MY BROTHER'S BEST FRIEND IS MY MATE.

Chapter Four: 3 years, and I'm back again.

Levrae

I found Lucas in the sitting room.

He had a glass of whiskey in one hand and his phone in the other, and he didn't look up when I walked in. I stood in the doorway in my long-sleeved dress — the one that covered everything that needed to stay covered — and I told him my father was dead.

He took a sip of his drink. "Condolences," he said flatly.

"I'm going home."

That made him look up. He studied me for a moment and then set his glass down slowly. "Now? Tonight?"

"First thing in the morning."

He leaned back in his chair. "I have meetings all week. I can't be running off to your pack over a funeral."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"I didn't ask you to come," I said.

Something shifted in his expression. He wasn't used to that — me not asking, me not needing. He opened his mouth.

"Before I go," I said, crossing to the writing desk in the corner, "I need you to sign something."

He watched me pull the folder from the drawer where I had kept it for six months. Waiting. I set it on the low table in front of him and slid it forward.

"What is this?"

"I did some business some days ago and they requested your signature. It's a really important business. I don't know when I'll see you next, so it's best to do it now." I kept my voice even. Professional. "My legal team would have advised the same thing."

Please don't read the document, please, please, please” I thought.

He looked at the document. At the formal header, the dense legal language, the signature line at the bottom.

He didn't read past the first paragraph.

He took the pen I held out, scrawled his name at the bottom with the same bored efficiency he signed everything, and handed it back.

"Happy?" he said.

I slid the folder back under my arm. "Thank you."

I turned around and walked back upstairs before he could fill the room with any more of himself.

I packed alone. One bag, everything folded neatly. I pulled my sleeve up once and looked at the thin pale scars running along the inside of my forearm — several of them, all in places that clothes could hide. I looked at them for a long moment. Then I pulled my sleeve back down, picked up my bag, and picked up the folder.

I left before sunrise without saying goodbye.

The drive to Denver took four hours.

I sat in the back of the car and watched the sky move through every shade of dark before it finally gave up and turned grey. The folder sat on the seat beside me. I didn't touch it. I had read it so many times I knew every word.

Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.

Lucas Thatcher, Respondent.

Levrae Fangveil, Petitioner.

Signed, dated, and witnessed.

My father was dead.

If Lucas finds out I had made him sign the divorce contract without his consent, what will he do?

I kept saying it to myself the whole drive.

My father's death didn't feel real yet. Just words with too much weight and nowhere to put it. He had handed me away like a bargaining piece. He had loved me in the only way he knew how and it had not been enough and now I would never get to tell him that.

The Fangveil estate came into view when we turned off the main road and my breath caught without warning. It was bigger than I remembered. Fortified, with heavier gates, extended fencing, guards stationed along the tree line with their eyes moving. Jonathan had been building up the pack's defenses while I was gone. Whatever was coming, he had seen it from a long way off.

The gates opened.

Pack members lined both sides of the path. Some still in their night clothes. Others dressed like they hadn't slept at all. An older woman near the front had both hands pressed over her mouth, her whole body shaking. Two young warriors stood with their heads bowed and their jaws tight. Children pressed into their mothers' sides, wide-eyed and quiet, sensing the grief even if they didn't understand it.

Thirty years. My father had been their Alpha for thirty years.

I pressed my fingers to the cold car window.

The car stopped. I stepped out. The cold hit first, then the silence. The pack stilled when they saw me, and for a moment nobody moved. Then a murmur rippled through the crowd, low and spreading.

She's back.

I kept my chin up and my eyes forward and I walked.

I was halfway up the path when I felt it.

That particular stillness in my chest. That shift in the air that had nothing to do with the cold or the grief or the crowd around me. My steps slowed before I even looked up.

He was standing near the entrance.

Apart from the guards, with, with his arms folded, and dressed in black from collar to boot.

Finn.

He was harder than I remembered. Broader, like three years had stripped away everything that wasn't essential and left only the dangerous parts. His jaw was the same. His hair was the same.

His eyes were the same.

Those hunter blue eyes, already fixed on me.

The mate bond lit up in my chest like a flame catching on dry wood — warm and sudden and so achingly familiar that my throat tightened before I could stop it. Three years of silence. Three years of trying to kill it. And it rose up like it had only been sleeping, like it had been waiting exactly this long and not one second more.

The memories came without asking.

A hallway. My eighteenth birthday. How foolishly I had been to think he'd accept my love. His arm around my waist and his eyes going still and the whole world narrowing to just the two of us and the space between us closing…

"This was a mistake. You are like a sister to me. We shouldn't be doing this," he had said.

"Forget it happened."

"Go marry Lucas Thatcher."

I breathed through it. In and out, steady and quiet. Two seconds. That was all I gave it.

Then the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly.

"Welcome home," Finn said, his eyes fixed on mine.