Chapter 27
Chapter 27:
“Leave,” I said. “Today is the happiest day of my life, and I would like to keep it that way p>
He didn’t move.
“Please go.” I kept my voice even. Polite, even—the way you’d address a stranger who has wandered into the wrong room at a hotel. “I don’t know why you’re here, but you’re frightening me p>
The word frightening did something to him. I watched it land—watched his face contort around it, as if the syllables were physically rearranging his features. The man who had once made fear his primary instrument of communication now stood on the receiving end of it, and the reversal was so complete, so structurally devastating, that for a moment I almost felt something adjacent to pity.
Almost.
He reached into his jacket with shaking hands and produced a small box. It was unremarkable—dark wood, unvarnished, the kind of container you’d use for jewelry or keepsakes. But when he opened it, the contents were neither.
Gray dust. Fine, powdery, with a faintly sticky quality—the residue of something that had once been solid and was now, irreversibly, not. Mixed in were fragments of porcelain, tiny and sharp, and what might have been a partial inscription, though the letters were too broken to read.
“These are your father’s ashes,” he said. His voice had dropped to barely a whisper. “After the urn broke—after I—” He swallowed. “I went back. That night. On my hands and knees on the living room floor, picking the pieces out of the grout with my fingers. It took hours. I couldn’t get all of it. But this is… this is what I could save p>
He extended the box toward me. His hands trembled so badly the lid rattled against the hinge.
I looked at the gray dust inside and felt nothing. No recognition. No grief. No connection to the powder in that box or to the life it had once contained. It was dust. It meant nothing to me—not because I was heartless, but because the woman who would have wept over those ashes no longer existed. She had been carefully, clinically, mercifully removed, and in her place stood someone who could look at a stranger’s grief and feel only the vague discomfort of witnessing an emotion she couldn’t share.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Please take it away p>
“Nonsense!” A voice like a thunderclap. My biological father—Alpha Caelan of the Solcrest Clan—stepped between us with the physical authority of a man who has spent forty years being the largest presence in every room he enters. He was tall, broad-shouldered, silver-streaked at the temples, and his eyes held the particular fury of a father confronting someone who has hurt his daughter in ways he is only beginning to understand.
Mⱺɍɇ Ʉρȡąţɇş ĩŋ
“I am her father,” he said, and each word carried the weight of a territorial claim. “I have been her father since the day she was born, and I will be her father until the day I die, and you—” He leaned closer to Thane, close enough that the words were almost private. “You are nothing. You are a mistake she made in a life she no longer remembers, and I will spend the rest of mine ensuring she never has to remember it p>
Thane’s face twisted. His hand shot out—instinct, desperation, the reflex of a man grabbing at something that’s already fallen—reaching for my arm.
“Isolde, don’t pretend. I know you’re in there. I love you. I’ve changed. I can prove it p>
“Remove him.” Alaric’s voice cut through the noise like a blade through gauze. No shouting. No drama. Just the quiet, absolute authority of a man who has decided that this particular scene is over.
Silverveil wolves moved immediately. Thane’s guards—fewer, thinner, visibly outmatched—stepped forward to intervene, and for one suspended moment the hall balanced on the edge of violence. Then gravity won. Thane’s men were outnumbered three to one, and the Solcrest guards materialized from the edges of the room like shadows given weight, tipping the equation past any possibility of contest.
It was over in seconds. Thane was moved—firmly, not gently—toward the exit. He fought the way a man fights when he knows he’s already lost: with noise, with motion, with the thrashing energy of someone whose body hasn’t caught up to the verdict his mind has already received.
“Isolde!” His voice echoed off the vaulted ceiling as they pulled him through the doors. “Isolde, please p>
I watched him go the way you watch a storm pass from behind glass—aware of the force, respectful of the damage it could do, but ultimately separated from it by something transparent and strong.
The doors closed. The sound cut off mid-syllable.
I turned to Alaric. He was looking at me with an expression I was learning to recognize: concern masquerading as composure, love dressed in the practical clothing of protection. I took his hand—his warm, steady, unsurprising hand—and squeezed.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“I don’t know who that was,” I said. And meant it. And felt, in the meaning of it, a freedom so vast it was almost vertigo—the freedom of standing in a field where a building used to be and feeling only wind where walls once stood.