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I thought about Nell in her apartment, probably rattling the door, probably inventing new categories of threat for me. She was going to give me hell when I got back to her apartment tonight.

I couldn't wait.

I knocked on the open door. My parents reluctantly broke apart without hurry or embarrassment. My mother turned her head and looked at me. She climbed agilely out of my father's lap and crossed to me. She cupped my face in both hands and kissed my cheek. Her hands stayed for a moment, the way they had when I was small and she was checking me for damage after something difficult. She patted my cheek once and slipped out of the room without a word.

"Sit down, son."

I sat. I had been sitting across this desk from my father since before my feet touched the floor. I had received every lesson of consequence in this room. I had become, in this room, incrementally and then all at once, the man my father had been building toward.

"Nell Odhiambo is my fated mate."

Fenrir was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was the baritone I had measured myself against my entire life; warm and without heat, the register of a man who was not going to show anger when the situation did not call for it.

"I believe you," he said.

Three words. The relief of them was equal to the shame I felt. Even at my age, I still needed my father to believe me. The absence of his doubt was a physical release of pressure. The knowledge that I'd disappointed him kept me from fist-pumping.

"The fated mate bond is not a thing a wolf manufactures," Fenrir continued. "I am not questioning what you experienced. I am questioning what you think it means for your obligations."

"It means⁠—"

"Let me finish."

I closed my mouth.

Fenrir stood. He walked to the window. His back to me, the tree line beyond the glass, the estate spread out before us. "The Lobo alliance makes us stronger. Without it, we face the Volki without a buffer. The Lupettos are rebuilding. They are grateful for our help, but they are not yet reliable as allies. Elias O'Shea is bound to us by blood, but he is untested and he has enough of his own instability to manage without carrying our political weight as well. If you break the Lobo contract, Sorsha does not simply withdraw. She has been building toward this alliance for over a decade. She will not absorb the insult quietly. She will align against us."

I knew this. I had thought about this. I knew it was going to be difficult. But I also knew that I couldn't even look at another woman now that my wolf had chosen.

"Nell Odhiambo is remarkable. I have been watching her these past weeks. She truly is an asset. But she is human. She has no pack behind her. No political weight. No alliances that transfer to us. In the calculation of what this family needs to survive what is coming, she brings a brilliant mind and a massive liability."

She also held my heart. My devotion. My loyalty. My father knew this. He knew what it meant to find your fated mate. He would never turn his back on my mother.

"Your mother and I did not choose each other," he said as though he heard my thoughts. "We were placed in a room together and told this was the future, and we built something inside it because we decided to." He looked at me steadily. "Your mother and I looked at every available alliance, and we chose the one that gave you the strongest foundation. I had hoped you could find what we did inside our union inside yours with Rosalind.

There was no argument available to me. Not because he was wrong — he was not wrong. The math was correct. The political reality was exactly what he described. There was no argument because he was my father and he had done what fathers did, which was to build the best possible life for their son with the materials available. He just wasn't accounting for the fact that the wolf would not negotiate beyond this point.

"Being Alpha means there will always be something you want that the pack needs you to sacrifice. Always. It does not stop. It does not get easier. The day you take this title is the day you accept that the pack comes before you." My father took his seat and held my gaze. "I have made that sacrifice. Your mother has made it alongside me. We have both paid the price for this seat. We have never once regretted it because we chose it with full knowledge of the cost. I cannot make this decision for you. I will not. You are my heir, and you will be Alpha. And an Alpha leads himself before he leads anyone else. I need you to understand what is at stake. Not for me. Not for the contract. For your brothers and sister. For your mother. For the pack members who have trusted this family with their lives and their children's lives for generations."

My father looked at me with the full, open love of a man who had given me everything he knew how to give and was now watching me carry it into a room he could not follow me into.

"Figure out how to do both," he said. "Or figure out which one you can live without. But Magnus—" A pause that had the weight of everything behind it. "Make sure it is a decision worthy of the man I raised."

The room was quiet. I sat in it and waited.

Waited for my father to say more words. He had none.

Waited for doubts to weigh down my shoulders. They did not.

I stood. I straightened my jacket. I said the only thing available to me. "Yes, sir."

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

NELL

For the first time since undergrad, I had to resort to paper files. Luckily, Darius had given me a dossier. The Omondi files were a collection of manila folders with typed labels and handwritten annotations in the margins. I turned a page and ran my thumb along the edge as I read about the highland estates outside Kisumu; the volcanic soil, the altitude, the unique conditions that produced Kenya's purple tea. The files described the elevation in careful detail. The morning mist that settled in the valley before the sun burned it off. The way the cold nights and the warm days created something in the leaves that didn't exist anywhere else on earth.

My grandmother had described that mist once. She'd said the mist in the morning made the world look like God was waking up and wiping the sleep from his eyes.