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The kitchen was quiet. The only light was the one over the stove, the one my mother left on every night since I was small. She left it on to let us know that we could have a midnight snack or drink without getting into trouble or losing our way in the dark.

It was silly. Wolves could see in the dark.

I heard her before she appeared. The soft, unhurried steps of a woman who moved through her own house with comfortable certainty. My mom came into the kitchen in her robe, her hair loose, her feet in the slippers Ivar had given her three Christmases ago.

She looked at me. She looked at the cold coffee. She filled the kettle and put it on the burner.

"What's wrong, baby boy?"

Baby boy. She only ever called me that in private. I was her first and would always be her baby. I liked it when she reminded me of that.

"I don't know where to start, Ma."

"Start at the beginning. I have time."

"I'm a grown man. I shouldn't be coming to you with my problems."

"I don't stop being your mother because you get older. I am always here. I am always a problem solver. Do you know why?"

I wrapped my fingers around the cold mug. Better that than reaching out to her with the aching need to be held, to let someone else manage the cold I was feeling after being forced to let my fated mate walk away from me.

"Men solve things with violence. You need your mothers and you need your wives because without us you would have settled every dispute since the beginning of time by hitting each other and there would be no one left." She reached across the table, pulled the cold mug from my hands and replaced it with a warm one. "So. Tell me."

I looked at her hand on mine. I looked at the ring on her finger. At the bite on her neck that was decades old.

"I don't want to marry the wife you chose for me."

My mother took a slow breath. "Are you coming to me as my son? Or as the heir?"

"What's the difference?"

"As my son, you can tell me anything. I will love you through all of it, and we will find a way. As the heir, you already know what I have to say, don't need to hear me say it."

Outside the kitchen window the estate was dark, but it might as well have been daybreak with our sight. Somewhere in that dark the enforcers were running their patterns, protecting the pack with their numbers and the strength of the Blackwood name.

"I know it's pack first," I said.

"It is not always pack first. It is always family first. Without family, there is no pack. The pack serves the family. Not the other way around."

She had never said that to me. Not in those words. What I had heard was pack first, duty first; the heir does not get the luxury of personal preference. I had built my internal architecture around that version.

"I could run the pack with Rosalind. She's an acceptable partner for an alpha. The alliance with the Lobos is necessary. We cannot make enemies out of them." I stopped. "But I want to make a family with Nell."

Not a hint of surprise crossed my mother's features. "I like Nell. Very much. But she's not a wolf. That fact would be difficult for the pack."

"No, she's not a wolf. She's a panther."

A little thrill went through me as my mother quirked a brow. I had never surprised this woman in all my life.

"So that's what I smelled,” she said. "Well, that changes things."

She was quiet again. Thinking. I had always loved watching my mother think. It was like watching a chess match in real time. Only this time, she didn't make a move. I didn't need her to. The run home had given me time to think while my wolf took over.

"I have a peace offering in mind," I said.

My mother reached across the table and took my face in both hands, the way she had when I was small and she needed me to hear something completely. "What ever you decide, your family will be behind you. You know that, baby boy."

I did know that. That's why it was so hard. That night when I was sixteen, I could've protested being the one to tell my girlfriend her fate. My father would've sent someone else. But it would've reflected poorly on my family.