Chapter 12

FREYA

The sound seemed to hang in the air longer than it should have, longer than any single slap had a right to. My cheek burned. I could feel my own pulse in it, fast and hot. The hall stood still. 

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Three hundred people who’d spent the last ten minutes looking forward for a spectacle had just gotten one, and none of them seemed to know what to do with it now that it had actually happened.

I straightened slowly. I didn’t touch my face. I wanted my father to see exactly what he’d done without the comfort of watching me flinch away from it.

“Say something,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “Say something to Lucian. Ask Lilith one question. Anything.”

He didn’t look at either of them.

“You have humiliated this family in front of nine packs,” he said, and his voice carried the way it always did when he wanted a room to remember its place, low and hard and final. “You stood in the middle of your own engagement ceremony and accused your sister of the worst kind of betrayal, with nothing but a piece of paper you likely forged yourself.”

“I didn’t forge anything. Get the healer. Get the panel notes. I told you exactly where to find them.”

“You have always resented her,” he said, still not looking at me, addressing the hall instead, addressing the story he needed them to believe. “Ever since you were children. I hoped marriage might finally settle whatever this is in you. Instead you’ve chosen tonight, of every night, to embarrass this family beyond repair.”

“I’m not the one who embarrassed this family.” My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated it, hated that after everything I’d managed to say tonight without breaking, this was the moment it slipped. “He did. She did. I just said it out loud.”

“Enough.” The word came out with an edge of command behind it, not quite an Alpha order but close enough that I felt it pull at something low in my chest anyway, some old instinct built over twenty-three years of being told to sit down and be quiet. “You have shamed the Ashford name. You have shamed me. I will not stand here and let you call my daughter a liar in front of the entire council.”

“She isn’t your daughter.” I said it quietly this time, not for the hall, just for him. “That’s the whole point. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Something crossed his face then, it looked suspiciously close to worry. For half a second I thought I’d reached him. I thought maybe under all that fury there was a father who wanted the truth more than he wanted the appearance of control.

Then his jaw set again, and I realized that i was dead wrong.

“Liar,” he said. “Disgrace. You have made yourself an embarrassment to this bloodline, and I will not have my council watch you drag it through the mud a moment longer.”

Behind him, Lilith had gone very still, watching the two of us with an expression I couldn’t quite read, something caught between disbelief and dawning relief. She hadn’t expected this either. I could see it in the way her eyes kept flicking between my father’s face and mine, like she was waiting for the trick to reveal itself.

Lucian said nothing.

I looked at him, actually looked, waiting for some version of the man who used to find me in crowded rooms just to make me laugh, who used to tell me I was the only person who ever made him feel like he didn’t have to perform. I waited for him to step forward and tell my father the truth, if not out of love then at least out of some scrap of decency.

He looked at the floor instead.

That was the moment something in my chest gave out completely. Not the mate bond, that had already torn loose earlier tonight and was still aching somewhere under my ribs like a wound that hadn’t decided whether to close. This was something else. Something that had been holding on long after it should have let go, some last thread connecting me to the idea that if I did everything right, if I was good enough and patient enough and quiet enough, someone in this family would eventually choose me.

Nobody was going to choose me. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

I looked around the hall at the faces still watching, waiting to see which way this would break, and understood with a kind of clarity I’d never felt before that every single one of them would let this happen. Not because they believed my father. Because it was easier than not believing him, easier than standing up in a room full of Alphas and saying the powerful man was wrong.

My mother was somewhere behind me. I hadn’t turned to look at her since I’d walked to the center of the hall, and I still didn’t, because I was afraid of what I’d do if I saw her face and it wasn’t enough to save me.

“Say it,” I told my father. “Whatever you’re about to say. Just say it.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and for the first time all night I saw something that might have been hesitation move behind his eyes. But it didn’t last.

“As Alpha of this pack,” he said, turning to address the council instead of me, his voice pitched to fill the entire hall, “I can no longer allow someone who would fabricate lies against her own family, who would humiliate this bloodline in front of our allies, to continue to hold a place of honor within it.”

The room had gone utterly silent again, that same taut, waiting silence from before the slap.

“Effective tonight,” he said, “Freya Ashford is stripped of her title as this pack’s daughter.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​