Get It 4

[Kylie’s POV]

Mom is at the kitchen table when I walk in, which is never good because my mother doesn’t sit—she stages herself, and the kitchen table means she’s been waiting long enough to choose her battlefield.

“Close the door.” She doesn’t look up from her tea, her fingers wrapped around the mug the way they wrap around everything—gently, completely, with no intention of letting go. “We need to talk about your meeting with Max Cornwell.”

My bag hits the floor and my stomach drops right behind it. “How do you even know about that?”

“I know everything that happens in this pack that involves you and visibility.” She lifts her eyes, and they’re soft on the surface, surgical underneath. “The future alpha called you into his office, sat you down across his desk, and asked you questions. Do you have any idea what that looks like?”

“It looks like a formal debrief about the trial.” I lean against the counter, crossing my arms because my hands need something to do that isn’t trembling. “He’s investigating the sabotage. It wasn’t personal.”

“Nothing is personal until it is.” Her eyebrow lifts a fraction. “Did he call in everyone from that lane, or did he call in the wolfless girl who went down hardest and gave him a reason to look closer?”

My teeth find the inside of my cheek. She’s not wrong—I don’t know if he called anyone else—and the uncertainty is a door she’d walk straight through and redecorate it into catastrophe.

“What did you tell him?” She sets the mug down with a click that sounds like a verdict. “Word for word.”

“I said the barrier moved, I fell, I didn’t see who did it.” I hold her gaze even though every muscle in my face wants to look anywhere else. “Then I left.”

“And that’s everything?” She repeats it back to me slow, weighing each syllable on a scale only she can read. “He didn’t push you? Didn’t try to keep you talking?”

He did. He pushed, and he watched me in a way that made the air between us feel too thick to breathe. But telling Mom any of that would be handing her ammunition for the next six months.

“He asked standard questions, I gave standard answers.” I pick at a loose thread on my sleeve, pulling it free one fiber at a time. “I was boring, forgettable, and out the door in ten minutes.”

“Boring.” She tastes the word like she’s checking it for poison.

“And forgettable. Yes, Mom—completely forgettable. That is literally the goal you raised me to achieve.”

“Don’t twist my words.” She stands, and the kitchen shrinks—Mom can fill any room by deciding it belongs to her. “You do not sit across from that boy and give him time to wonder about you.”

“I didn’t volunteer for the meeting, Mom.” My voice comes out sharper than planned, and I swallow the edge before she can weaponize it. “What was I supposed to do—refuse the future alpha?”

“You were supposed to be so unremarkable he’d never think to call you in at all.” She crosses to me and her hand finds my chin, tilting my face up—the examination gesture, the one that says she’s checking me for cracks.

Her thumb traces my jawline, slow and precise. I hold very still because movement is confession in this house, and my mother reads bodies the way other people read weather.

“If Max Cornwell develops an interest in you—any interest, for any reason—it threatens everything I’ve built to keep us safe.” Her voice drops, intimate and unbreakable. “The glamour, Kylie. Our place in this pack. All of it.”

“I know.” The words scrape my throat raw on the way out. “I’m not stupid, Mom. I know what’s at stake.”

“No, you’re not stupid.” She releases my chin and steps back, and something in her posture rearranges—so subtle I’d miss it if I hadn’t spent twenty-one years decoding her. “Which is why I think you’ll appreciate what I’m about to tell you.”

The pivot throws me. Mom doesn’t transition—she attacks or retreats, and this is neither. She smooths her blouse and her mouth curves into something engineered to look like joy.

“I’m getting married.” She lets the pause hang, expectant and luminous, like she’s waiting for confetti to fall. “Richard Cornwell proposed last night. We’re announcing it to the pack this week.”

The counter digs into my lower back because my body has stepped away without consulting me. My hands find the edge, knuckles draining white, and somewhere behind my ribs everything compresses into a space too small to hold it.

“You’re—” My mouth opens and closes around syllables that refuse to form words. “You’re marrying the alpha?”

“I’m marrying Richard Cornwell, yes.” She picks up her mug again, sipping tea like she’s just mentioned a change in dinner plans and not the demolition of my entire existence. “It’s a good thing, sweetheart. The best thing. Real protection—permanent status, permanent safety.”

Permanent. The word bounces off every wrong surface in my skull. Permanent means permanent address, and permanent address means the alpha’s house, and the alpha’s house means Max’s house, and my lungs forget how breathing works.

“We’re moving in with them.” It’s not a question—my pulse is already slamming behind my eyes, answering for me.

“Of course we are. His family lives there.” Mom waves a hand like this is a logistical footnote. “We’ll be family.”

Family. I will be Max Cornwell’s stepsister. I’ll sleep down the hall from my fated mate, sit across from him at breakfast, and perform total indifference while the bond shreds me from the inside out. I should start a memoir. Title it Everything Is Under Control, Nothing Hurts.

“You can’t do this.” My voice barely clears a whisper, and I loathe how much it gives away. “Mom, you can’t. Did you even think about what this means for me?”

“I thought about what it means for us.” She turns from the sink, and her expression is the patient mask she wears when she’s decided the conversation is a formality. “Everything I do is for us. Besides, if you’re his sister legally, any interest he may have had in you becomes familial and unremarkable.”

“It’s already done, isn’t it.” My hands won’t unclench from the counter edge. “You already said yes.”

“The ring is upstairs. The announcement is written.” She turns the faucet on and rinses her mug with deliberate, unhurried care. “Richard expects us at dinner Friday to discuss the move.”

Friday. Four days until the distance between me and the one person whose proximity makes my skin burn collapses to shared hallways, shared meals, shared air.

“This isn’t protection.” My throat works around each word like swallowing something jagged. “This is you locking me in a room with the one thing that can destroy us, and calling it a favor.”

Mom dries her hands on the towel, folds it into perfect thirds, and hangs it on the oven handle. Every gesture a finished sentence in a conversation I was never a part of.

“It’s a future,” she says, already walking toward the hall. “You’ll thank me when you see how much easier life gets from the inside.”

Her bedroom door clicks shut. The faucet drips once, twice into the empty sink, and I stand gripping the counter with the ground dissolving beneath me—because in four days, the distance between me and Max Cornwell shrinks to doors and drywall, and I already know that won’t be nearly enough.