Thalia’s POV
The argument starts over cereal.
Kieran sets three bowls on the counter and says the words that detonate the fragile peace we've maintained since last night.
"I want to pull them from school. Effective immediately."
I set down my coffee: "No."
"Thalia, the hunters breached the school perimeter fence three days ago. They cut through it like it was decorative. If they'd wanted to reach the children instead of sending a message—"
"They sent a message. They didn't act on it. Pulling the kids signals exactly what they want—that we're scared enough to collapse our routines and isolate ourselves."
"We should be scared," he braces both hands on the counter, and I notice how white his knuckles go, how the veins stand out against skin that's lost the supernatural warmth it used to carry.
"Our home was invaded. I was shot, and you're telling me our children should sit in a classroom with glass windows and a security fence a ten-year-old could climb?"
"Ripping them out of the one stable thing they have left will do more damage than any hunter can."
"Damage?" His voice rises. "It is what happens when armed operatives walk into an elementary school and find Alpha heirs sitting at desks like targets in a shooting gallery."
I get furious. "What's your alternative? Lock them in this house indefinitely? Turn their bedrooms into cells while we wait for the war to end?"
I wish I could control emotions right now, but I can’t handle them:
"They watched their father convulse on the living room floor, Kieran. They heard hunters in their home. Taking away school—the place where they get to be kids instead of Alpha heirs under siege—that doesn't protect but imprisons them."
"At least in prison they're alive."
"At what cost? Luna's already drowning in everyone's fear. Orion's retreating into his head so far I can barely reach him. Phoenix flinches every time someone drops something. They need normalcy, routine, the reassurance that their parents aren't falling apart—"
"Their parents are falling apart!" The words crack out of him like something breaking, and the kitchen goes silent.
Kieran stares at me with eyes that hold everything he's been burying since the night the dart hit—the rage, the grief, the consuming helplessness of a man stripped of the only power that ever made him feel capable.
"I can't protect them, Thalia. I can't shift, can't fight, can't even sense a threat approaching until it's too late. The one thing I can still do is keep them physically close to me, and you want to take that away too?"
The accusation lands between my ribs. "I'm not taking anything away from you."
"You're taking my decision, my authority as their father. Every security choice, every strategic call, every deployment—it all runs through you now, and I'm standing in my own kitchen asking permission to keep my children safe."
"That's not fair."
"None of this is!" He pushes off the counter, pacing the small kitchen with an energy that has nowhere to go.
"I used to feel you through the bond. Now I'm guessing. Reading your body language like a stranger, trying to interpret your silences the way humans do, and I'm getting it wrong every time because I was never taught to communicate without supernatural shortcuts."
My throat closes. He's right. Every word he's saying is true, and the truth of it is unbearable.
"I'm terrified too," I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "Every decision I make could be the wrong one. I'm running this pack on instinct and legal training and sheer fucking stubbornness, and none of it feels like enough."
"Let me help. Let me at least control what happens with our children—"
"You think I haven't imagined every scenario where they're in that school and something goes wrong?" My hands are shaking.
"I lie awake planning escape routes from their classrooms. I know exactly how long it takes my wolf to reach them from this house at full sprint, and it's forty-seven seconds longer than it would take a bullet."
Kieran stops pacing. The anger drains from his face, replaced by the recognition that we're both standing in the same ocean of fear, drowning in different directions.
"We can increase the protection detail," I offer. "Four wolves instead of two. Pack members positioned inside the building, not just at the perimeter. And I'll talk to the principal about modified lockdown procedures—"
"You've already thought this through."
"It's all I do now—run scenarios, calculate risks, plan for disasters that haven't happened yet. The mate bond used to tell me when I was overthinking. Now there's nothing to quiet the noise."
We stand in the kitchen, three feet and an impossible distance apart. The argument isn't about school—it's about a marriage straining under pressure neither of us expected.
It’s two people trying to communicate through the clumsy tools of human language now that the bond is gone.
"I'm sorry," Kieran says quietly. "For yelling and for making this about me when you're carrying more than anyone should have to."
"Don't apologize for being honest. I'd rather fight with you than watch you disappear into silence."
He reaches for my hand across the counter. I take it—warm skin, human grip, nothing underneath but the choice to keep holding on.
I'm gripping the counter edge trying to steady my breathing when I hear it.
"Mommy's scared," Luna's voice from the hallway, small and strained. "She's so scared it hurts to feel."
My blood goes cold.
"They'll decide to keep us home," Orion's response comes flat, mechanical, a tone I've never heard from my son. "Probability is 73% based on how Dad's breathing changed when Mom mentioned the school layout."
I move to the doorway and freeze.
All three children are huddled on the stairs. They've heard everything. Phoenix sits on the bottom step with her hands wrapped around the wooden banister, and the wood groans under her grip, splintering where her fingers dig in with strength a nine-year-old shouldn't possess.
Luna sits two steps above, tears streaming down flushed cheeks from emotions that aren't hers—mine, Kieran's, her siblings', the residual fear soaked into every wall of this house. Her empathic abilities are cracking open under sustained trauma.
And Orion. My brilliant, careful boy sits at the top of the stairs staring at nothing, his lips moving in rapid sequences I can barely track.
"Next attack probability within forty-eight hours: 84%. Likelihood of school as target given demonstrated perimeter access: 61%. Survival probability if—"
"Orion," my voice breaks on his name. "Stop, look at me."
He doesn't. His eyes remain unfocused, fixed on invisible calculations, probability cascades running through a nine-year-old mind processing threat data about whether his family lives or dies.
The banister cracks in Phoenix's grip. Luna gasps and curls into herself, overwhelmed by a fresh wave of her mother's horror. And Orion keeps murmuring numbers, retreating further into a mathematical fortress where emotions can't reach him.
The trauma of these weeks is cracking something open inside my cubs—abilities awakening under pressure, gifts manifesting in the worst possible way—and I'm standing in my own doorway with no idea how to stop it.