"They're mine." The words leave my mouth before the smart part of my brain can intervene. "You don't get to show up seven years later and claim them like lost luggage."
Leon towering over me and taking up every inch of air that used to belong to me.
Behind the door our children are getting ready for bed, and I'm keeping my voice low enough not to carry through it. Which means I'm essentially hissing at an Alpha of Shadowcrest like an angry cat in a very narrow hallway.
I've made worse decisions. Marginally.
"I'm not claiming anyone. Yet." His voice is careful and measured, like he selects each word the way you'd pick your steps across ice you're not sure will hold. "You just need to understand that I didn't leave by choice."
"And I'm telling you it doesn't matter." My nails are cutting crescents into my palms but I don't unclench. "It doesn't change anything. You're marrying my sister in five days. That's the reality. That's the only thing in this corridor that is real."
My voice has gone flat, emptied out, because I poured everything into that one word and there's nothing left.
"I was pregnant and alone. I spent six years scrubbing floors while your children learned to walk in a room the size of a closet, and you were off building an empire."
He doesn't flinch. Doesn't interrupt or defend or try to talk over me.
Just stands there absorbing it with that infuriating steadiness, and somehow the patience makes it worse.
I want him to flinch. I need him to, because if he just keeps standing there looking at me like that I'm going to lose the structural integrity of this anger and I cannot afford that right now.
"My father was murdered that night." No excuses in his tone, just the bones of the thing laid bare. "While you were sleeping, I was being told my Alpha was dead and our packs were mobilizing. I left before dawn because if I didn't, everyone I was responsible for would have died."
The corridor shrinks and I can hear through the door River humming. Some nonsense melody she invented at age four and has never stopped using, low and wandering and entirely her own.
The sound scrapes against the silence between us in a way I wasn't prepared for.
"The false name… I was sent to the festival on an intelligence mission against your stepfather." He holds my gaze without wavering. "I couldn't give you my real name any more than I could stay."
"How comforting." My voice comes out flatter than intended. "So our entire night was a side mission with benefits."
"You know it wasn't." Something shifts behind his jaw. "I knew who you were, Skyler—knew your father's name, every bloody chapter. I didn't care, I still don’t." He takes a half-step closer, and the air between us tightens. "You don't owe the world a debt for crimes committed while you were learning to walk."
My throat does something inconvenient, and I swallow past it. "Beautiful speech. Did you rehearse it on the drive here, or has it been marinating the full seven years?"
"Both." No hesitation. "After that night, I wanted to come back, but I was twenty-four, my father was dead, and I was a new Alpha fighting a war against your pack. I couldn't show up at Thomas Bryant's gates asking for his stepdaughter without getting us both killed."
The worst part is that it makes sense—every word airtight, logical, unassailable.
None of it fills the hole where six years of absence hollowed me out. It makes sense, and I hate him a little for that—for having a reason that I can't simply throw back at him.
"I'm not asking for forgiveness." Leon takes one step closer, his voice drops—rougher and lower. "I'm asking for the chance to know my children. To give us another chance. To make sure all three of you are safe."
"Safe." The laugh that comes out of me has edges. "In the pack of the man marrying Kailani Bryant." I tilt my chin up to hold his gaze, because he's close now and looking away would also mean something. "You see the irony, right?"
"I see a lot of things." His eyes drop briefly to my mouth, just for a second. Come back up. "Including the fact that you're not moving away from me."
The observation lands in my chest like a match dropped into something dry. "I'm not moving toward you either."
"No." His head tilts, just slightly. "You're not."
We are a foot apart. Less. The corridor is narrow and he is broad and the air between us has taken on that specific charged quality—the frequency that gets into the back of my teeth and stays there.
"You should go." My voice comes out lower than I intended.
"You should mean that.".
"I do mean it."
His hand comes up slowly and his fingers brush my jaw, the undamaged side, careful and deliberate.
"Shadowcrest will be different." Each word sounds like it's being pressed through a filter designed to remove violence. "I swear to you. I’ll be good for you."
His thumb traces the line of my jaw and I feel it everywhere—throat, chest, the backs of my knees—and my hands still on him. Not pulling him in, not pushing him away, just gripping the fabric like it's the only fixed point in a room that's started tilting.
"Don't make promises you can't keep." I place my hands on his chest but push away but can’t move a single muscle to do so, my voice rising involuntarily. "I've survived this long by not expecting anything from anyone, and your guilt doesn't erase seven years."
His nose brushes mine, I can feel his breath is warm and unsteady on my lips. The hand at my jaw has slid into my hair and I am gripping his shirt with both fists now.
None of this is acceptable, none of this is survivable.
He is marrying Kailani in five days and his mouth is a centimeter from mine and…
A small, choked sob cuts through from behind me, and we both turn. River stands in the cracked doorway, tears streaming, silver-blonde hair half-brushed and tangled on one side, trembling from her bare feet to her clenched fists.
"Mama," she says, trembling from her bare feet to her clenched fists. "Why are you fighting?"
My voice climbed without permission, and she heard—not the words, maybe, but the sharp edges. Leon moves before I do, on one knee in one stride and eye level with my daughter, his whole massive frame folded down to make itself smaller for her.
"Hey." His voice drops to something devastatingly soft. "Don’t worry, nobody's fighting, sweetheart. Your mama and I were just talking too loud. I'm sorry we scared you."
River looks at him, measuring and unhurried, reading the weather behind eyes with a precision that usually makes adults deeply uncomfortable.
She does it to everyone. She's been doing it since she was two.
Then her hand comes up slowly and little fingers touch his jaw, light and exploratory. She tilts her head to one side when the corridor door bangs and Ashton plants himself between River and Leon so fast I don't see him move.
Chin up, jaw set, fists balled at his sides, every ounce of authority that can be compressed into three and a half feet kid radiating off him like heat.
"I take care of my mama and my sister." His voice shakes on the last word, doesn't blink. "If you hurt them, you have to deal with me."
I wait for the condescension, the softened smile, the gentle adult amusement at a child playing soldier, but it doesn't come. Leon looks at our son the way he'd look at another Alpha.
Level. Serious. Absolute.
He holds Ashton's gaze and there is nothing in his face that isn't meant. "I understand," he says quietly. "And I won't."
Ashton searches his face for the lie but doesn't find one. That seems to confuse him more than the threat did. He turns to me, uncertain for the first time and I cross to them, pulling both children against me.
Their father kneels on a dirty floor in the servants' wing of a pack house, being weighed and measured by a boy who decided to become a man before he learned to read, while his daughter's small fingers still rest against his jaw.
Don't. I say it to myself. Don't do it. Hope is how you get destroyed—the crack that lets everything in, the wanting, the believing. Don't hope.
Leon’s eyes find mine over the children's heads and whatever he reads in my face makes his hand twitch at his side—reaching for something, stopping itself, falling still.
River's voice comes up from somewhere near my hip, quiet and certain.
"Mama." She's still watching him with those blue, unsettling eyes of hers. "He has Ashton's eyes."