A Different Angle
TREACHEROUS WATERS
"I can't figure her out."
Things were not going as smoothly as he was used to when rehabilitating other wolves, the progress of getting Aelin to change and become accustomed to her wolf was slow: one step forward, two steps back. She was stubborn, and the atmosphere her attitude caused at times had reached the ears of his Alpha, his father, which had eventually caused a summons so tense that Børre was sure the elder Lupo was going to rise and clip him hard, like hadn’t been done in years. He needed to get her in line, or Ødvin would.
Bjørn, the most intellectual, even-tempered, and eldest of Børre's younger brothers, sat across from him in the library, his expression frank, "And yet you've mysteriously made some progress here and there.” Ever the voice of reason, “I wonder why that is.”
Børre ignored the cheek his brother often employed, "She still fights me,” and his warnings of what laid ahead for her, for any Lupo, weren’t doing enough. It was like drawing blood from a stone. Bjørn, for his part, wasn’t done laying on the smartassery.
"Have you tried being a bit less like Dad Version 2.0?"
Børre lifted his gaze at the accusation, his tone carrying the beginnings of a warning. "I'm not dad." He wasn’t… and partly feeling that he couldn’t 'fill those shoes' as the idiom so put it. Even if much of the clan’s affairs these days were handled without his Alpha’s direct intervention. It wasn’t so much the intervention as the implications of its occurrence that were the reason to avoid it.
Bjørn loosely folded his arms and reared back on the hind legs of the chair he sat in, his brows faintly creeping upward, barely managing not to look smug. "Aren't you?" The second-eldest Drage brother needled. Børre’s mouth had slowly been going deeper and deeper into a frown. To say that he didn’t like what he was hearing, nor the feeling it provoked, was not too unlike saying a wolf had fur. It was obvious.
Bjørn's chair settled back on all four feet, and the younger Lupo leaned in. "Thought so."
And that was the straw that… almost broke the camel’s back. Børre bolted up from his seat in a clamour that saw his chair rattle back and almost crash to the floor, and planted his hands on the table hard enough that it creaked and groaned. Bjørn rose out of his seat as if the energy given by his brother had found its escape route through his lither form. "I would never..." Børre growled.
Bjørn took a deep breath, and a cautious backward step with his hands raised in a conciliatory gesture. "All I'm saying is... talk to her a little." It couldn’t be that hard, could it? For a moment, Børre seemed to stare at his brother as if Bjørn was from another galaxy, then let his hands slip off of the table to back off and turn to pull his chair back toward the table.
"I do."
"I said to, not at." Bjørn parroted in turn. The future Alpha settled back into his seat and crossed his arms, fixing his brother with a hard stare. "And listen to her a little more than you talk. Aren't you interested in why she is the way she is?"
The only part of Børre that seemed to move was his mouth to speak. He didn’t blink. "Why?"
"Uh-uh, patient confidentiality," Bjørn shook his head, and moved to sit back in his chair. "Ask her."
