The psychic shielding took four days to arrange.
Four days during which Roman apparently decided that patience was no longer a strategy he was interested in.
The first mind-link hit Miles on a Tuesday morning. I heard him from down the hall—a sound I had never heard my son make before, high and rigid and wrong, the kind of sound that bypasses your brain entirely and goes straight to your feet. I was through his door before I was fully awake.
He was sitting up in bed, eyes open and completely unseeing. His whole body had gone stiff, like something was holding him from the inside. The stuffed wolf had fallen to the floor. His hands were fisted in the blankets.
"Miles." I grabbed his face, tilted it toward me. "Miles, look at me."
Nothing. His eyes stayed fixed on something I couldn't see.
Then, just as suddenly as it started, he collapsed forward into my arms and started screaming.
I held him. I didn't say anything for a long time. I just held him and let him scream himself out, and I felt my wolf pressing against my ribs like something trying to break a door down.
When he finally quieted, he pressed his face into my shoulder and whispered, "Daddy was yelling."
My hands went very still on his back.
"In my head," Miles said. "He was yelling in my head. He wants you to come back."
I closed my eyes.
"You don't have to go back," Miles said, in the careful voice of a five-year-old who has learned that the wrong words have consequences. "Do you?"
"No," I said. "We don't."
He nodded against my shoulder. But his hands stayed clenched in my shirt.
It happened again on Thursday. Then Saturday. Then the following Monday.
Each time, Miles came back a little slower. The unseeing look lasted longer. The screaming stopped—which should have been a relief and wasn't, because what replaced it was silence. He stopped asking questions at breakfast. He stopped lingering in the garden with my father. When Soren Vale walked through the corridor near the east wing, Miles pressed himself flat against the wall until the Beta had passed, and then stood there for a full minute after, breathing.
I watched my son flinch at his own grandfather's footstep from across a room, and I understood, with perfect cold clarity, that Roman had just crossed the only line that had ever mattered.
The fourth time it happened, I found Miles afterward in the corner of his room, behind the chair, knees pulled to his chest. Not screaming. Not moving. Just sitting there with his stuffed wolf held against his face, staring at nothing.
I sat down on the floor beside him. The stone was cold through my clothes.
I didn't speak. I just sat there, close enough that he could feel me, and waited.
After a long time, he reached out and put his hand on my knee. That was all.
I looked at that small hand on my knee and something cracked open in my chest that I had been holding shut since New Year's Eve. I pressed my back against the wall and let it happen—silent, furious tears that I would not let Miles hear, that I would not let anyone in this court ever see. I cried for the five years I had spent making myself smaller. I cried for the boy who had learned to be afraid of his own father's voice. I cried for every instinct I had suppressed and every warning I had rationalized away.
Then I stopped.
I wiped my face. I pressed my fingertips together once, briefly, and felt the familiar click of a decision already made.
I called the pack healer before I left Miles's room.
Healer Maren was a small, precise woman with twenty years of psychic work behind her eyes. She arrived within the hour, assessed Miles with a quiet thoroughness that did not require him to speak, and looked at me with an expression that confirmed everything I already knew.
"Three more sessions," she said. "Full shielding. It won't be comfortable, but it will hold."
"Do it," I said.
I also pulled out the journal I'd kept since my first week at Blackridge—the one where I'd documented every alliance, every training program, every territorial calculation I'd run for Roman's pack. I opened to a fresh page and began a new section. Date, time, duration, observed symptoms. Clinical. Precise. Every incident recorded in a handwriting that would hold up before any Council in the Lycan world.
Roman thought he was applying pressure. He was building my case.
While I documented, the reports from Blackridge began filtering in through my father's network. Three senior warriors had formally requested transfers to neutral territory in the past week alone. The Coldfen alliance had gone quiet—not broken yet, but quiet in the particular way that precedes a formal withdrawal. One of Roman's own Gammas had reached out to a neighboring pack's Beta, which was either a job inquiry or the beginning of a defection, and either way it meant the same thing.
Blackridge was bleeding.
I had built every system that was now failing him. The training rotations. The alliance protocols. The territorial maps. The reputation that made other Alphas take his calls. None of it had ever been his. He had simply been standing in the room where I kept the machinery running, and now the machinery was stopping, and he was discovering—piece by piece, defection by defection—that he had no idea how any of it worked.
I should have felt something about that. Satisfaction, maybe. Or grief for the years I'd spent.
I felt neither. I just kept writing.
