= Mikael =
Cutting my father and brother out of my life hadn’t been difficult. It should have happened the moment I took the Alpha title—clean, decisive, final. And yet, I hadn’t done it then.
Not because I owed them anything.
But I showed them mercy.
Not because they deserved it—but because blood still meant something to me. Because no matter how fractured we had become, they were still my family.
I let them stay.
Even when every instinct screamed for me to exile them, to strip them of the protection they no longer respected. I wanted distance. Finality. Silence. But banishment would have done more than punish them—it would have provoked the Elders. And the council never forgot a slight, especially when it came from someone like me.
They reminded me often of my father.
Of how he
