These are the things his family wants spoken. I speak them. I let his name sit in the air, with the other fourteen names beside it, and I do not rush any of them.
Sienna is at my left shoulder for all of it.
I can feel her there without turning my head. The bond hums, quiet and close. She’s wearing a black dress I have not seen before, high at the throat, long sleeved, her hair twisted back at the nape of her neck. When my voice catches once on a word near the end of the eulogy, her hand comes up to the small of my back. She leaves it there. She does not press. She does not stroke. She is a steady, warm pressure through the wool of my jacket. My voice settles, and I finish the speech without breaking.
When I turn to commit Terrance to the earth, her hand drops away. When I turn back, it is there again. I do not know if she is aware she’s doing it. I think she is.
Terrance’s mother accepts the folded pack pennant from me. Her fingers are very cold. I cover her hand with mine and tell her quietly that her son was a good man and a good wolf. Her eyes lift to mine for the first time, and they fill. She nods once and takes the pennant against her chest.
I move to his sister.
Then to his brothers.
Then to the grandfather. I crouch down in front of the wheelchair to be level with him, and the old man takes my hand in both of his, gripping it hard enough to bruise.
“Your father would be proud of you, Lucas,” he murmurs, his voice cracking while the rest of him refuses to.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You did right by my boy.”
I cannot respond to that. I press his hands with my free one and stand up. He releases me.
The receptionin the main hall lasts three hours.
I do what an alpha does at a soldier’s funeral. I move through the room. I find every family member of every wolf whose name was spoken at the graveside. I shake hands. I ask after mates, children, elderly parents. I remember the small things from personnel files I made myself memorize the moment the casualty list came in. The mother who was ill last winter. The brother who just qualified as a healer. The cousin training as a tracker who’d been hoping to be assigned to her uncle’s section next year.
I make the families feel seen.
This is the part of being alpha that has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with attention. My father taught me without ever sitting me down to explain it. I watched how he moved through rooms after losses. I watched how he turned his whole body toward each person he spoke to. I learned that grief is a thing that has to be witnessed by the man who sent the order, and you do the witnessing or you do not deserve the seat.
Sienna stays at my elbow the entire time.
She does not insert herself. She does not try to be luna; she lets me do the work, standing one step back, and when a wife collapses sobbing into her husband’s shoulder, Sienna is the one who gets the woman a chair and a glass of water before I have even registered the need.
A young pack member in his early twenties pulls me aside near the windows and tells me, his voice rough, that Terrance had been his mentor since he was fifteen. He cannot finish what he came to say. I rest my hand on his shoulder and tell him I understand. He nods and walks away to be alone with his grief for a while. Sienna watches him go without comment. She squeezes my arm briefly and then lets go.
By the time the last of the family groups have left the hall, the sun has gone down behind the western trees. The staff quietly clear the long tables with Lydia supervising from the doorway. Monroe is at the front entrance seeing the wheelchair down the ramp. The household is moving as it always does after a funeral reception: soft-footed, with low voices, tiredly.
I find Sienna near the windows. She has a glass of water in her hand she has not drunk from. The hem of her dress is damp from the grass at the interment.
“I’m going to my office for a while,” I tell her.
She looks up at me. “Alright.”
“I just need some time.”
“I know.”
She doesn’t ask if she can come. She doesn’t tell me to take care of myself. She lifts her free hand and rests it briefly against the front of my jacket, two fingers smoothing a wrinkle that isn’t there, her eyes holding mine, and that is all she does.
I cross the entrance hall. I climb the stairs. I close my office door behind me without turning on the lamp.
The last lightof the day is fading as I sit. I lower myself into the chair behind the desk. I sit with my back against the leather, my hands resting on the wood, and I let the quiet press in.
My father told me once that grief was a tax.
I was nineteen. We had buried a young pack member who had drowned in the river during training. I had returned from the service shaking and gone to my father’s office to tell him I did not know how he sat through ceremonies like that without falling apart. He set down his pen and looked at me across the same desk I am sitting at now, and he said, “Grief is a tax, son. The alpha pays it in private. He pays it in full. He does not take it out of the people he serves.”
