Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 167

Chapter 167

Chapter 167

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I keep my head high as I stepped into the ring beside Francesco.

I will show it to them.

“Our lives are braided,” I said to the Keeper. “Bind one, bind both.”

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The Keeper studied my face–the too–young Luna with the too–old eyes.

She lifted her staff. “By river and moon.”

A shallow bowl was placed between us, filled from the three converging streams.

Wolfsbane petals floated like dark stars.

The Keeper scored her palm and let three drops fall, one for each river. “Speak.”

Francesco’s voice didn’t change. “Henri’s council was corruption. We burned it so no one could sit there again and pretend it was a throne.”

No sting.

No choke.

The water lay flat and simple.

“My turn,” Dorian said. “Speak this: you will not claim a second French territory within a year.”

Francesco didn’t look away from me when he answered. “I will not claim any territory I do not have to save.”

The room went very quiet.

The bowl did not stir.

Somewhere in the back, someone’s chair groaned like a lament.

Dorian’s eyes hardened. “What of Henri’s people?”

I spoke. “They chose. They chose breath over memory, safety over ceremony, the

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future over a portrait of the past. We will carry them until they can carry themselves. Then we will set them down gently, not drop them when they are useful no more.”

The water shivered–not in warning, but like a cat arching into a good hand.

The Keeper nodded once, satisfied.

She turned to the marsh alpha. “Renaud?”

The reed–braided woman’s mouth crooked. “I want something better than a promise.” She tapped a finger against her lips, thinking. “A charter.”

Alfonso straightened, instinctively touching the folio. “Drafted,” he said. “A Protectorate Charter–limited term, shared patrols, transparency of ledgers, external audit by neutral elders, automatic review at three moons and six. Sunset clause unless the protected pack petitions to remain.”

Dorian laughed, but it was too quick. “Paper.”

“Paper,” Alfonso agreed. “And signatures that bind teeth.”

Renaud’s eyes glinted. “I’ll sign if the river bears witness.”

The Keeper looked pleased in the way only very old arbiters do when children remember their lessons. “So it is.”

We broke then–not to adjourn, but to let the room breathe around the new direction the air had taken.

Audiences of wolves decide with their bodies before they decide with their mouths; I could feel the tension ease across shoulders, the angle of spines soften, the curiosity creep in where suspicion had hoped to set up shop.

Monica slipped a flask into my hand. “Drink.”

“What is it?”

“Something you can’t argue with.”

It tasted like stubborn herbs and care.

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I drank it all. Audrey watched the corners of the room with that predator patience she wears like a second skin.

“Dorian isn’t done,” she murmured.

“He shouldn’t be,” Marlow said from my other side. “Losing gracefully is a muscle he’s never bothered to learn.”

Luc approached then, his shoulders squared, palms empty.

He asked the Keeper’s leave with a glance.

She gave the smallest nod.

“I was Alpha Henri’s Beta,” Luc said to the room. “I didn’t do enough. I thought I could fix rot from inside the tree. I couldn’t. When the King cut the parasite’s head, it was only because I was too late to do it myself.” He lifted a leather ledger. “Names of those lost. Accounts of where the food went instead of to our children. Schedules of the women who were taken to the lake under pretense of ‘counsel‘. I will put this on the table for any elder to read.”

He placed it on a low stone slab like an offering.

The room edged closer―not all at once, not eager, but the way wolves approach a new scent they think might be dangerous and necessary at the same time.

Renaud stepped to the slab first.

She flipped a page.

Then another.

She did not look up when she spoke. “This will do.”

Dorian’s lip curled. “Confessions and cooked books.”

“Your problem,” Marlow said pleasantly from ten feet away, “is that you think everyone’s as bad at lying as you.”

Dorian’s head snapped; his wolf flared up in his eyes like a match dragged too hard.

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He stepped toward the circle. “Trial by dominance, then. If your King wants to keep what he stole, let him take it with his claws where everyone can see.”

A murmur–hungry, eager–skittered over the floorboards.

Wolves love a fight the way thunder loves open sky.

Francesco didn’t move.

His aura rolled–calm, vast, inexorable. “I don’t make orphans to prove what my word already proves.”

“You refuse?” Dorian crowed.

“I choose a different trial.” Francesco lifted his chin toward the Keeper. “Trial by keeping.”

A hiss ran through the older wolves; the younger ones blinked.

The Trial of Keeping was old–older than Valmont, older than the three rivers, called only when a land itself must decide.

It wasn’t a duel.

It was penance.

And work.

The Keeper’s eyes warmed a fraction. “Explain it for those who like their stories

short.”

Francesco’s voice was simple. “For three moons, we keep what we did not choose: the widowed, the fatherless, the elders, the fields. We mend what is broken and bury what will not mend. At the end, we open our gates. Those who wish to sign their names to our banner will do so. Those who don’t will go–fed, clothed, escorted, with their names returned to them instead of erased.” He tilted his head toward Dorian. “You may come count.”

Laughter this time–real, not sharp.

A few elders slapped the table with the open–palmed approval of people who like

a solution that wears boots.

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Dorian looked as if he’d bitten pith. “And if at the end they stay only because they

fear you?”

I stepped forward. “Fear doesn’t build schools,” I said. “It doesn’t fill kitchens, or teach names back to children who stopped answering to them because no one spoke them with kindness. Come in three moons and ask the children if they are afraid. If they say yes, I will walk you to the gate myself.”

Silence.

Not hostile.

Considering.

Renaud shrugged one shoulder, reeds whispering. “The marsh accepts the Charter. For three moons, then six. After that, we let the land speak.”

Others nodded–the river brothers together, an elder from the mountain pass, a woman whose crest was a white hound and whose gaze measured like a tailor’s hands.

Dorian did not.

He looked at me, then at Francesco, then at the Keeper. “The Valois reserve judgment.”

“The Valois may reserve what they please,” the Keeper said, staff coming down with satisfaction. “The Charter will be sealed in the river. The Conclave stands.”

We signed by water.

The Charter parchment lay atop a flat slate at the bank where the three rivers met.

The Keeper pricked each signatory’s finger; a single drop fell and sizzled faintly as it touched the wet stone.

Names in ink meant something to the young.

Names in blood meant something even to the wind.

the

Francesco signed first, then Alfonso, then Renaud. When it was my turn, Keeper looked at me for a heartbeat as if to ask whether I knew what I was doing.

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“I do,” I said.

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“Luna,” she said, and the word felt like a mantle and a soft scarf both.

Monica squeezed my hand after and pressed a square of linen to my finger. “Hold,” she said. “You always bleed more than you need to.”

“I have people to tell me that now,” I said, and she smiled the way women smile when they pretend they have not been crying on other nights.

Dorian did not come to the river. He watched from the shadow of a poplar, calculating angles as if the tree might tell him a geometry that could undo the arithmetic of what we’d just made.

On the road out of Valmont, the air felt thinner, the light cleaner.

Our horses picked up their pace like they, too, preferred work to the politics that

talk themselves in circles.

“Three moons,” Alfonso said, already organizing his thoughts into lists. “We’ll need grain, carpenters, midwives. A magistrate from the neutral circuit. Scribes.”

“And bells,” Audrey said.

“Bells?” he asked.

“For Ellaine’s boots,” Monica said, straight–faced. “In case she gets ideas.”

Damn them!

Marlow laughed, a short, honest bark. “We’ll put it in the annex. Line item.”

Francesco reached across and brushed his gloved fingers over my wrist, a touch so light it might have been only air.

Proud, the bond hummed–no word, just the weight of it.

I let the warmth settle in my ribs.

We camped that night where two hills shouldered each other and looked down on a line of willows threading a stream.