mouthy captain from Meridian who'd looked him dead in the eye tonight like he had something to prove.

He told himself that had nothing to do with anything, and drove home too fast to actually believe it.