Chapter 16: CONFLICTING DUTIES
CALLUM’S POV I couldn’t explain it. That was the most embarrassing part. I was a grown man. An Alpha. I had led this pack for sixteen years, made decisions that determined lives, kept my composure through things that would have broken lesser men. And yet, I had stormed into that girl’s office like a man who had lost every single one of his senses because there was a boy sitting across from her desk. 1 A boy. I pressed my fingers into my temple as I walked back to my quarters, jaw tight. The look on her face when I walked in was the thing I couldn’t shake. The way she flinched at my tone. She wasn’t used to that from me and I knew it and I had done it anyway because Orin was sitting there with his lunch and his easy smile and she had been laughing. I felt the bond pull so hard the moment I got within range of her office that my feet had carried me there before I had made any conscious decision to go. Pathetic. I pushed the door to my quarters open and stopped. Dane was leaning against the wall outside it with his arms folded and the expression on his face that said something was wrong before he opened his mouth. I looked at him. "What?" He straightened. "You want to tell me what that look was about first or should I go ahead?" "Nothing. Go ahead." He followed me inside and we stood at the map on the wall and he laid it out. Right. The Northeast stretch still had issues — issues that were apparently becoming a pattern. "One of ours." I leaned back. Dane looked at the map. "Has to be. No outsider maps our rotation that clean." Something cold settled in me. A traitor? I moved to my desk, sat down and rubbed my face with both hands. Someone in this pack had been feeding information out and had been doing it long enough to be comfortable about it. "How do you want to play it?" Dane asked. "Quietly as always." I replied. "We watch it ourselves for a few more days. Get the full picture before we move." He nodded, pulled the chair across from my desk and sat in it with a blank look on his face. "I’ve been thinking." He started. Oh goddess. "About?" "Her." He said it simply. "What this looks like for her long term. She came here to get away from something and now she’s sitting in the middle of something she didn’t ask for and can’t tell anyone about." He paused. "Neither can we." I reminded him. "So what are we doing, Alpha Callum?" He asked, brows furrowed. I leaned back. "I don’t know yet." He looked at the desk for a second. Then up at me. "What happens if we can’t break it?" I didn’t have to ask what he meant by that. I had thought about it a lot. "The bond." He said anyway, like he needed it to be said out loud. "What happens to her? To us? If there’s no way out of it?" The question sat in the room with no answer. "I don’t know." I admitted. We would get to that later. Not now. He nodded slowly like that was the answer he expected and stood after a moment, straightening his jacket. "Right." He moved to the door and stopped with his hand on it. He looked at me over his shoulder for a second before he walked out and pulled the door shut behind him. I sat there in the quiet of my quarters and stared at the map on the wall. Someone in my pack picked the worst time to be foolish and betray us. The knock came about an hour later. "Come in." I barely looked up. Nadia pushed the door open and stood in the doorway for a second. Her hair was loose and she had her favorite oversized jumper on and she looked so much like her mother sometimes that it still caught me off guard after all these years. She came inside without being invited and dropped herself into the chair across from me. "You haven’t eaten." She said it like an accusation. "I’m fine." "I didn’t ask if you were fine, I said you haven’t eaten." I almost smiled. "I’ll eat later." She looked at me for a long moment and my heart ached. "Dad." She said quietly. "Hm?" I tried to play it off. "Talk to me." "There’s nothing to talk about." I looked up at her. What did she want to hear? "You’ve been distracted for weeks." She said finally. "Like you’re always half somewhere else. I keep waiting for you to come back and you keep not coming back." Something tightened in my chest. "It’s the borders. Things have been—" "It’s not just the borders." She said it simply. "Is it something with the pack? With us? Because I need you to tell me if something is wrong, Dad. I’d rather know." My daughter was looking at me with those eyes and I thought about everything sitting behind the thing I couldn’t tell her. The bond. The cabin. The woman who was her best friend and who I had been going to in the dark and sending away before morning like that was something a man of my age and position did. "Everything is fine." I assured her. She looked at me for another long moment. Then she exhaled and looked down at the pen in her hands and something settled in her face like she had decided not to push tonight. "Okay." She said quietly. "If you’re free tonight. Maybe you can join Keisha and I. We’re having a movie night. We had one yesterday and—" Oh no. "I have matters to attend to." I quickly said. "Sorry, maybe another time." Not exactly a lie. But I needed to look out for my daughter. And until I could find out how to control the bond completely until I could break it, I needed to keep Nadia away from it all. She was my priority and I didn’t need her hating me.
