When My Ex-Husband Dragged Me Before the Lycan Council

The café had good coffee and bad lighting, which was why I liked it. The kind of place where nobody looked too closely at anyone else. I was on my second cup when the bell over the door chimed and Leif walked in.

He was alone. That surprised me.

He stopped just inside the door, scanning the room, and when he found me his face did something complicated — relief and dread braided together. He walked over. Slid into the seat across from me. His hands were shaking.

He put a photograph on the table between us.

I knew it before I looked. The three of us in front of the Ironhold main lodge, the summer he turned five. Kingston's arm around my waist. Leif in my lap. I remembered the shirt I'd been wearing. I remembered the smell of pine.

"Mom." His voice cracked on the word. "Please."

I didn't touch the photograph. I pressed two fingers to the left side of my collar and left them there.

"Why did you leave?" His eyes were already wet. "Kiana said — she said you wanted to run with a wild pack. That you didn't want to be a Luna anymore. That you didn't want—" His voice broke. "You didn't want me."

I looked at him. Really looked. Eleven years old, tall for his age, my jawline and Kingston's eyes, and none of the boy I remembered anywhere inside the shape of him.

"Leif." I kept my voice level. "Do you remember the Winter Solstice? The one on the cliffs?"

He blinked. "I — Kiana said—"

"I'm not asking what Kiana said. I'm asking what you remember."

His mouth opened. Closed. Something behind his eyes flickered — the edge of a memory he'd been taught to disbelieve.

"I couldn't swim," I said. "Your father spoke the rejection vow in front of the pack. He clawed the mate mark off my neck with his own hand. He kicked me off the cliff. My wolf went dormant on the way down. I hit the water in human form and I nearly drowned."

His face went white.

"I did not choose to leave you," I said. "I was thrown away. And you clung to Kiana on that cliff and you turned your face into her coat so you wouldn't have to watch."

"That's not—" His voice was barely there. "That's not what she—"

"I know."

A tear slid down his cheek. He didn't seem to notice.

"You chose her," I said. Not cruel. Just true. "You were six. You didn't know what you were choosing. But you chose her, and she spent five years making sure you'd keep choosing her, and I'm not going to undo that for you in a café."

I stood. Put a twenty on the table. His hot chocolate was untouched.

"Mom—"

"Kiana is your mother now," I said. "That's what you have. I hope she's what you need."

I walked out. I didn't look back.

Outside, the street was cold and bright. I was halfway to the corner before I registered the woman standing on the far side of the road, half-hidden behind a parked car, watching the café window. Kiana. Her face was very still. Very cold. She saw me see her. She didn't move.

I kept walking.

---

Thomas came home that night.

I heard the SUV in the drive, the low murmur of Garrick's voice, then Thomas's boots on the porch. He came in quietly. Isabela was already asleep upstairs. I was at the kitchen table with the locked box in front of me, both hands flat on the lid.

He didn't ask about the box.

He sat down across from me. He was still in his travel clothes, dark coat unbuttoned, hair damp from the cold. He didn't say anything. He just waited.

I didn't know how to start.

"He came to the café," I said finally. "Leif. Alone. With the photograph."

Thomas nodded. Once.

"I told him." My voice was steadier than I expected. "The whole thing. The vow. The mark. The river. That my wolf went dormant. That he chose her."

His eyes didn't move from mine.

"He didn't know," I said. "He genuinely didn't know. And I watched — I watched it land. The exact second it landed." My throat closed a little. I made it open again. "I gave an eleven-year-old the truth his mother spent five years hiding from him, and I walked out and left him with it. And I don't regret it. That's the part I can't — that's the part—"

Thomas reached across the table and covered my hands with his.

He didn't say anything. His palm was warm. Mine were not.

I didn't pull away.

We sat like that for a long time. The kitchen clock ticked. Upstairs, the floorboards creaked once as Isabela turned in her sleep.

"You did the right thing," he said eventually. Quiet. Certain.

"I don't know if I did."

"I know."

I closed my eyes. His thumb moved once, slowly, across my knuckles.

---

Three days later, I walked out of the pack supply store with a paper sack of dried herbs and a spool of copper wire and Kingston stepped into my path.

He was not alone. Two Ironhold warriors flanked him — men I recognized, men who used to bow to me. They fanned out along the sidewalk, cutting off the alley behind me and the crosswalk ahead. His Alpha aura was flaring, deliberate and heavy, meant to be felt.

"No wolfless exile," he said, low and vicious, "speaks to an Alpha the way you spoke to me."

I didn't step back.

"I will drag you back to Ironhold in chains if I have to," he said. "Do you understand me, Evelynn?"

My hand moved to my collar. Stopped there.

I did not answer him.