Page 115 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

Ronan folded his arms. “You are not walking into a room full of wolves who already question whether you should be alive.”

“Then put me in another room. Behind a screen. On a call. Outside the window. In a decorative cabinet. I don’t care.”

“No.”

“If Evelyn is offering explanations about the ceremony that almost killed me, I’m hearing them.”

I said her name. “Cassie.”

Her gaze came back to mine, and the tension changed. It always did now when she looked directly at me. The bond pulled tight, not painful, but aware. The wolf inside me lifted its head as if her attention had weight.

“I’m not trying to make this harder for you,” she said.

That surprised me more than it should have.

I said nothing.

She continued, quieter now. “But every time people decide things about me in rooms I’m not allowed to enter, I lose more of myself. I can’t afford that.”

The bond carried the truth of it. Not as words. As pressure. Years of rooms where her pain had been discussed as inconvenience, her anger as instability, her boundaries as something everyone else could interpret.

Grant had done that. Her mother had done that. Now we were doing it with older laws and better security.

The wolf wanted to kill the feeling. I could not kill a feeling, I could only stop adding to it.

I looked at Ronan. “She hears it.”

Ronan’s face changed by one degree.

Enough.

“You are asking as my brother or my enforcer?” he asked.

“As the man who marked her.”

Cassie went very still.

The words were ugly, but they needed to be.

Ronan’s eyes hardened. “That gives you no authority.”

“No,” I said. “It gives me responsibility.”

Ronan stared at me before he looked at Cassie. “You sit in the adjoining study. Door open. Sava with you. You do not speak unless I allow it.”

Cassie smiled without humor. “That last part felt optimistic.”

“Cassie.”

“I’m listening. I’m not promising decorative silence.”

Ronan’s mouth tightened. “You speak only if I address you, or if you hear something materially false.”

“That I can work with.”

Ronan looked at Sava. “Can she tolerate transport?”

Sava sighed. “I dislike all of you.”