Get It 14

The alpha’s dining room has been dressed for war disguised as hospitality—candles in silver holders, linen napkins folded into shapes that suggest too much free time and not enough therapy. I sit at the far end of a fourteen-person table, between a pipe-tobacco elder and an empty chair.

Mina arrives in champagne silk and takes the seat beside Max, her hand finding his forearm before the first course. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t lean in either—just holds his wine glass and nods at an elder’s comment, polite and hollow.

I trace paths through my potatoes with studious dedication. My eyes betray me every forty seconds—finding his jaw, his hands, the way candlelight pools in the hollow of his throat.

He glances at me over Mina’s laughing profile—one second, maybe less—and my lungs stall. Then he looks away, and Mina leans to whisper near his ear while I sip water with a glass trembling against my lip.

Richard stands and the table quiets with the speed of people trained to respond to authority. Glasses lower, conversations die mid-syllable.

“I won’t keep you long—the lamb is too good for speeches.” Polite laughter, cue taken. “But I have news. After consulting with the elders and the Walker family, we’ve moved the choosing ceremony forward.”

My fork stops. Beneath the table, my fingers tighten around the handle until the silver bites back.

“One week from tonight, Max will stand before the pack and name his chosen mate.” Richard raises his glass toward his son, toward Mina. “I think we can all agree—it’s time.”

Glasses clink. Mina’s chin lifts, her hand presses Max’s arm, her eyes bright with a victory she’s stopped questioning.

“One week,” Mina breathes, loud enough for the table. “That’s perfect—I’ve already started planning.”

She squeezes his arm and beams at Richard. “Thank you, Alpha—this means everything to us.”

I stare at my plate, count the green beans—seven—then my breaths, then the seconds until I can leave.

Max raises his glass because the table expects it, and his eyes sweep past me entirely. A mercy that draws more blood than cruelty would.

Seven days—the number sits in my stomach like something swallowed whole and wrong. I should order commemorative napkins.

Dessert arrives and I excuse myself with a headache. The back door opens onto cold air that bites my bare arms, and I welcome anything that isn’t Mina’s fingers on his sleeve.

The garden is stone paths and hedgerows. I press my palms against the low wall until my fingers ache from the cold.

“You left before the crème brûlée.” His voice arrives behind me and my pulse sprints before my brain can object. “Richard takes dessert rejection personally.”

“I’ll write a formal apology.” I don’t turn around. “Dear Alpha Cornwell, my appetite died during the main course—please accept this letter in lieu of future attendance.”

“You’re not funny when you’re deflecting.” He sits beside me on the wall, close enough that his warmth finds my bare arm through the cold. “You’re funny the rest of the time, but not when you’re deflecting.”

“I’m hilarious when I’m deflecting. It’s my best material.” I pick at the stone beneath my hands. “One week, huh.”

“I sat through that toast with Mina’s hand on my arm and my father’s voice deciding my life.” His elbows drop to his knees. “And the only thing I could think about was whether you’d left the house or just the room.”

“Just the room. I’m not dramatic enough to leave the whole house.” My jaw aches from an hour of clenching. “Give me a few more dinners like that one and I’ll upgrade to full evacuation.”

“That’s not funny.” His voice is low, stripped clean of everything but the raw underneath. “None of this is funny to me anymore.”

“It was never funny, Max.” I wind a loose thread from my dress around my finger until the tip goes white. “Funny is just what I do so I don’t have to do the other thing.”

“Look at me.” His voice drops low enough for only the hedgerows to catch, something bare underneath. “Please.”

I turn because the please undoes me—him, that word, stripped of every defense he carries. His face in the half-light is open in a way I’ve never seen at any table or training yard.

“I don’t want to choose Mina.” He says it the way you’d say the ground is wet—simple, factual, past the point of debate. “I need you to hear that.”

My nails dig into stone until grit bites through skin. Hearing it out loud is so much worse than suspecting it in silence.

“Not wanting isn’t the same as not doing it.” I keep my voice careful, level. “The ceremony happens whether you want it or not, Max.”

“You think I don’t know that?” His hand drags through his hair. “Every path I can see ends with someone getting destroyed.”

“Then choose the path that destroys the fewest people.” My throat works around the words like swallowing something with edges. “That math doesn’t include me.”

“Why do you keep doing that?” He shifts on the wall, facing me fully now. “Subtracting yourself from every equation like you’re a rounding error.”

“Because I am one, Max.” My voice is quiet, steady, and costs me everything. “In this pack, in this family—I round down to nothing. That’s not self-pity, that’s arithmetic.”

“Stop telling me what the math includes.” Something rough scrapes through his voice. “You don’t get to decide what you are to me.”

My mouth opens on nothing—not a joke, not a deflection. He just removed every wall I had and left me on cold stone with no exit strategy.

“In seven days I stand before this pack and commit to someone.” He turns toward me on the wall, his knee almost brushing mine. “I can’t do that while there are things I haven’t said to the one person who—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” My voice comes out thin and cracked at the center. “You finish that and I have to carry it after the ceremony.”

“You think it’s easier if I don’t say it?” His eyes hold mine and the six inches between us hums with something neither of us is naming. “You think silence is protecting either of us?”

The wind cuts through the hedgerow and I shiver hard enough that he notices. His hand moves toward mine on the stone, then stops—the almost-touch worse than any contact would be.

“I need to talk to my father.” He says it quietly, and when I search his face I find something I’ve never seen—not the mask, not authority, but a man at an edge he fully intends to step off.

“Max.” His name scrapes out raw, tasting like copper on my tongue. “What are you going to tell him?”

He doesn’t answer. He holds my gaze with the weight of a decision already made, a pin already pulled, and the blast radius be damned.

He stands, and his hand grazes my shoulder as he passes—barely a touch, gone before it arrives—but it burns through fabric into skin and stays.

The back door closes and I sit alone on cold stone, hands shaking, and the look on his face told me everything—whatever Max Cornwell is about to say to his father, none of us are surviving it.