**Savannah’s POV**
We were just turning to follow Theodore toward the garden when the front door opened hard enough to announce itself.
I knew Vivienne’s particular brand of entrance before I saw her face.
That specific energy — anger dressed up in the costume of righteousness, worn so long it had become second nature.
Her heels hit the marble floor in measured strikes, each one a punctuation mark, each one landing exactly where she wanted it to.
“Dad.” She positioned herself squarely between us and the corridor, pulling on the eldest-daughter posture she’d spent years perfecting.
“You can’t simply allow her to walk in here with—” her gaze dropped to Finn, a fraction of a second, “—this child.
And act as though nothing happened.”
“Vivienne—” Theodore’s voice carried the beginning of a warning.
“No, Dad.” She pivoted to face me, and those ice-grey eyes had something in them I recognized immediately.
I’d seen it since we were young — the look of someone who has fed their fear into hatred for so long the two things have become indistinguishable.
“Do you think you can walk back in here and pretend the past doesn’t exist?
Bring your illegitimate child into this house and just— take everything?”
Finn’s fingers tightened around mine.
I felt it — the small, precise tensing of his body against my side.
Six years old and already learning how to hold still when a room turns dangerous.
My chest ached with how well he’d learned it.
I breathed in.
Let it out slowly.
The kind of breath I took in the ring before a fight I intended to win cleanly.
When I spoke, my voice was quiet.
Low enough that it was only for the space between us.
“Vivienne.
Take back what you just said about my son.”
The corner of her mouth curved.
I knew that particular curve — it appeared when she believed she’d located the exact right place to press.
“Touched a nerve?
I’m only stating facts.
A child with an unknown father, trying to establish a foothold at the center of Silver Creek’s power structure.” She let that sit for a moment.
“What do you think the other packs will say?”
Her gaze moved to Finn again.
That slow, assessing look, like she was appraising something brought in off the street.
The cold moved through my stomach in a wave.
“For a stepdaughter,” I said quietly, each word placed with care, “you seem remarkably invested in questions of true bloodline.”
The temperature in the hall dropped.
Vivienne’s face changed.
Not to anger — anger would have been easier to watch.
This was something underneath anger, something more exposed and more brittle. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The crack she’d been papering over for six years, the one that lived beneath all that careful presentation.
She was Marcus and Renata’s daughter.
Second in line in this house.
The heir who had spent her entire life existing in the shadow of a dead woman she could never outrank, no matter how many years she put in.
My sentence had gone straight to the part of that she never admitted out loud.
“You—”
“Enough!”
Theodore’s Alpha command hit the hall like a physical thing.
The old walls seemed to absorb the resonance of it, stone and wood and years of authority all reinforcing the same frequency.
“Vivienne.
Leave.
Now.”
She stood frozen for one long beat, eyes locked on mine.
Whatever she was looking for in my face, I didn’t give it to her.
I kept my expression exactly where it was — level, still, unmoved.
Then she turned.
Walked toward the door with that controlled, precise pace she always used when she wanted to look like she was choosing to leave.
She reached it, and stopped.
One hand on the frame.
She didn’t turn around.
Her voice came out low, deliberate, aimed.
“Keep a close watch on your cub, Savannah.” A pause, long enough to be intentional.
“Pray he never fully awakens his wolf nature — because when he does, the entire Alliance will see exactly how impure his blood is.”
The door closed.
The threat stayed in the hall after her.
Like smoke.
It didn’t disperse cleanly — it just thinned, slowly, not quite disappearing.
I stayed exactly where I was.
Breathing.
Keeping the fury in my chest contained in the specific, practiced way I’d spent six years learning, because Finn was still holding my hand and I could feel his pulse in his fingers and that was the only thing that mattered right now.
Finn looked up at me.
His voice was very small, carrying a kind of carefulness that no six-year-old should need.
“Mom.” He hesitated.
“Are we still welcome here?”
I crouched down in front of him, both hands coming up to hold his face.
Those amber-brown eyes looked straight back at me — not crying, not crumbling, just asking.
Just needing to know.
He trusted the answer I gave him the way he trusted everything I’d ever told him, completely and without reservation, and that trust was the most precious and most terrifying thing I’d ever been handed.
“You are welcome here,” I said.
I held his gaze and I didn’t look away.
“Some people need time to understand things.
That’s their problem, not yours.” I smoothed my thumb across his cheekbone.
“But you?
You are wanted here.
By your grandfather.
And by me.
Always.”
Finn considered this with the seriousness he gave to things that mattered.
Then he nodded, a small firm nod, the decision made.
“Okay,” he said.
“Can we still see the roses?”
I let out a breath.
Something in my chest loosened by a degree.
Theodore had waited through all of it, standing quietly at the entrance to the corridor.
When I looked at him over Finn’s head, his face was open in a way I hadn’t seen since before my mother died — no Alpha composure layered over it, just a man standing in his own house, watching his daughter hold her son together, and knowing exactly the shape of what he’d contributed to.
I straightened up.
Took Finn’s hand.
I didn’t know if this house would ever feel like anything simple again.
I didn’t know if Theodore and I would find our way back to anything that resembled what we’d had.
I didn’t know what Vivienne’s parting words were going to cost us, or when, or how.
But I knew this: Finn had asked if he was welcome, and I had told him yes, and I was not going to let that be a lie.
Not today.
Not ever.
Whatever it cost me, I would make it true.
“Yes,” I said, taking his hand.
“Let’s go see the roses.”
Theodore led the way down the corridor, and Finn fell into step beside him, and I followed them both into the part of the house that smelled like old wood and open air and Margaret.
I would not let anyone — anyone — make him feel like he didn’t belong here.