Phoenix Maplewood If I sit still, maybe I'll get out of here

There was exactly one answer that would appease Saena, but it was not the one that Reek uttered.

She pinned back her ears when he said their children deserved to know their father. "They will know him," she agreed, but she now believed it would be safest for them to know him distantly and so added, "but what they deserved was a family, and you ruined any chance of that." If he had disappointed her then she was stubbornly certain he would disappoint them as well. It was the essence of his actions, him putting himself or Tavi first, and she was far from a fair judge of anything. She was the last wolf who should've passed judgment and spoken, but biased and often self-serving, Saena always believed what she wanted to believe and not necessarily what was true. Reek might've kept his word and become the best father in the entire world, but he had disappointed her and she could only imagine that he would disappoint them in the end, too.

"Go find Spring," she told him coldly, "get her to look after those stings." She turned away from him, flicking her red-backed ears and searching for the right words to say. Mere months ago she would have screamed at him, but she had exhausted all her rage in the brief snapping of her jaws and instead said heavily, "I want you out of the wood by tomorrow morning. Do not come back here of your own accord. I will howl for you when they are born and you can meet them then, and when they are old enough, you may meet them outside the territory every other week." She said it with a note of finality. Reek would know his children but he would not know them as the alpha male of the maplewood pack, or even as a wolf of it, if she had her way.