Chapter 12: What Empty Means

Maija's POV

He took me inside and shut the door.

His rooms were bare.

A bed with a gray blanket, a desk, a stack of ledgers, and a window that looked at the lake.

I had expected a trophy wall and a fur rug, and found a monk's cell.

He didn't sit.

He stood in the middle of the floor with his hands hanging by his sides, and told me all of it.

He said it in short flat sentences, and he did not look away once.

The Challenge on the cove.

The silver, and the scream.

The silence afterward, and how the wolf had never come back.

Three years of standing on the border stones on full moons.

Reino on the river road that morning, and what he'd felt, and what he knew.

My father.

When he finished, he stopped talking, and the only sound was the radiator knocking in the corner.

I sat down on the edge of his bed with the first-aid kit still in my lap.

"You're wolfless," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"You've been wolfless for three years."

"Yes."

I nodded slowly.

"And the whole pack calls me empty."

He closed his eyes.

"Maija," he said.

"No, let me say it, because I have been trying to find the right way since I stood outside your door."

I put the kit down on the blanket.

"Two weeks ago, you walked across that hall and took a pitcher out of my hand."

"In front of everyone, you said you wanted me. And I sat in my own head for days wondering what I could possibly be good for," I said.

"I told myself you wanted a placeholder. I told myself I was safe for you because I had no wolf to threaten your seat."

"I was right, wasn't I? In a way. I was the only woman you could be with."

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