[Rhys’ POV]
The Adler pack hall hasn't changed. Same oak beams, same iron sconces, same portraits of ancestors who managed to look disappointed across three centuries of oil paint.
I kneel on the same stone I knelt on at fourteen when Callum told our father I'd threatened him with a knife I'd never touched. My knees remember the cold.
"Alpha." I keep my head down, voice level—the cadence of a man who's rehearsed this for two hundred miles. "The search yielded no confirmed sighting. Every lead went cold south of Greymoor. The woman and children have—"
"Rhys." My father's hand lifts from the arm of his chair—two fingers, a minimal gesture—and my mouth stops mid-sentence because twenty-six years of obedience don't require more than that. I look up.
The expression on his face is one I've studied on other people's fathers at naming ceremonies. That slight lift at the mouth, eyes holding mine without their usual clinical sweep.
Never once aimed at me. Not after border victories, not after anything he deemed inconsequential.
"You can drop the act." Father leans forward, elbows settling on the carved arms of the Alpha's chair. His voice carries a warmth usually reserved for the dead son's memory. "She's here."
The stone under my knees becomes very specific—every ridge, every crack pressing through fabric. "I don't follow, Father."
"Nell." He says her name the way he says acquisition. "Arrived at the eastern border four hours ago—both children, walking, under her own power. No escort, no coercion. She walked the prophecy heirs in like she was delivering a parcel."
Home—the word sits unspoken behind his teeth. I watch him decide against saying it, which is the closest thing to decency I've seen from him in years.
"She's been in the hall since before you knelt." He gestures behind me, as though the woman I spent months protecting is a chess piece he's pleased to find back on the board. "I assumed you'd want the debrief to play out first. Smart. Deniable."
I don't turn around. The muscles between my shoulder blades have drawn tight enough to pulse. "She heard everything I just reported."
"Every word." Father's smile widens. "And she didn't flinch. Impressive woman—I see why it took you this long."
"You think I—" The correction starts forming, and strategy catches it by the throat before the second word lands.
"Don't be modest." Father stands, and the hall rearranges itself around him the way it always does—architecture deferring to the man at its center. "Months of patience. You earned her trust so completely she walked the children here willingly."
"No extraction team," he continues, circling me with the measured stride of a man admiring his own reflection in someone else's work. "No diplomatic incident. No mess."
Each word is a brick in a structure I cannot dismantle without burying myself beneath it. My hands rest still on my thighs—the discipline of a lifetime.
"The failed-mission approach is elegant." He stops close enough for me to see the silver threading his beard. "Deniable to anyone outside this room. The kind of thinking I would have used at your age."
His hand lands on my shoulder—firm, proprietary, the grip of a man claiming a harvest he didn't plant. "I underestimated you, son."
Four words. I have waited my entire life for them, and they arrive dressed in someone else's story—a cruelty I didn't commit. The universe prefers humor that draws blood.
"Stand up." His grip tightens, then releases, and the command carries the weight of a gift he believes he's giving. "You've earned it."
I stand because the alternative is kneeling before a lie already taller than I am. "Father. The situation is more nuanced than—"
"It always is." He waves this away with two fingers, dismissing nuance the way he dismisses everything that complicates his version of events. "The point is results. You delivered."
The trap requires no deliberation. If I correct him—if I say every letter was fabrication—I am no longer the disappointing son. I become the treasonous one.
"What happens to her if she cooperates?" I ask it the way I ask about border logistics—flat, professional, betraying nothing.
"Voss will handle the formal intake." Father is already moving toward the side entrance where his council waits. "The children will be assessed tomorrow—prophecy markers, bloodline confirmation, the full panel."
"And the mother?" The question exits before I can shape it into something safer, and I hear the urgency in it a beat too late.
"What about her?" He turns, one hand on the door frame. "She delivered herself and the heirs. She's earned hospitality—for now."
For now. The qualifier hangs between us with the weight of a sentence not yet passed, and my father lets it hang.
My tongue presses against my teeth hard enough to taste copper. "The boys are young, Father. Barely walking. What exactly does the panel expect to find?"
"Everything we need." He doesn't look back. "You'll oversee it personally." It isn't a question.
"Understood." The word exits clean, obedient, and costs me something I'll calculate later.
Father nods once and disappears through the side door. The hall settles into the particular silence of a room emptied of power.
The doors at the far end open and every thought in my head goes quiet. She walks in carrying Ash on her left hip, Rowan gripping her right hand.
My knees almost buckle. My chest seizes and my vision sharpens to a point—just her, just her face, just the exhaustion carved into it. She's thinner. The shadows under her eyes are new, and I put them there. I know I put them there.
She's here. In this hall, on this stone, under these portraits—the place I spent two years making sure she'd never have to stand again. My hands are shaking at my sides.
She does not look at me. Something hot and sharp twists beneath my ribs—a feeling I don't have the vocabulary for and wouldn't use if I did.
She looks at the Alpha's chair, then the portraits, then the council door. Exits, obstacles, distance. The same scan I watched her do at Blackvale, and the fact that she's doing it here makes my throat close.
Her chin lifts and her shoulders square into something that wasn't there two months ago. Not borrowed, not performed. Hers.
Ash squirms on her hip, both fists reaching for the iron chandelier. Rowan presses closer to her leg, his quiet eyes scanning with an assessment I recognize from every mirror I've owned.
Why did she come? Not because I left—or maybe precisely because I left. I don't understand what brought her here, and the not-knowing won't leave my chest.
My father will return any moment, extending his hand to the woman he ordered me to destroy. And I will stand here watching.
Ash spots me across the stone floor. His face splits with recognition and he lunges sideways off Nell's hip, arms out, shouting a sound that isn't quite my name but close enough to stop my breathing entirely.
Nell's arms tighten around him. She still doesn't look at me—but her hands do, adjusting their grip, pulling her son back against her ribs with a quiet, immovable force that makes its own argument about who gets to hold her children.
To be continued…
P.S. Author’s Note
Dear readers, my biggest thanks to you for accompanying me on this journey! I hope you liked it, and I hope you already picked your favorite characters, because the continuation is coming (couldn’t leave you hanging like that, now, could I?) very soon, so sit tight!
See you in the next chapters!