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Most of us tended to be insular. Keep out of politics.

Bringing humans in on an issue between werewolves and mages was impossible, but I didn’t think any council of mages, any old family, would side with us.

Hell, they wouldn’t even side with Dakota, now that he was one of us.

The wasting of a mage’s magic? That was a tragedy, certainly, but it was not cause to lose more magical talent.

If it came to mudslinging, we wouldn’t win. And I—well, I had no will to fight for anything that Dakota didn’t want. He could walk away from all of this, cut his losses. I wouldn’t blame him.

“Of course not,” Minori hissed. “But this is a stain.”

“Not one we caused,” Jillian spat.

Minori’s lips set firm. “There must be restitution, and?—”

Her eyes flashed to Dakota, and there was something like longing in her gaze. It only lasted a second before she was glaring at me hard enough to keep me in my seat as effectively as her brother’s magic had pinned me down.

“You have made himother. A mage could have healed him, but youchangedhim. You must answer for it.”

The room erupted in shouting, the wolves practically snarling.

But she was right. I couldn’t regret the choices I’d made, but I owed it to Dakota to face them. I held Minori’s eye and nodded.

37

Dakota

“Oh fuck no,” I said, but no one was listening to me.

Jillian was putting herself between Jax and Minori, and the other wolves were all looking at her, eyes narrowed, considering her flanks with tight, barely leashed emotions.

Why the hell was Jax agreeing to anything?

“The merger should continue as planned,” Minori said, though her jaw was clenched and while I couldn’t feel her emotions the way I could for the wolves, it wasn’t hard to guess. She felt wronged.

She felt as though she had lost something.

Me.

Because despite the fact that I was there, was alive and well, I was nothing to a mage anymore.

The notion lanced through my gut like a sword, and without thought, my eyes sought out Prudence. I’d heard her voice in the fray, I was sure I had.

There she was. Arms crossed over her chest and eyes hard and colder than I’d ever seen them, she was...

Minori. She was glaring at Minori. Thank fuck there was at least one mage in the world who realized that werewolves weren’t automatically at fault for everything. Fuck, we mages were?—

But no. Not we. They. I’d never properly become one of them, and now I never would, because Jiro had taken that from me.

Not Jax.

Never Jax.

But Jax was hanging his head like a puppy who’d just been caught going on the carpet, and I thought he was precisely as culpable as that—not at all. Puppies had no control over their bodies, and Jax hadn’t been able to control Igarashi Fucking Jiro.

This all came back to him. If someone was going to pay restitution, it sure as fuck wasn’t Jax. It was him.

“Now you listen—” Jillian was saying to Minori, being thoroughly ignored.