Chapter Text
The Marrok’s open migration policy for European wolves had been, for the most part, successful. Wolves who’d sought to escape the cruelty of the European packs flooded North America on a scale that hadn’t been seen since this continent was still considered the New World. To say that Charles had been busy would have been an understatement.
He and his wife Anna worked diligently to determine the best placement for all the new additions, taking into consideration the new wolves’ preferences, personalities and dispositions. They prepared new identities for some, helped with employment for others and created whole new identities for a small number who wished to leave everything that had been their old life behind.
Though they strived to make each new arrival’s transition as successful as possible, something Bran had never bothered to do since obedience was all he’d ever been concerned with, there were still growing pains and those added to the bureaucracy that came with managing dozens of packs and hundreds of wolves throughout the Marrok’s territory. Charles was growing weary.
“I feel like a babysitter.” He said gruffly.
Anna turned away from the sink. “Honey, have you ever babysat a day in your life?” Charles nodded his head. “Really?” she asked disbelievingly.
“Mercy.” He answered with a faint smile. Those were happier times, as fraught with turbulence as they were he thought.
Most of that tempestuousness had originated from his father’s mate, Leah. Despite having been mated well over a century and a half by then, Leah was still so insecure in her relationship and herself that she’d been jealous of a shapeshifting infant that was brought to Aspen Creek by her terrified human mother. Leah couldn't stand the competition for her mate’s love and affection even if it was in the form of an innocent child.
Charles had barely finished that memory when his phone vibrated again. “You see? It never stops.” He held his screen up so his wife could see the incoming call from the New Orleans pack Alpha, Dominic, as he was calling himself now.
Anna, for her part, was thankful to have her husband working behind a desk fielding phone calls and answering e-mails rather than risking his life on behalf of her father-in-law, the Marrok. She’d gladly listen to his grumblings rather than worry about his safety.
That job was the one that he’d had for longer than most wolves had been alive and he was terrifyingly good at it, but it had been killing him the death of a thousand cuts so much so she’d worried she’d eventually lose him to his ghosts. Though Anna understood his frustration, she simply couldn’t find it in herself to wish it to go back to the way it had been.
“I feel a little bit more sympathy for your dad now.”
Charles sighed and answered the buzzing phone retreating to the bedroom that had recently been made an office.
Normally, pack business would be conducted at the Pack house, Bran's house, in Bran's office, by Bran. But that hadn’t been the case for nearly six months. A little over half a year ago, Bran walked straight out his front door, loaded his truck and drove away without a word to anyone. Once a place pack members had congregated, socialized, feasted and even mourned together, now stood empty and silent.
That had been a very strange and confusing few days. Days which morphed into weeks and eventually months. Bran had left no instructions or even guidance for his successor upon his departure, so everyone pitched in and tried their best to hold everything together until the day their leader, on whom they all heavily relied, returned.
Everything had continued as normal for about a month at first. But now no one even bothered to visit the pack house or meeting barn. Despite his cryptic manner and cool if not cold demeanor, Bran’s influence was comforting to many and now it was no longer there. The whole pack had been left, everyone feeling the gaping hole where Bran's presence had been; everyone just awaiting the day he returned. No one knew how to get Bran back, assuming he even wanted to return, and that unsettled the small community’s members. Since a pack requires leadership, they turned to Charles as their de facto leader.
It was only natural to do so since he was his father's unofficial second though he'd never truly wanted the job. Thankfully, Anna was fairing far better. Since everyone felt much differently about his wife than they had his father’s, pack members and their families had offered their assistance and aid freely. Leah had rarely included the human faction of the community so this change had been a welcome one. Anna did her best to juggle the local day-to-day work while her husband oversaw the operations of the packs throughout the territory. Charles could see that in at least that way, moral here was improving and he wished he could say the same for himself.
The world went on. The sun rose and set. The seasons changed and other than the redistribution of the workload, nothing much changed. At least, that’s what it looked like to the rest of the packs in America, but in Aspen Creek, everyone knew better.
Leah had left seven months ago, severing the bond she’d shared with Bran for the better part of two centuries. There had been no loud dramatic breakup. No harsh words, no smashing of china, no burning of clothes; there had been nothing of note at all. The long-time power couple had simply agreed one day that it was over, signed already drawn up divorce papers and within a few days the movers came. Two hundred years had boiled down to a four-man moving crew’s afternoon’s worth of work. After that, Leah was just... gone.
Bran went on as usual for a few weeks, but eventually he left too. Most people assumed he had gone to retrieve his mate, but three months later, Leah had resurfaced and Bran hadn't.
Charles sent Leah’s whereabouts to his father’s phone once, hoping that it might be the push his father needed to reemerge from where ever he’d been hiding. His efforts were met with radio silence. His father wasn't even speaking to he or his brother through their bonds any longer.
No one knew where Bran had gone or what he was doing. Every day, Charles and Anna watched the news for some hint of the rampage that was a devolving Bran Cornick, but every time they heard nothing they were left with questions still unanswered and work still to be done.
Charles worked, under the guise of assuming a more executive role in pack operations, all day everyday leaving little time for anything else. He hated it, he’d much rather spend his hours running through the mountains, hunting game in the woods or researching promising startups in which to invest. Charles having only ever been the Marrok's executioner, realized just how much of his father had been shielding him from all these years. Bran had been the Marrok since before this country was a country and he'd been Atlas carrying the weight of their world on his shoulders since.
Now, with his disappearance, Charles stepped up trying to save everything his father had worked and sacrificed to build. Knowing what would happen if the North American Packs learned of Bran’s disappearance and not wanting to see the violence and upheaval that always accompanied a vacuum of power, like the one already being experienced in Europe following the deaths of Jean Chastel and Arthur Madden. The timing was also critical since werewolves had gone public so recently, everyone understood that they could not afford additional scrutiny from the rest of society. Charles now understood just how fragile everything his father had built was and he was determined to see it preserved.
Those closest to the Marrok conspired to hide Bran’s disappearance for these reasons, but in order to accomplish this deception, Charles, Anna, Samuel, and even his former mate, Leah, had to create a plausible story for Leah’s departure. They prayed that they could stave off the worst of possible outcomes until Bran returned.
Part of those preparations had been the scheduling of another assembly of the world’s Alphas. The meeting was to be held in New Orleans, since many still held a bitter taste in their mouths following the Seattle summit. For that reason, Charles selected a more festive environment to serve as backdrop to the unpleasantness of these talks and it was also why Charles had to take this particular call.
During this conference, Charles intended to lay the foundation for the solidification and unity of the packs worldwide. He didn’t delude himself into thinking there would ever be a single leader, but he hoped for at least more cooperation between the packs here and those abroad.
Since the vampires had abducted Mercy, the mate of Alpha Adam Hauptman, and had shown their desire and ability to feed from and control werewolves; they had shown themselves growing confidant and brazen. Enemies like that were not to be dismissed easily.
Since Sage’s betrayal at the hands of the witches, witches threat level had increased greatly. The discovery that vampires and witches had been cooperating and conspiring against wolf kind in Europe, meant the dangers wolves faced were now two-sided and worldwide.
The underlying and just as menacing threat of factions within governments- both rogue and authorized, zealots - religious or otherwise, and the political positionings of weak men that would use their kind for professional gain remained as well.
All of these would happily see the destruction or enslavement of their kind; exactly what Bran had worked so diligently to protect them from. Charles knew he had to call upon those elsewhere to battle these threats because as strong as he was, he was no Marrok. More so, he personally didn’t believe his father would be able to withstand the blow without the strength provided from having a mate either. If any of these were to succeed in attacking the only home Charles had ever known, it would render the centuries of work, sacrifice, blood, sweat, and tears his father had put into this pack, this community, null and void.
Three hours later, Charles made his way into his kitchen where Tag and Asil had joined his wife. “How goes it in the world of party planning?” Tag asked with a mischievous grin.
“Fine.” Charles barked sitting down to a steaming bowl of beef and barely stew.
“Are you gonna share with us or do we get to imagine the details?”
“One of the Scottish delegations asked to use the meeting to hold talks of their own.”
“What kind of talks?” Asil asked skeptically.
“To mate off one of their females.”
Everyone’s eyes widened and Anna leaned forward with excitement. “What?!? Tell us everything and don’t leave a single thing out.”
Charles let out a long breath, brushing his long black hair from his face and sitting back in his chair. “Very well.” He began.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lincoln, Nebraska was perfectly normal. It was a million times bigger that Aspen Creek, but it still seemed to roll up the streets when the sun went down. Leah’d considered many different locations when she decided to leave Montana, but the security specialist she’d hired had informed her that the best way to stay safe when she made her escape was in a moderately sized town where she’d have both anonymity as well as a certain amount of popularity.
Since she’d left, she’d had a few run-ins with lone wolves and pack members she’d wronged over the years. Most of them wanted nothing more than to teach the Marrok’s wife a lesson, but thankfully everyone still believed her mated to her ex so the confrontations had been more uncomfortable than bloody.
Her first step in creating a life for herself had been to buy a home. She’d bought a respectable home in a respectable neighborhood and what had excited her the most was that for the first time, she’d done so for herself by herself.
Once she’d established a relationship with her realtors, she set about doing the same with her neighbors. Then she rented a small office space where she’d set up her nonprofit for battered women since apparently single women had to work.
It was ironic that though Bran had never been physically abusive, she identified with the women she served deeply. Bran had always been more than manipulative, neglectful and, at times, psychologically abusive, something she’d deemed far more damaging. She'd have preferred that he’d have just punched her to the little games, cutting condemnations and insults he wielded so skillfully against her. Injuries to the body healed much more easily that those to the psyche.
Leah had even begun going to church once again and once a week she conducted a women’s self-defense class in the gym. All of her efforts had helped her establish roots in the community which she knew she’d one day rely upon when word of her marital status did inevitably come to light.
Starting over had been difficult, though not financially. For years before and for months following Bran having left her for dead at the hands of his son, Leah’d been saving a small portion of the monthly allowance Charles had arranged for her.
Several times, when she’d foolishly believed that Bran might have come to love her, she’d actually considered spending the money on something for just the two of them. She’d used her savings once to buy a two-seated Porsche for Bran, but his coyote brat had wrecked it leaving Bran to chastise Leah for her stupidity having such a temptation around a teenager.
She’d often considered a romantic vacation package where they could reconnect, or possibly putting the money towards something for the pack such as a park, garden recreation building anything that would show her husband that she wasn’t the selfish, hard-hearted woman he’d made her out to be.
However, every time she’d entertained the notion that she could turn Bran’s heart, her mate did something that reminded her exactly why she’d started squirreling away the money in the first place. Now, all these years later, she was financially stable and thankful that she had done so.
The nest egg that she’d built up had become substantial and with the help of her once believed best friend, Sage, Leah had learned a lot about investing and real estate. Leah had enough money that if she were careful, she could live the next century on just what she had in the bank never having to work.
However, complacency and leisure weren’t things that suited Leah Carmichael, as she was called now. She needed to work, to make her own way, to be the boss, to fight, and she’d found a way to meet all of those needs here.
Leah had been coached ad nauseum on how to ingratiate herself with her human neighbors. Her efforts were made doubly more difficult, because Lincoln is a traditionally conservative area in the Midwest Bible Belt region of the US and the population here is known more for their faith and practicality than their open-mindedness and culture.
Leah had labored learning to grin when she wanted to growl, empathize when she wanted to roll her eyes and retreat when she wanted to attack. She practiced donning the mask of domesticity and docility so much that now, when necessary, she could slip into it seamlessly. Occasionally, she wondered if Bran would be proud of her now, want her now, perhaps even love her now, but she never allowed herself to dwell on such musings for long knowing too well how painful such ideas could be.
When she was alone, she got to be herself though. A woman and a wolf in all her faults and glory and in those moments, she was simply Leah. Not Leah Cornick, wife to the Marrok, stepmother to his sons, highest ranking female wolf in the land.
She wasn’t even Leah Carmichael, philanthropist, activist, business woman and adopted Nebraskan. No, in those moments she could breathe in a way she hadn’t been able to do since before she had been changed. When she was alone, she was most herself. That piece of information had been critical in her therapies.
That was until she’d gotten an email from her former daughter-in-law on one of her various burner accounts informing her that her former husband and mate had disappeared and wasn’t responding to anyone. Leah was scared not just for herself, but for the world as a whole.
She didn’t much care for Anna, but after ALOT of therapy, which she’d only initially entered into in order to build her new life’s backstory, she’d come to understand that much of her animosity towards other female wolf was a direct result of her feelings regarding her broken relationship with Bran.
Anna told Leah that a cover story for her departure from Aspen Creek had been floated amongst the packs wherein she’d been separating from Bran for continuity of leadership should the government pass the controversial bills being hotly debated in Washington right now or, worse, Aspen Creek one day become exposed.
She explained that most believed that Leah would reside elsewhere anonymously and would serve as the gatekeeper to the Marrok for those who sought to remain hidden. When she considered their lie objectively, she realized that it was actually a good idea. Strategically speaking, it provided an extra layer of insulation for those that really needed it, the wildlings of whom Leah still felt very protective.
Leah missed the wildlings. As dangerous as they were, she had always felt a certain kinship with them and that made her that much more determined to see them safe. So, she agreed to go along with the story. But she also agreed because she knew it was the smart thing to do and Leah was not as stupid as everyone had always believed.
She was also very practical despite her reputation and love of expensive shoes. She knew Charles would be able to find her wherever she went if she refused to get on board with his plan anyway. Being complicit in the subterfuge allowed for continuation of pack unity and mutually assured survival, at least until Bran emerged once again.
It worried Leah more than she’d like to admit that her former mate had been missing for so long. Every day that passed she grew more worried about what would happen should the man, who’d only sought her out to keep his wolf appeased, lose the control he’d worked so hard to maintain.
Thankfully between serving on the various boards about town, church activities, social clubs and running her nonprofit, Leah kept herself busy and her mind off the impending doom that was a rampaging Bran. Eventually, she became a fixture in Lincoln and eight months to the day since she’d left the home she’d help build; she went on the first real date of her life.