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It took ten minutes before I could face him.
Before I could tell him that everything we’d done, every risk we’d invoked, dragging SnowFang and even his parents into it—however unintentionally—had been for absolutely nothing. And that no matter what happened with AmberHowl and Apharia, we were infinitely worse off than when we’d begun.
His head rotated a few degrees on his neck, almost like a mechanical owl’s might, and his face held no emotion, but his eyes were molten, stormy skies. “So whatever he thought would be in that box was more dangerous to him than you being an Abomination.”
I stared at the puke carpet.
His fading bruises stood out like accusations. His anger burned like acid, liquifying my insides, filling me with tears I refused to shed.
I said, lost, “Every Alpha is breaking the Law of Proper Behavior. But if we take down Jerron for this, we might damage my father’s reputation, which might be the only thing keeping your pedigree intact.”
“Intact! You call this intact?! This is not intact! And if Demetrius thinks he is getting any Mortcombe cooperation on Apharia, he can fuck off. I am going to build a very nice observation post on the eastern perimeter and go piss off it.” Sterling picked up his phone.
I snatched at his hands. He held his phone out of reach.
I pleaded, “This isn’t just about you and me anymore. This isn’t even about SnowFang. This is about the species. If my father’s reputation is completely destroyed, then everything he worked for, and my grandfather worked for, is destroyed. There’s no recovery from it, Sterling, there’s no fucking hope. For any of us! Alphas everywhere will just do whatever the hell they want with mates, nothing will change, and we’ll go extinct!”
“Fuck your father. Your father was a corrupt Alpha who abused his power, and I am done being his pawn.”
I grabbed at his hands. “Wait. Don’t do anything. Not yet! The population imbalance is real, and he was the champion. There’s no heir to that work. There’s no one else who’s going to pick up the torch. His good name, rightly or wrongly earned, is all that’s protecting everything he’s ever done. You are part of that work. We’re all part of it.”
Sterling froze all over, as if he had been dipped in liquid nitrogen, and would shatter into furious pieces all at one moment. “You call this good work? Your father is the root of this. He needs to pay for what he did to you.”
“Without him, you wouldn’t be recognized at all! You might be a hybrid!”
“He’d done me a favor if he’d registered me as a no-pedigree bastard!”
“This is about more than that!” I pled with him.
He stared at me like I had lost my mind, but at least he put his phone down. “Is that what you tell yourself? Is that because you can’t bear to look at how he treated you? You don’t seem aware of how badly you’ve been treated. I just listened to you tell your brother how your father put his hands on you!”
“Oh please.” I lashed back, “He was an Alpha, and mouthy wolves always get cuffed!”
“So because he was an Alpha, he gets to cuff his daughter like she’s a bad dog? Did he use a rolled up newspaper across your snout? You don’t even see how your father manipulated you or played you!”
“I am not a victim!” I shouted.
His tone got cold, like it was from the back of a deep cave. “I am an Alpha, and I would never put hands on you or our pups. You have seen how I do not put my hands on women, I have seen males beat my mother into a fucking pulp, I have held ice to her face when she came home and a man beat the shit out of her, and you are standing there telling me that an Alpha hitting his own daughter for having an opinion is acceptable and normal?”
“You aren’t listening.”
“I am listening, you aren’t hearing! You are still his pawn, even now. He’s got you so well trained that his oh-so-important work has to be protected that you can’t see what he did to you!”
“His work is important!”
Sterling growled, “That’s what he trained you to believe. That’s what the data he showed you said, but how much don’t you know? You didn’t know about me! He never let you see anything from a wolf you might meet! He had you so damn trained you never peeked at anything you weren’t permitted to. There is obedient and there is brainwashed. Were other females expected to be untouched virgins? Were other daughters of high-prestige wolves friendless? Were other daughters forbidden from having jobs, educations, lives? He took everything normal away from you and filled it all in with ‘his work’ so you’d feel special and privileged and never question him.”
No. No, that wasn’t what had happened.
He ground it deeper. “He isolated you. He dismantled you. Any pride and self-respect you developed he made sure had a caveat attached to it, so he could take it from you. You barely have an education, you had no friends, no career, no family to bid farewell. You had nothing he didn’t let you have. Do you think anyone realized you were gone? Were you close enough to anyone they’d have reported you missing after a week? Two weeks? Does even half of SilverPaw know you’re gone?”
My heart throbbed. “I wasn’t some damn puppet.”
“You were a Solstice Hound, and you never told me. The EarthSpine said you were one of the best hunters in SilverPaw. I’m just some degenerate rumored hybrid, but even I know being a Solstice Hound in a pack like SilverPaw is something wolves work their entire life for. You are probably one of the best hunters of your generation in the entire species, you know it, and you never mentioned it.”
“Why should I have? I can’t hunt in the city,” I snapped, aching from old wounds that weren’t his business.
“Did he take that away from you too?”
