Kristen stepped into the office and closed the door behind him — or tried to, anyway, before it swung right back open.
“Hey!
Ass-hat!
Is this how you treat a lady?!” Scarlet barked, forcing the door back open and glaring at his back.
“You’re just so short, and you look absolutely nothing like a lady,” Kristen shot back, reaching out to ruthlessly ruffle her hair.
Scarlet growled, batting his hands away in a flurry of limbs.
“I’m taller than you in wolf form,” she shot back, not missing a beat, shoving him toward the couch like that proved something.
“Liar, in wolf form everyone looks taller than you shortcake,” Kristen said, already laughing.
Scarlet flicked his ear in retaliation, hard enough to actually sting.
“Ahem.”
The sharp sound of someone clearing their throat instantly broke up their squabbling.
Kristen felt the smile slide right off his face.
“I’m not getting married,” he stated flatly, walking over to sit on the plush office sofa.
The office itself was a strange, comfortable mix of ancient history and modern convenience — old stone walls and a desk that looked like it had survived several centuries, paired with a laptop charger snaking across the floor and a space heater tucked in one corner that nobody had bothered to hide.
Maps of old pack territories hung framed beside a whiteboard someone had scrawled half a budget meeting onto and never erased.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t go into human cities when they needed to, but the humans had developed advanced technologies and scanners that made detecting supernatural entities entirely too easy.
It was a massive risk.
A few brave wolves still volunteered to go anyway, every so often, slipping into the cities under careful glamours and borrowed names to learn whatever they could and bring it home — better wiring for the pack house, updated maps of human patrol routes, sometimes just news of the wider world that never quite made it past their wards otherwise.
It was dangerous work, the kind that occasionally cost someone their freedom or their life, and everyone in Ironbound knew it.
Their sacrifices were never taken for granted.
His mother sighed.
Rising from her desk, she walked over to where he sat.
Scarlet remained stationed by the door with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, while his dad leaned back against the edge of the desk, arms loosely crossed, looking somehow both present and a thousand miles away.
Nobody had turned on the overhead lights yet, just the desk lamp, and in that half-dark the three of them looked less like the people who ran an entire pack and more like exactly what they were — his family.
“Kristen,” his mother started, her eyes suddenly tearing up.
Kristen felt himself deflate on the spot.
Why was she crying?
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his mother cry — not once, not in his whole life.
Scarlet made a small, pained sound from the doorway.
Overwhelmed by a sudden, radiating panic in his chest, Kristen reached out and took both of his mother’s hands in his own.
“Kristen, trust me, I would rather do anything else than have you sacrifice yourself like this,” his mother continued, tears finally spilling over and streaming down her cheeks.
Sacrifice?
It couldn’t be that big a deal, could it?
“I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m not completely against it,” he lied, trying to soothe her.
“I just don’t understand how I’m ending up in an arranged marriage when there isn’t a single pack in this city that could rival us,” he continued.
He’d meant for it to come out confident.
Instead it came out like a question, like some small, stupid part of him was hoping one of them would correct him, tell him it was all some terrible misunderstanding.
And that was one of his problems — aside from the fact that he was gay, and would be deeply, painfully uncomfortable marrying a girl — not that he’d ever said those words out loud to either of his parents, not in so many words, though he suspected they’d known for years anyway — arranged marriages like this were usually about forming alliances or boosting a pack’s numbers, the kind of practical, old-fashioned matchmaking that had kept smaller packs alive for generations.
But their pack was already large, established, thriving despite everything they’d survived in hiding.
They had schools.
Shops.
A clinic that rivaled anything in the human world, a training yard that turned out warriors and diplomats in equal measure.
A whole functioning little world tucked behind their wards, practically a city in miniature.
What could another pack possibly offer them that they didn’t already have?
Numbers, maybe.
Land.
But Ironbound didn’t need either of those things badly enough to sell off its only son for them — which meant whatever this actually was, it had nothing to do with growing the pack at all.
“You’re not marrying into a pack,” his mother said softly.
He blinked, confused, and even Scarlet let out a small, confused sound behind him.
If he wasn’t marrying into a pack, was he marrying someone from within their own territory?
Theo’s face unexpectedly flashed across his mind, and Kristen couldn’t stop the heat that crawled up the back of his neck.
He shoved the thought down hard and fast, mortified.
His mother looked down at him, her eyes a painful mix of sadness and anxiety.
She raised a trembling hand to wipe her face.
“You’re not marrying into a pack,” she repeated, nervously chewing on her bottom lip—a restless habit Kristen hadn’t seen her exhibit in years.
This was bad.
Very bad.
“Because you’re marrying into the Vance Clan.”
The name meant nothing to him, and everything to him, all at once — he’d heard it before, in passing, in the careful, clipped way adults mentioned things they didn’t want pups asking follow-up questions about.
Static filled Kristen’s ears.
He heard a sharp, loud “No!” from somewhere behind him — undoubtedly his sister, her voice cracking on the single syllable.
He felt like he’d gone underwater, like the whole room had filled up around him and he was drowning in it.
“What did you just say?”
His father was already pushing off the desk, crossing the room toward him, reaching out to touch his shoulder.
“Don’t FUCKING TOUCH ME,” Kristen growled.
The sound was primal, vibrating with a raw power that made the windows rattle and his eyes flared more golden than they had ever been in his life, brighter than even he knew they could go, his fangs lengthening halfway into a shift he hadn’t consciously chosen.
His nails had already curved into something closer to claws, and he could feel his shoulders straining against the seams of a shirt that had fit fine five minutes ago.
His dad’s hand froze midair.
Tension snapped through the room like a livewire, and for one terrible second his father just stared at him — not with fear exactly, but with the grief of watching your child carry something you couldn’t carry for him, no matter how badly you wanted to.
This was another freakish anomaly that only Kristen could do.
A half-shift.
Manifesting partial wolf traits while remaining in human form was completely unheard of in modern history, and truth be told, even his parents feared him a little because of it.
He could palpably feel that underlying fear radiating off them now.
Sensing someone approaching his shoulder, Kristen whipped his head around, fully prepared to tear the offending hand off with his fangs—until he felt gentle, familiar fingers threading through his hair.
“It’s okay,” his sister whispered.
Her hand kept moving, slow and steady, the same way their mother used to do it when they were small and couldn’t sleep, back before any of this, back when the worst problem either of them had was a scraped knee.
Kristen felt the fight drain right out of him, all at once, like someone had pulled a plug.
Tears welled up before he could stop them.
“Fuck!” he shouted, raising both hands to cover his face.
Scarlet wrapped her arms around him from the side, holding on tight.
Silence settled over the room for a while, broken only by the occasional sniffle.
The lamp on the desk flickered once, throwing strange shadows up the stone walls, and somewhere outside the office door he could hear the ordinary sounds of the pack house going on without them — a door closing, someone laughing down the hall, life happening completely unaware that everything had just changed.
It felt almost obscene, how normal the rest of the world still sounded.
Kristen lifted his head.
Despite his overwhelming anger, he hadn’t wanted to make his mother cry further.
But when he looked down, he realized the person sobbing wasn’t his mother.
It was his father.
Richard was down on his knees on the floor right beside the sofa.
His hands hovered uncertainly above Kristen’s knees, desperately wanting to offer physical comfort but clearly trying to respect his son’s boundaries after the growl.
His face was wet with tears, and he was biting down hard on his lower lip, clearly trying to hold himself together and failing.
Kristen didn’t want him to feel like that — not for one more second.
He reached out and took the hovering hand himself, holding it firmly.
His father held on like it was a lifeline thrown to a drowning man.
“My sweet boy,” his father choked out, his voice warbling violently through his tears.
“I don’t want this.
I don’t want you to sacrifice your life, but there was…
there was nothing else we could do.” His voice cracked painfully on the last word.
Kristen believed him.
His father had always fought to make life as peaceful as possible for his children.
He’d had a hard enough road himself, growing up as a male Omega in a family that had never quite known what to do with him, who he was, or what he wanted from his own life.
It hadn’t helped that, during his pregnancy with Scarlet, he’d been ambushed by human hunters and had very nearly lost his life right there in the woods, alone, before help ever arrived.
He still had the scar for it, a thin silver line along his ribs that Kristen had traced with curious fingers as a kid who didn’t understand his pain
Kristen stared into his father’s tear-stained face, gently running his thumb over the back of the older man’s hand.
Scarlet’s arms were still anchored securely around his neck, while his mother had finally managed to pull her stoic Pack Alpha mask back over her features, even as her eyes stayed red-rimmed.
She looked into his eyes for a long moment, like she was steadying herself for what came next.
“If we don’t agree to their alliance,” she said quietly, “they’re going to kill us.”
It’s just marriage Kristy, why are you acting like the world is ending ಠ益ಠ please let me know your thoughtssss