Page 86 of Fate, Interrupted

“I’m not signaling anything.”

“You were seen publicly courting a human woman.”

“Courting,” I say.

“What would you call it?”

“She’s a friend. We like each other’s company. That she’s human is irrelevant.”

Elias tilts his head slightly, a small movement that signals a change in approach. He’s assessed the direct route and is choosing a different angle.

“Your naivete is astounding. That, or you’re playing me for a fool. I understand the appeal. Human women present novelty. Curiosity is natural. Attraction happens.”

I hold my breath for a few heartbeats.

“These experiments run their course,” he continues, calm enough to make it clear he considers the matter settled. “The wolf finds its equal. It always does.”

The word sits like a hand flat on a table.

Experiments. Equal.

Anger moves through me, but that’s not all of it. Underneath is an older fury: the fury of being seen as deficient by someone certain he is superior.

He is looking at me. The middle son. The one who ran too hard and too fast with the younger pack members at eighteen, howling at the moon, mildly terrorizing humans because we could. The one who used his intelligence as a weapon and his charm as a shield, and his playboy reputation as an argument against being taken seriously.

The one who has never been able to make his father see him as anything other than the version of himself he was at eighteen.

Experiments.

The sinking feeling arrives. He thinks what has been building for over a month now with Norah—the bookshop, the trivia night, the lake, her hand over mine last night—is the same category as everything his eighteen-year-old son did years ago. He’s filed me away in that image and never revisited it.

On one level, I feel only sadness. He doesn’t know what this is.

My father uses the word attachment. Not the other word. I don’t know if that’s strategy or if he genuinely hasn’t seen it yet — if his certainty about what this is has blinded him to what it actually is. Logan’s face tells me nothing. Nobody in this room is going to say it first. But it’s here, in this office, the thing none of us is naming, and my father gave an order that was already too late before he gave it.

What he doesn’t know is what a bond with me could cost Norah. A human woman doesn’t automatically gain the pack’s protection. She has no rank or formal standing. The pack wouldn’t act against her directly, but other wolves in Larkin could see her as a weakness, a pressure point, a way to get to me or my family. She wouldn’t even know what to watch for.

My father is giving an order about the wrong problem.

The real problem is that I should have thought this through before I let it get this far. Before I let her matter this much without telling her what mattering meant.

On another level, I feel enraged, because he is completely certain he does.

And that certainty, the absolute confidence of a man who believes his experience of the world is comprehensive, cracks me open in a way I wasn’t expecting. Because looking at my father’s certainty that he is right about everything makes me think about my mother.

Not the version of her that Elias has been carrying for twenty-five years. The other version. The one that lived in the afternoon hours before my father came home from work.

It comes back to me—the looseness in her shoulders, the laugh that came from somewhere real, the version of herself when she wasn’t acting out the role her marriage required. I was the right age to be with her in those hours: old enough to be company, young enough that nobody thought to send me elsewhere. Logan was already trailing Elias through the daily business of running a company. Henry was barely past toddling. It was only Grace and me in the afternoons, and I knew her in those hours the way my father never did.

The cocktail on the counter, before he was due home.

I noticed it the way children notice things, the way children absorb things—not analytically, just as part of the afternoon’s rhythm. The drink appearing, then disappearing, her attention diverted away from me, the shoulders straightening as the clock moved toward his return. The smile that arrived when the door opened, and how it wasn’t the same as the smile from the afternoon.

I noticed it then.

I have not let myself follow it to its conclusion until this exact moment, standing in my father’s office while he uses the word experiment, looking at a man who adored his wife so completely that he never once saw her.

A car accident, two miles from the house, on a road she had driven a thousand times.