Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 168

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Chapter 168

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Chapter 168

Chapter 168

MATTHEW

The pack house was fuller than I’d expected.

I stood at the side entrance for a moment before going in, looking at the cars filling the lot and the overflow parking that Marcus had arranged in the field behind the building because he’d anticipated this better than I had. There were vehicles I recognized and vehicles I didn’t, people who’d driven in from the outer edges of the territory, family groups and older members who didn’t usually attend formal gatherings.

They’d come to hear what I had to say.

I hadn’t known how many would. Had prepared myself for a half–empty room, for the visible evidence of a pack that had lost faith in its leadership and was expressing that loss through absence. The fullness of the lot did something complicated to my chest–not relief exactly. Something more like weight. The weight of being seen by more people than you’d steeled yourself for.

Marcus appeared at my elbow. “Ready?”

“As I’m going to be,” I said.

We went in through the side entrance.

The main hall of the pack house was the largest interior space we had–used for formal gatherings, significant announcements, the occasional celebration that needed more room than the usual venues. It held two hundred people comfortably. Tonight it held more than that, with people standing along the side walls and filling the space at the back that was normally left clear.

The noise when I entered was the specific noise of a large group of people who have been talking and fall quiet when the person they’ve been talking about arrives. Not hostile. Not warm. The particular waiting quiet of people who had decided to reserve judgment and were here to gather the information that would inform it.

I walked to the front of the room, where a simple raised platform held a lectern that Marcus had set up and I had told him to remove. No lectern. No physical barrier between me and the people I was addressing. I stood on the platform and faced the room.

I saw faces I recognized and faces I’d lost track of in the months of my absence. Sandra Harker’s mother, whom I’d written the letter to, sitting near the front with her hands folded in her lap. The Callahan family–four generations, the oldest of them a woman in her nineties who attended everything because she said she’d earned the right to hear things directly. Pack members I’d grown up with, whose children had grown up with me, who remembered my father and his father and had watched this pack across generations with the particular investment of people who’d built their lives inside it.

And at the back, unobtrusive near the right wall, Thorne Lockwood. Standing rather than sitting, the

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Chapter 168

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relaxed posture of a guest with no stake in the proceedings, his attention on the room with the mild interest of someone observing something that didn’t directly concern him.

I was aware of him the way you were aware of something in your peripheral vision that you’d decided not to look at directly.

I looked at the faces in front of me instead.

I’d prepared three pages of notes. They were in my jacket pocket, and they were going to stay there. I’d known since yesterday morning that I wasn’t going to use them, that the moment I stood in front of these people and pulled out prepared notes the distance between us would become the wrong kind of

distance.

I stood in the quiet and let it be quiet for a moment.

Then I started talking.

“I failed you,” I said.

No preamble. No building to it. Just that, first, because it was the foundation of everything else and there was no point trying to construct anything on top of it if I hadn’t laid it clearly first.

“I was your Alpha and I failed you. Not in any single moment that I can point to as the one thing I did wrong. In the accumulated decisions of months and years where I consistently chose what I wanted over what I was responsible for.” I looked at the room, not past it, not at a middle distance where faces blurred into a manageable abstraction, but at actual faces. “I want to be honest about what that looked like, because I think you deserve specificity rather than a general apology that costs me nothing to deliver.”

The room was very still.

“I was in a failing marriage, and instead of doing the work to understand why it was failing and address it honestly, I looked somewhere easier. I maintained a relationship that I knew was incompatible with my responsibilities to my family and to this pack. I told myself that keeping that quiet meant it wasn’t causing harm, and that was wrong.” I paused. “The harm it caused was real even when it wasn’t visible. My wife lived in this pack for four years and I didn’t see her clearly for most of them. I was so focused on what I wanted that I failed to see what was actually in front of me.”

I heard movement in the room–not protest, not agreement, just the small unconscious shifts of people adjusting to something being said that they hadn’t expected to hear said out loud.

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