Get It 23

[Kylie’s POV]

The great hall smells like cedar garlands and fresh paint. I’ve been arranging centerpieces for forty minutes because if my hands stop moving they’ll start shaking, and the reason has a name and blue eyes and I haven’t been in the same room with him in three days.

Three days of rearranging my schedule around his footsteps, eating at wrong hours, taking the long corridor to every class. Avoidance is an art form and I’m operating at gallery level, which would be impressive if it weren’t destroying me.

“Kylie.” Mina’s voice arrives before she does, sharp enough to cut through the noise of two dozen women dressing the hall for a ceremony that will hand her everything I can’t have. She stops at my table, and the smile she usually wears is gone.

“We need to talk.” She pulls out the chair across from me and sits without invitation. “And I need you to not do the thing where you deflect with a joke and pretend nothing is happening.”

“I wasn’t going to joke.” I set down the centerpiece and fold my hands in my lap, pressing my thumbs together until the nails go white. “You have my full, humorless attention.”

“The drill last week.” Her eyes don’t blink. “You dodged a blind strike that took out three wolves with actual training.”

My thumbs press harder into each other. “Adrenaline is—”

“Don’t.” The word cracks between us. “I’m not your mother and I’m not an idiot, so don’t hand me that line.”

She leans forward, elbows on the table, and whatever sweetness she’s performed for two years has evaporated. “I’ve watched Max pull away from me since you moved into that house. He looks at me like he’s reading a weather report.”

My nails cut crescents into my own skin. A garland brushes the table edge and the cedar scent is so strong my head swims.

“I don’t know what’s happening between you two.” Her voice drops, and the women at the next table don’t look up, but the angle of their shoulders says they’re listening. “But I know something is. The way he watches you across a room—nobody looks at their stepsister like that.”

“Mina—” Her name in my mouth tastes like the wrong answer to every question. “There’s nothing between us.”

“If you are the reason he’s hesitating at the choosing, I will find out.” Each word placed with the patience of someone building a case she intends to win. “And when I do, I’ll make sure the pack knows every detail.”

She stands, the chair screeching against stone. “I’ve waited two years for this ceremony. I’m not losing it to a girl who shouldn’t even be in this house.”

She walks away and the air where she sat still hums. I stare at the garland in front of me, my fingers trembling against the table in a fine, visible tremor I can’t will away.

Mina without the mask is not a girl playing social games. She’s a woman staring down the edge of losing everything she was promised, and people on that edge don’t bluff.

I pick up the next centerpiece because the alternative is sitting here counting the ways my life is narrowing. The cedar bites into my palms where I grip it too tight, and the sting is the only thing keeping my breathing steady.

“You look like you’re strangling that arrangement.” Max’s voice from the doorway, and my hands freeze mid-squeeze. He crosses the hall, pulls out the same chair Mina vacated, and drops into it like he hasn’t slept in days.

The shadows under his eyes are violet, deep enough to look like bruises. His hair is pushed back like he’s been dragging his hands through it for hours.

“I went to my father.” He keeps his voice low, pitched under the noise of preparation. “Asked about Callum—your dad. The Eastern Ridge.”

My grip tightens on the garland until a cedar twig snaps between my fingers. “Why would you do that?”

“Because your mother came from a pack that doesn’t exist and her name doesn’t come up anywhere, and I need to understand what’s real.” His elbows rest on the table, knuckles pale. “Callum held forward position with a unit of six. Mark and Garrett flanked him, Thomas anchored the rear, Jensen and Cole ran perimeter.”

He recites the names the way he recites formations—precise, deliberate, each one set down so it can’t be dismissed. My nails dig into the broken cedar and a splinter slides under my thumbnail, a bright hot point of focus.

“Second group hit from the south. Your father turned to cover Mark’s flank.” His eyes hold mine and he doesn’t soften it. “The wound was to the throat—quick. My father was ten feet away and carried Callum out of that ravine himself.”

I nod. My face is still, arranged into the expression of a woman hearing painful history retold. Underneath, the real reaction is something else entirely.

Yes. That’s the story—the one Mom constructed so the pack would never know what actually happened. An eight-year-old girl lost control and killed her own father. That’s what I was told, and that’s the story I’ve lived inside for thirteen years.

Max’s information doesn’t contradict my mother’s version. It confirms it—the pack believes what Mom needed them to believe.

“Thomas lost his arm in the same fight.” Max watches my face, reading it the way he reads everything—thoroughly, missing nothing. “Mark still walks with the limp. These aren’t stories, Kylie. These are men carrying that day in their bodies.”

“I know.” My voice comes out steady and it costs me everything I have left. “He was my father. I know what that day took.”

But something catches. A small thing—a splinter inside a splinter, the kind you can’t reach.

Not the story itself. The number. Six wolves, each carrying a specific, detailed account of watching the same man die. Named, verified, corroborated by scars and limps and missing limbs.

It’s just a lot, isn’t it? Six people—Mom did her best to cover my patricide.

I push the thought down so hard my jaw aches from it. The splinter stays, buried but present, a thing I am not ready to follow to its conclusion—not here, in a hall full of cedar and candles and women who would tear me apart if they knew what I was.

“I’m done accepting half-truths.” Max’s voice drops, something final running through it. “The ceremony is in three days, and the truth is coming out with or without your help.”

My mouth opens—to argue, to deflect, to deploy the humor that has kept me vertical this long—and my phone buzzes against my thigh. I pull it out under the table.

One message. Mom. Come home now.

My blood drains so fast my vision spots at the edges. Max is watching me, waiting for an answer I no longer have, and under the table my phone screen glows with three words that have never once meant anything good.