Page 158 of Final Drive

Just whether I want it.

I look back at the water as Priya’s four comes out of the fog crooked enough that even from here I can see it. Her voice carries over the lake.

“Port side, you’re killing me. Two seat, stop trying to fix it yourself and row the fucking boat.”

I laugh into my coffee and look at Gray again. “Yeah. I think I do.”

He nods once. “Okay.”

Nobody starts planning. Tyler doesn’t pull out his phone, Gray doesn’t ask for dates, and Beckett manages to keep whatever he’s thinking inside his head for once. Eight men who have spent most of the last year trying to solve every problem before it reaches me stand there and let me want something without immediately turning it into a group project.

It might be the nicest thing they’ve ever done for me.

Out on the water, the novice four straightens by a few degrees. Priya tells them to lengthen out, and three men twice her size do exactly what she says.

“She’s going to be a problem,” I say.

Gray’s arm brushes mine as he looks where I’m looking. “Good.”

The four disappears into the steam again, carrying her out past the dock lights and into water she can barely see yet. I know what that feels like. I also know now that not seeing the whole course doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to start.

I take another drink of coffee and listen to eight men behind me begin arguing about something that has nothing to do with my future.

For once, I let them.

EPILOGUE

Gray

The state form is called a Declaration of Pack Association. It’s four pages long, and I know that because it’s been open on the dining room table for three days.

Nobody asked me to do the paperwork. Nobody had to. I’m the one who reads documents for a living now, and I’m also the one who spent two months last spring believing that if I handled enough things on Reese’s behalf, eventually nothing could get to her.

So there’s a fair argument that I shouldn’t be trusted with forms at all.

I’ve considered it.

I filled this one out anyway, because there’s a difference between completing paperwork and deciding what belongs on it, and I’ve had seven months to learn where that line is.

Page one is names and designations. Page two is the bond registry numbers, all eight of them, which Tyler has already cross-checked twice against the health center file and will absolutely check again before this leaves the house.

Page three is where I keep stopping.

Designated principal.

One line. One name.

Every pack registration in the state requires one. Most of the time it’s an Alpha, and in a pack with eight Alphas and one Omega there’s exactly one answer a clerk would expect to see.

I checked what the designation actually means. It doesn’t confer authority. It’s administrative, a single point of contact for correspondence, filings, notifications. Forty years ago it meant more than that, and nobody has bothered to change the language.

My father would have put his own name there without thinking twice.

Not because he’d misunderstood the form.

Because he’d understood it exactly the way he wanted to.

The jeweler is a small place on the square with a bell over the door, and the woman behind the counter watches eight men walk in together before putting one hand flat on the display case.