Elliot walked them to the border at sunset. Liam limped. Camila didn't look back.

I found Kieran in the courtyard afterward. He stood with his back against the stone wall, eyes closed, both hands flat against the rock. His right hand was still red across the knuckles.

He wasn't hurt. I could tell that much. He was holding something down. Like a man sitting on the lid of a box that kept trying to open.

I stopped ten feet away and watched him breathe. In. Hold. Out.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

It came out quiet. I realized I had never asked him anything about himself before. Only about contracts. Only about work.

He opened his eyes. They found me right away, like they always knew where I'd be.

"I should have moved faster," he said.

I almost said, *You threw him through a door. How much faster could you be?* Then I saw his face. He wasn't talking about today.

He meant the ceremony. The fire. Me on my knees in front of three hundred wolves while he stood outside in the rain.

My throat went tight.

"You moved when it mattered," I said.

I turned and went inside before he could answer. I didn't trust my face.

But halfway down the hall, I felt it. Not a pulse this time. A slow warmth, spreading under my ribs and staying there. Something waking up. Something turning, very carefully, toward the courtyard where he stood.

---

My parents arrived two days later.

I saw them from the workshop window. My father climbed out of the car stiff as a fence post. My mother came around the other side and stood still, looking up at the walls. She didn't smile. She always smiled.

I knew what the rumors had told them. *That girl seduced the Lycan Prince to shame her Alpha.*

Kieran met them in the main room. I stood by the fireplace with my arms crossed so no one could see my hands shake.

"Your Highness," my father said, and started to bow.

"Kieran," he said. "Please. In this house I'm just the man asking for your blessing."

My father stopped halfway down. He didn't know what to do with that. Neither did I.

Then Kieran knelt.

A Lycan Prince, on one knee on the stone floor, in front of two Deltas from a pack he could crush with one phone call. He bowed his head. He waited.

My mother's hand went to her mouth.

My father's jaw worked. Then he said, slow, "Do you know the old Delta rite?"

I almost stepped in. Nobody knew that rite. Liam didn't. Liam's father didn't. I only knew it because my grandmother sang it to me when I was small.

Kieran lifted his head and began.

"By blade and by blood, by watch and by wall, I stand where you stand. I guard what you guard. I kneel to the ones who kept her first."

Every word. Every pause in the right place. Even the old ending, the one about the moon keeping count.

My father didn't say anything. He just nodded once and went to the hearth to build the blessing fire.

My mother stood at Kieran's left side for the ritual. When she leaned in to touch the ash to his forehead, she paused. Just for a breath. Her eyes dropped to his jacket collar.

Then she finished the blessing like nothing had happened.

But I knew that look. I had the same one. It was the look of a woman putting something away to think about later.

---

That evening, they came to my workshop.

My father stood by the door like he was on guard duty. My mother sat with me and took both my hands. She didn't speak for a long time. Her thumbs moved over my knuckles, over the edge of my wrist brace.

"I should have seen," my father said finally.

That was all. Four words. From him, it was a speech.

I didn't ask him to say more.

"I knew something was wrong," my mother whispered. "Those flowers every month. The way you stopped looking at the door when he walked in. I had no words for it inside our world."

I swallowed hard.

"I'm not asking you to choose," I said. "But I'm not asking you to stay, either. Not to guard a pack that watched me kneel."

My father looked at the floor. Then he nodded and walked out.

---

I couldn't sleep. Near midnight, I passed the guest room and saw light under the door. I heard a pen scratching.

Then my mother's voice, soft.

"I think the Moon Goddess has been working on this for a very long time, Marcus."

The pen stopped.

"Then she's waited long enough," my father said.

The door was open an inch. I saw him at the desk, the old Ironvale loyalty form in front of him. Twenty-six years of service on one sheet of paper. He pressed the pen down and read aloud as he wrote, the way Deltas always do.

"I, Marcus Solano, Delta of Ironvale, withdraw my blade and my blood from the Alpha who—"

His hand stopped on the page. The ink pooled black under the tip.