Rowan's POV
The council meeting had gone exactly the way I knew it would.
Terribly. Long. And with my father sitting at the head of that table looking at me the way he always looked at me when I wasn't falling in line, like I was a problem he had created and was now deeply inconvenienced by.
Mating.
That word had sat in the center of the room for the better part of two hours, just sitting there, heavy and immovable, and I had sat across from men three times my age and kept my face completely still while they discussed my life like it was a council agenda item, something to schedule and arrange and tick off before moving to the next order of business.
Valerie.
My father wanted Valerie for me and had wanted it long before anyone thought to ask me anything about it, because that was ho
