Get It 29

The pack is a living wall of hostility, and I’m holding onto the back of Max’s jacket like it’s the only thing keeping me vertical. Which it is.

Max’s shoulders are squared against the hall, three enforcers frozen mid-step since he told them not to move. The heat radiating off his back is the only anchor I have while my wolf throws herself against what remains of the cage.

“How long?” Mina’s voice cracks across the hall from the platform, pitched to carry. “How long have you been hiding this—from the pack, from Max?”

“Answer her, Kylie.” An elder in the second row, arms folded, mouth a blade. “You owe this pack an explanation.”

My jaw is clamped so tight the muscles in my neck are screaming. If I open my mouth, what comes out might not be words.

“Is the bond even real?” Mina turns to the elders, gesturing toward me. “Or is this some manipulation—a trick her mother taught her?”

“The bond is real.” Max doesn’t raise his voice—he doesn’t need to. The authority in it moves through the room bone-deep, and three wolves near the front drop their eyes. “I’ve been feeling it for weeks.”

“Weeks.” Mina repeats the word like she’s biting through glass. “You’ve been feeling a bond with her for weeks, and you stood on that platform tonight and let me think—”

“Mina.” The warning in his voice stops the rest of her sentence, but not the way her hands curl into white fabric at her sides.

“You knew?” Richard’s voice cuts from the front row, stripped bare in a way I’ve never heard from the alpha. “A mate bond, and you said nothing—to me, to your alpha?”

“I said it tonight, Father. In front of everyone.” Max holds his gaze without flinching. “That’s more than most wolves get.”

“Don’t make this about protocol.” Richard’s jaw works around something he swallows back. “This is about trust.”

He stares at his son for three endless seconds, then turns to Hope. His face is changing—the shock burning off, something harder and colder filling the space it leaves.

Hope absorbs his stare the way she absorbs everything—gracefully, chin level, hands folded over her dress like a woman at a charity luncheon. Then she steps forward, and the hall quiets because my mother has always known how to own a silence.

“I understand the questions.” Her voice is warm, measured—the patient teacher guiding frightened children through a fire drill. “But the priority right now is safety. Kylie’s wolf is unstable—I’ve watched it surface, and I’ve seen what it does.”

My nails dig into Max’s jacket hard enough to feel the seams strain. She’s building again, laying new bricks on the foundation she set five minutes ago. The worst part isn’t that it’s working—it’s that I spent twenty-one years handing her the mortar.

“The suppression wasn’t cruelty—it was containment.” Hope pivots to address the west side of the hall, drawing the room with the turn of her body. “And this bond should be examined before anyone treats it as legitimate.”

“She kept a dangerous wolf hidden among our children.” A man near the pillars, loud enough for the accusation to travel. “And we’re supposed to trust her judgment now?”

“That is exactly why I’m asking for calm.” Hope absorbs the hostility and returns warmth—a magic trick all on its own. “Panic helps no one.”

“What are you proposing, exactly?” A woman three rows back, knuckles white around her husband’s arm.

“Separation.” Hope lets the word land before she continues. “Kylie kept away from Max until we determine what her wolf does to a mate bond—and what an alpha heir’s proximity does to an unstable wolf. For her own protection, and for his.”

For her own protection. My vision whites at the edges because I have heard this script my entire life—I’m doing this for you, I’m protecting you, you don’t understand how dangerous you are. The same performance, the same cage dressed in the language of care.

“She’s lying.” My voice comes out shredded, low enough that only Max and the nearest rows catch it, and his shoulder blade shifts against my forehead.

“I know,” he says, just as quiet. He turns toward me—half-facing the hall, half-facing me—so the enforcers can still read his jaw and the pack can still feel his authority.

“Kylie.” His hand finds mine where it’s twisted into his jacket, fingers uncurling mine from the fabric one by one. The contact sends a current up my arm that makes my teeth ache. “I need you to trust me.”

“I don’t trust myself.” My throat works around something that might be a laugh if I had any air left. “My wolf—I’ve never let her out. Not once, not all the way.”

“Then let me carry it.” His eyes hold mine—blazing, the wolf right there beneath the blue. “I trust you enough for both of us. That’s how this works.”

“You don’t know what I am.” The words crack on the way out. My wolf is pressing so hard my vision is going gold at the edges, and every second of holding her back costs something I’m running out of. “I don’t know what I am.”

“I know enough.” His fingers close around mine—steady, warm, certain in a way I have never been about anything. “Take my hand, Kylie.”

My wolf goes still. Not quieter, not gone—but still, the way a held breath is still, like something inside me heard him and chose to wait. I take his hand, palm pressing against his, and the bond hums through the contact.

Every wolf in this room can see it—the future alpha holding the hand of the girl they were ready to cage five minutes ago. Wonderful optics. Really nailing the whole normal-and-not-at-all-terrifying thing.

“Max.” Mina’s voice is serrated, stripped of everything performative. “You’re choosing this? You’re choosing her?”

He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t answer. His thumb traces one slow line across my knuckles, and the silence says everything.

Hope sees it too. I watch the recalculation behind her eyes—tracking our joined hands, scanning faces shifting from fury toward uncertainty, toward something she can’t steer. Max standing with me is rewriting her math, and my mother does not lose control of a room.

She turns to the hall. When she speaks, the warmth is gone—stripped down to something bare and deliberate and choosing violence.

“You want to know why I contained her?” Her eyes find mine across the space between us. “Ask her father. Ask Callum what happened when he tried to stop me.”

The silence slams down so hard my eardrums ring. Richard’s face drains white, his hands closing into fists, tendons standing out beneath the skin.

“Callum found out what I was doing to Kylie.” Hope’s voice is barely a whisper and it reaches every corner of the hall. “The suppression. He tried to interfere.”

She stops. She doesn’t finish the sentence—doesn’t have to. The silence finishes it for her, and the shape of what she’s left unsaid crashes through me until my knees buckle and Max’s grip is the only thing between me and the floor.

My father didn’t just die. My father tried to save me, and the pendant burning cold against my chest is the last thing he touched before my mother made sure he never could again.