Five days of waiting turns out to be its own circle of hell—the one Dante forgot, where nothing happens and your nervous system treats every silence like a detonation countdown.
So when Spencer's name lights up my phone with a two-word text—my office—the relief lasts exactly as long as it takes to reach his door.
He closes it behind me. Spencer leaves doors open the way other people leave lights on—default, unremarkable. A closed door means the room needs walls.
"Sit down." No greeting, no preamble, just a gravity that bypasses my brain and sends my body into the chair before my mouth can argue.
"That bad?" I lower myself into the leather seat across from his desk. "You've got the face of a man delivering a terminal diagnosis."
"Not terminal." He pulls a document from a folder and slides it across the mahogany like he's serving papers in a case he didn't want. "But it's going to hurt."
My fingers close around the edges. The letterhead is pack council—formal crest, embossed seal, the kind of stationery that exists solely to make whatever follows feel like a sentencing.
I scan the first paragraph and my throat tightens around something sharp enough to draw blood. "Celeste filed a formal challenge to my father's will."
"Three days ago." Spencer's jaw could cut glass, and he's choosing words with a precision that tells me something underneath his composure is running hot. "The challenge argues the inheritance clause is unenforceable."
"On what grounds?" My eyes track down the page and each sentence answers with more details than I’d like.
"No pack standing, no recognised bloodline, no legal status within the hierarchy." He leans forward, forearms on the desk, every line of his body controlled. "She is arguing you do not exist in any framework that matters."
"So she's not challenging a clause." I flip to the second page and my nails whiten against the paper. "She's erasing me from every framework my father built."
"The language is surgical." His mouth thins into something that isn't a line so much as a verdict. "Every sentence designed to reduce your standing to zero."
"And here I thought Celeste's Christmas cards were her most creative work." My laugh doesn't reach my lungs. "What does this mean practically?"
"A council vote and a public hearing." He holds my gaze and the air between us gains density, something you could lean against if you needed to. "Every detail of your life opened for pack scrutiny."
"Every detail meaning what, exactly?" My thumbnail digs into the arm of the chair hard enough to leave crescents in the leather.
"Blood status, employment history, your living arrangements." He pauses, and the pause has its own architecture—a doorway he is choosing whether to walk through. "Your relationship to us."
The word relationship hangs heavy in the air. Neither of us touches it. The silence holds for two full seconds and I watch Spencer's jaw work once before he continues.
"Your financial situation, your medical history." His voice drops half a register. "All of it becomes council record."
"So Celeste gets to put me on trial for the crime of existing." My laugh comes out scraped and serrated. "How very on-brand."
"The challenge is designed to damage whether it succeeds or not." He sits back, and I track the tension in his shoulders—held so tight the shirt fabric strains. "The process itself is the punishment."
"Meaning what?" I ask, though the answer is already carving itself into my sternum.
"Meaning she's forcing you into a public defence of your right to exist." His eyes don't leave mine and his voice carries the weight of a man who has measured every word. "In a world that's told you since birth that you don't belong."
"Win or lose, I bleed in public." I finish the sentence for him because hearing it in his voice would crack something I need intact.
"Yes." Cruel, but true—and I hate that truth with every fiber of my being.
My vision blurs for half a second and I press my thumbnail into my palm until the sting sharpens everything back.
"Can she win?" My voice is steady. My hands are performing a separate, less convincing show.
"Not if I can help it." His pulse is visible at his throat, fingers pressed flat against the mahogany. "The precedent is weak, and the clause was drafted by someone who knew exactly what he was doing."
"My father." The words come out quieter than I intend, and something in Spencer's expression shifts at the sound—a tectonic movement, deep, barely visible at the surface.
"Your father built this to hold." His voice is careful, the tone of a man handling something that might detonate. "He knew what Celeste would try."
"But?" I hear it in the silence after his sentence, patient and inevitable.
"But a public hearing means exposure." His jaw shifts. "Celeste controlling the narrative—every wolf in that chamber forming an opinion about you before you open your mouth."
I stare at the document on my knee. The language stares back—clinical, precise, reducing me to a line item, a genetic anomaly, a half-blood with no claim to the name on the will.
Something older and harder surfaces underneath the tremor in my hands. The same stubbornness that kept me mopping floors at midnight, that made me press submit on an auction screen with nothing but refusal holding my spine together
"I'm not withdrawing." I look up and my voice arrives load-bearing, built for the weight it carries.
Spencer holds my gaze. His composure rearranges—shoulders dropping, chin lifting, something behind his eyes that makes my chest compress in a way that's warm and dangerous and uninvited.
"I didn't think you would." His voice is low enough to feel in my sternum, and the corner of his mouth gives up a small, private surrender. "I'll file the response by end of week."
"Spencer." I stand, the document in my fist clutched harder than needed. "Thank you for not pretending this is fine."
"Nothing about this is fine." His eyes track me to the door. "But you're not doing it alone—that part isn't negotiable."
I walk back to my desk with a will challenge in one hand and a fight I did not choose. The corridor stretches ahead, fluorescent lights humming, and every person I pass looks straight through me.
Which is fine—because if anyone looked closely they would see a woman whose knuckles are white around a document and whose composure has approximately ninety seconds of structural integrity remaining. Halfway to my desk, my phone buzzes.
Samples received. Processing initiated. Estimated results: five to seven business days.
Two bombs, one body, and a timeline that just got a lot shorter. My hand presses flat against my stomach where a heartbeat that isn't mine keeps its own ruthless, ticking count.
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