Chapter 5 Pack law

Caden pov

The meeting was held at the Wolfe house, the way all serious pack business was.

Caden sat at the head of the long oak table in the back room and watched his pack watch him and kept his expression neutral with the practice of someone who had been doing it since he was seventeen and his father had put the alpha title on his shoulders like a coat that didn't quite fit yet. It fit now. He'd made sure of that.

Seven faces around the table. His beta Jace to his right, arms folded, jaw set in the particular way that meant he already didn't like where this was going. Beside him, Petra, the pack's eldest, silver-haired and sharp-eyed and about as easy to manage as a weather system. The others ranged in age from nineteen to forty, all of them people Caden had grown up with, fought beside, would die for without blinking.

All of them currently looking at him like he'd lost his mind.

"A hybrid," Petra said. Not a question. Not quite an accusation. Something in between that was somehow worse than both.

"A hybrid," Caden confirmed.

"Living in Ashveil."

"In the Mercer rental, yes."

Petra sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling briefly, the way she did when she was deciding which of several things to say first. Caden had known her his whole life and he waited her out.

"The vampires will know," she said finally. "If there's a hybrid in their territory they'll send someone to assess the situation. You know that."

"I know."

"And if they decide she's a threat—"

"She's nineteen years old and she doesn't know what she is," Caden said, keeping his voice level. "She's not a threat to anyone."

"That's not how Aldric Blackthorn sees hybrids and you know that too." Petra's eyes were steady on his. She wasn't being cruel, that was the thing about Petra, she never was. She was being precise, the way she always was, laying facts out like stones across a river so you could see exactly where each step would land. "He had the last one killed. The one in Prague."

The table was quiet.

Jace unfolded his arms. "How close are you to the bond?"

Caden looked at him. Jace had been his best friend since they were eight years old and he could read Caden the way most people read a room — immediately and accurately.

"Close enough," Caden said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one I've got."

Jace exhaled through his nose. "Caden."

"It hit the moment I scented her." He said it plainly because there was no point in anything else, not in this room. "Full bond. Immediate."

Another silence. Longer this time.

Petra closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them her expression had shifted into something that looked almost like sorrow. "Then we have a problem."

"We have a situation," Caden said. "I'm not calling my mate a problem."

"Your mate who the Vampire King will want dead the moment he knows she exists." Petra leaned forward. "Your mate who doesn't know she's a hybrid, which means she doesn't know how to control whatever she is, which means when it surfaces, and it will surface, Caden, it always does, she'll be completely unprepared." She paused. "Your mate whose father, from what you've described, is not going to be useful in any of this."

Caden's jaw tightened. He'd thought about Dale Voss exactly once since last night and the thought had arrived with a cold, quiet fury he'd had to put somewhere else before it got away from him. A man who could look at that girl, who could have that girl and still reach for the bottle first.

"I know," he said again.

"So what's the plan?" Jace asked.

Caden looked around the table. At the faces of people who trusted him to make the right call, who had built their safety on his ability to think clearly and act decisively and not let personal stakes cloud his judgement.

"We protect her," he said. "Quietly. She doesn't know about any of this yet, about what she is, about the bond, about the vampires. I'm not dumping that on her in the first week."

"She'll need to know eventually," Petra said.

"I know."

"Sooner rather than later if Blackthorn sends someone."

"I know, Petra."

A beat. Then Petra nodded, once, the way she did when she'd said everything she had to say and was stepping back to let the alpha lead. It was the closest thing to approval she gave and Caden had learned to take it.

"Pack keeps eyes on the boundary line," he said, looking around the table. "Quietly. Any vampire scent that doesn't belong to Ashveil's residents gets reported to me directly. Nobody approaches her without my knowledge. Nobody tells her anything before I do." He paused. "And nobody." his eyes moved to the two younger wolves at the end of the table who were already exchanging the particular look of people who found situations like this entertaining, "makes this into something she can feel. She's already looking at this town sideways. I won't have her spooked."

Nods around the table. Even the two youngest straightened up.

"One more thing," Jace said, as chairs began to scrape back. His voice was careful in a way that made Caden go still. "Dorian Blackthorn."

The room settled again.

"What about him," Caden said. Flat.

"He's been away two weeks. Mission for his father." Jace met his eyes steadily. "He comes back to Ashveil, Caden. He goes to school here. He's going to scent her the second he's within fifty feet."

The silence that followed was a different kind than the ones before it.

Dorian Blackthorn. The Vampire King's son, sent to Ashveil two years ago for reasons the pack had never fully established. Cold, contained, and deeply uninterested in anything that didn't serve his own purposes. Caden had maintained a working understanding with him the way you maintained a working understanding with bad weather, you didn't like it, you couldn't stop it, you just made sure you had shelter ready.

But this was different.

This was his mate. And Dorian Blackthorn was going to walk back into Ashveil in two weeks and sense a hybrid on his doorstep and Caden had absolutely no idea what he was going to do about that.

"I'll handle Dorian," he said.

Jace looked at him for a long moment. "Sure," he said, in the tone of someone who was not sure at all.

Caden didn't have a better answer.

He stayed at the table after the others filed out, in the quiet of the empty room, and thought about dark grey eyes and a girl who had learned to step over creaking floorboards and make herself small in spaces that should have been safe.

I'll handle it, he thought again.

He had to.