Page 70 of Fate, Interrupted

The question holds more than it should.

The pack is still alert. My father’s office is still in my recent memory. And the entire pack, whether openly or not, has adjusted around the fact that I have been seen with a human woman repeatedly and have now taken her to a lake on a Tuesday afternoon like a man who has forgotten what world he belongs to.

What I haven’t forgotten, what I think about every time Logan does the look, and my father gives the order, is that nobody asked me. Not when they decided Logan was the heir. Not when they built the structure of this family around his strengths and handed me the parts that didn’t fit his profile. Not when they decided what my role was and what it wasn’t and what the middle son was good for and what he wasn’t. The structure was decided without my input, and I’ve been living inside it since before I was old enough to understand I didn’t have a choice about it.

“And now what?” I say.

Logan lets that pass.

“Do you know what worries me?”

I try to keep the anger out of my voice. It’s an old anger, and therefore harder to locate than a fresh one. “Probably several things.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

He looks out across the lot for a moment, toward the line of trucks parked along the far fence, toward the perimeter of territory that has defined the shape of my adult life. His territory, officially. The operation he runs. The pack he leads. The future that was assigned to him before either of us was old enough to have opinions about it. It’s a future he accepted without visible conflict because Logan has never wanted anything our father didn’t want for him.

Then he looks back.

“What worries me is not that the pack notices,” he says. “That was inevitable. What worries me is that you don’t seem to understand what happens next.”

The resignation in his voice catches under my ribs. “Enough.”

“No,” Logan says, softly and without heat. “You understand the part that feels good right now.”

The irritation comes faster than I want it to. There’s the condescension underneath the reasonableness, right on schedule. Logan, who has never wanted the wrong thing, who has never had to fight for the right to want what he wants, telling me I don’t understand. Logan who was handed everything I spent fifteen years trying to compete for, who accepted it with the equanimity of a man who never had to fight for it, and who now stands in the parking lot of our family’s operation looking at me with the patient expression of someone explaining a concept to a person who is trying very hard not to learn it.

“You don’t know anything about what this feels like.”

“I know enough.”

There it is again. Both of them using it, my father and my brother, like it’s the family position on things they can see that I can’t. Like thirty-two years of being the one who wasn’t chosen has left me somehow incapable of understanding my own situation. Like the middle son needs the heir and the patriarch to explain to him what is happening in his own chest.

“You sound like Father,” I say.

“Because he isn’t wrong.” He says it without apology, without inflection. Logan isn’t trying to win. He’s trying to make me stop pretending that the shape of this problem can be altered by wanting it badly enough.

He doesn’t move from the wall.

“Has she been asking questions?” he says.

I look at him. “About what?”

The deflection is automatic, and he sees through it immediately, which is the problem with Logan—he doesn’t need you to confirm anything. He only needs to watch your face for the half-second before you decide what to show him.

“She’s curious,” I say. “She asks about things she doesn’t understand. That’s who she is.”

I look past him toward the warehouse entrance. “She asked questions. Real ones. About wolves. About pack life. Things she didn’t know and wanted to.”

He absorbs that without interruption. “And you answered,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

What I want to say is: because she’s not judging. Because leaving her alone with whatever version of wolves the human world has already built for her feels more dangerous than telling her something true. Because she asked like she actually wanted to know, and I haven’t had a conversation like that in longer than I want to account for.