Get It 15

[Max’s POV]

The last guest’s taillights disappear down the drive. I follow my father into his study before he can close the door, and Father pours himself a scotch with the unhurried hand—he considers the evening finished.

He doesn’t offer me one, which means he already senses what’s coming and has decided not to make it comfortable. “The ceremony is premature.” I say it standing, because sitting in the leather chair across his desk is what supplicants do.

“The tradition is that you choose.” He settles into his chair and the leather sighs beneath him. “I’m giving you the platform to do exactly that.”

“You’re giving me a deadline disguised as an honor.” My hands find my pockets because the alternative is watching them curl into fists. “I’m not certain about Mina, and I need more time.”

His glass pauses halfway to his mouth. “Not certain,” he repeats, tasting the words the way he’d taste something spoiled.

“You’ve had enough time past your birthday, Max.” The silence that follows has weight, the kind that fills a room from the floorboards up. “The pack has been patient. I have been patient.”

“Patient isn’t the same as right.” My jaw works around the next sentence before I release it. “If the choosing exists to honor the fated bond, then rushing past the possibility of one makes the ceremony a performance.”

“It’s not a rush, it’s a reckoning.” He sets the glass down and folds his hands, and the posture shift tells me the father has left and the alpha has arrived. “Every week you stand unbonded, the elders question your commitment.”

“I’m not asking for months.” My grip tightens on the chair back. “I’m asking you to consider that seven days isn’t enough to make a decision this pack will live with for generations.”

“Generations.” He exhales through his nose. “You sound like your mother when you talk like that—she always found ways to make patience sound like principle.”

“Maybe she had a point.” The mention of her tightens something behind my ribs, and he knows it—he always knows when he’s drawn blood.

“The pack has waited long enough.” His thumb traces the rim of his glass, slow, deliberate. “Mina is a strong match—her bloodline, her temperament, her family’s standing. She is ready.”

“Ready and right aren’t the same thing.” I pull my hands from my pockets and anchor them on the chair because standing upright is becoming difficult. “What if there’s a fated bond I haven’t been able to identify yet?”

The question hangs between us and my father’s expression doesn’t shift—it calcifies, patience compressing into something denser. “Fated mates don’t hide, son. The bond manifests—instinct, scent—it’s unmistakable.”

“If it hasn’t surfaced by now,” he says, glass settling against the desk with a click, “it isn’t coming.”

“You don’t know that.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend, scraped raw on the thing I’m not saying. “There are documented cases of late manifestation—”

“Documented cases and fairy tales.” Father’s palm comes down on the desk—not a slam, a period. “I’ve led this pack for twenty-six years. I’ve seen fated bonds form, Max.”

“They are not subtle, and they do not require their alpha to stand in his father’s study arguing for more time.” He leans back, something behind his eyes less command than exhaustion.

The truth sits behind my teeth. Her name, the heat, the way my wolf orients toward her across any room—three sentences and he’d understand everything.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” Father’s voice cuts through the silence, and my fingers go white on the chair back.

“No.” The lie tastes like copper, because the truth would mean questions—why the wolfless girl carries a scent that appears and vanishes, what Hope is hiding—and every answer I don’t have becomes a door kicked open into Kylie’s life. “I just need you to trust that I’m taking this seriously.”

“I do trust you.” He picks up his glass, and the gentleness is worse than the command. “Which is why the ceremony happens in seven days, and you will stand before the pack with a name.”

“And if the name isn’t Mina?” The question escapes before I can cage it, and my father’s eyes narrow by a fraction that carries more force than any shout.

“Then it had better be someone the pack can stand behind.” His gaze holds mine, and beneath the alpha’s authority I catch the weight of a man who has carried this pack alone. “Someone worthy of what I built.”

“I lost your mother to a war I couldn’t prevent.” His voice drops, quieter, the weapon he carries closest to his chest. “I will not lose this pack to a choice you refuse to make.”

My throat works around nothing, muscles pulling against bone. He deployed that one without hesitation—because it works, and the fact that it works is what makes my hands shake inside my pockets.

“That isn’t fair.” The words scrape out before I can stop them, raw and young-sounding in a room that has no use for either.

“Fair doesn’t keep a pack together, son.” He turns back to his desk, pulling a folder forward—dismissed. “Seven days. Get some sleep—you look like hell.”

“If I choose wrong, that can’t be undone.” The words stop him, his pen hovering above the page. “You understand that.”

“That’s why you won’t choose wrong.” He doesn’t look up, and the conversation is over in every way that matters.

The hallway stretches long and dim, sconces casting amber that doesn’t reach the spaces between. My footsteps sound wrong against the hardwood—too heavy, carrying weight my skeleton wasn’t designed for.

I pass my own door without stopping. My hand doesn’t reach for the handle—my body knows where it’s going before my brain agrees, orienting through walls and darkness toward the one point that makes the compass stop spinning.

Her door is closed. A thin line of light bleeds beneath it, which means she’s awake at midnight after excusing herself from a dinner where my future was announced over lamb and she counted green beans like rosary beads.

I stand with my knuckles an inch from the wood and my wolf pressing so hard against my ribs that my breathing goes ragged. Every word from the study is still ringing—my father’s voice, the deadline, the expectations stacked like stones on my chest.

Knocking is a decision that reshapes every decision after it. My wolf doesn’t care, and the part of me that isn’t wolf doesn’t either—the part that watched Mina touch my arm through an entire dinner while my eyes kept finding grey-green ones at the far end of the table.

I knock—two beats, quiet enough that the hallway won’t carry them, loud enough that she’ll know it’s not accident. Silence stretches, then footsteps—bare feet on hardwood, careful and light.

The handle turns. The door opens, and Kylie stands in the gap with her hair loose and her father’s pendant against her collarbone and her eyes holding every question I came here without answers for.