UNDER HIS RULE

I was fifteen when I lost my mother, and it was my grandmother who decided I shouldn't sit in that grief alone. "Come stay with me," she'd said, already packing my things before I could argue. "This house is too big for two men and their silence. You need something to kill the boredom — and I need the company." I hadn't argued. There was nothing left in my father's house to stay for, not with Mom gone and Dad retreating further into pack business every day, and Cormac too busy trying to be the son our father needed. So I went. Those years with Grandma were the most peaceful of my life. Her cottage sat at the edge of the woods, wrapped in things that grew and things that healed. She kept a garden that took up half the yard — tomatoes in the summer, herbs year-round, roses she babied like they were her actual children. The whole house always smelled like whatever she'd just pulled from the oven. She baked when she was happy, baked when she was thinking, baked, I suspected, just to have an excuse to hand someone a cookie and ask them how they were really doing. I learned to cook standing on a stool at her counter. I learned patience kneeling in her garden dirt. And I learned to fight from the man next door. Callan didn't look like much — sixty-something, quiet, the kind of neighbor who waved and said little else. But Grandma trusted him, and one afternoon when I was restless and short-tempered with grief, she sent me to him instead of trying to talk me down herself. "Teach her something useful," she'd told him. "God knows she needs to put that energy somewhere." He was merciless. No easing me in, no coddling because I was a girl who'd just lost her mother. He corrected my stance until my legs shook. He made me run drills until I stopped thinking about anything except not falling on my face. And somewhere in those years of bruises and being knocked flat on the packed dirt behind Grandma's garden, I got good. Good enough that there were days — not many, but enough — that I put him on the ground instead. Those years felt like a different life. A quiet one. A safe one. Nothing like this. I stood in the east wing of what used to be my father's house, and Ash stirred low and unsettled beneath my skin, my wolf pressing up against the inside of my ribs like she didn't recognize the place either. *Something's wrong here,* she said. *This isn't ours anymore.* I already knew that. I'd known it the second Grandma and I crossed onto pack land and I felt the difference in the air — the way the territory itself seemed to hold its breath, wary and subdued in a way it never used to be. Grandma had come with me. Not because she had to, but because she wouldn't let her son sit in whatever this was without her standing beside him, even just for a little while. That was Grandma. Sympathy delivered in person, cookies probably already planned for the occasion. It didn't matter much to me either way. I'd already lost the person whose absence should have gutted me. Losing a title I never asked for and barely remembered having didn't feel like it should touch the same part of me. But it did. A little. Enough that my hands curled at my sides as I walked through the door that used to be *ours* and now just... wasn't. My father was not a greedy man. That was the part I kept circling back to, the part that didn't fit no matter how many times Cormac had tried to explain it to me over the phone in that flat, careful voice he used when he didn't want to say too much. Dad had always been satisfied with what we had. Steady. Fair. Not the kind of alpha who reached for territory that wasn't his. So what changed? *People change,* Ash said, low and unimpressed. *Change is constant. You know that better than anyone.* I hissed under my breath, more at her than anything else, and kept walking. The house looked the same and felt like a stranger's skin. Same halls, same east wing, same worn spot on the floorboards outside what used to be my father's study. But it all belonged to someone else now. Someone whose name I'd only heard in the clipped, careful way people speak about power they're afraid of. Whatever had happened here, whatever my father had done to lose everything he'd built — I was about to find out exactly how much it had cost