Chapter 159: VANITY
AMARIS
We were fucked.
No.
Let me be more accurate.
Rowan was fucked and I was more fucked because I was the one sitting on a vanity with my underwear on the floor when the door opened, which put me at a clear disadvantage in any version of this conversation that was about to happen.
I had imagined this scenario before, the one where someone walked in, and somehow in every version of it the person was faceless and forgettable and easy to manage.
I had a whole collection of imaginary disasters and none of them had ever looked like this. None of them had ever been Nia specifically, standing in a doorway with her arms at her sides looking like she had seen everything and was already deciding what to do about it.
The door had swung all the way open and a familiar figure stood in the frame, and for exactly one second all three of us were completely still in the low lamplight of the room with nowhere to hide and nothing useful to say, and then she said it.
"Oh my God. Amaris."
"Nia."
I shoved Rowan off me, grabbed my underwear from the floor in one motion without looking at it, and crossed the room and pulled her into a hug before she could finish processing what she had just walked into.
She made a sharp sound of pain against my shoulder.
I pulled back immediately. "What—"
"Just an ache." She held up a hand. "I am fine. Sort of. Not really. But fine."
I looked at her properly for the first time and saw all of it.
The careful way she was holding her whole body, the dark circles sitting deep under her eyes. The pallor in her face and the way she was breathing were slightly too shallow. She looked like she had been through something and then put back together slightly wrong and was hoping nobody looked closely enough to notice.
Then I looked at her for one more second and hit her on the arm anyway.
"Ow—"
"Why did you not tell me you were going somewhere?" I kept my voice low because Rowan was still in the room. "I was standing there worried sick while people told me you take these little trips sometimes and I was trying to convince myself to believe it."
"I am sorry." Her eyes drifted past my shoulder to Rowan. "I had to deal with a few things."
"You could have sent me one message. One." I crossed my arms. "I thought something had happened to you."
"Something did happen to me." She blinked at me steadily. "I will explain everything later."
"You will explain now."
"Later," she said firmly, and her eyes were back on Rowan now, and I watched her assemble the full picture from the available evidence. The vanity. His collar. My hair. The general atmosphere of the room. The underwear in my hand that I had still not done anything about.
Behind me, Rowan cleared his throat and adjusted his posture like it was going to help anything.
"Nice to see you back, Nia," he said. "And well."
"Well is a strong word." She tilted her head. "I am guessing you might not have been hoping for my return tonight specifically."
My cheeks went warm. "Nia. It is not what you think."
She looked at me with the patient expression of someone who had known me long enough to know when I was about to say something embarrassing. "I think it is exactly what I think."
"I will leave you two to catch up." Rowan stepped toward the door.
"Rowan." Nia’s voice stopped him without raising at all. "What about Lila?"
He turned. His eyes went from her to me and back, and something in his face settled into something honest and final.
"I told her today that I do not want to get married," he said.
Nia studied him. "Why."
"Take a guess."
She looked at him for one flat second. "Because you are sleeping with your father’s mate."
"Nia—" I started.
"That is harsh," she said mostly to herself, though she did not take it back.
Rowan looked at her for a moment, then at me, and something crossed his face that he did not bother hiding.
"Glad you are back, Nia." He pulled the door open and walked out and it closed behind him with more force than strictly necessary.
The room settled into silence.
I sat there for a moment in the quiet of it and thought about what a tremendously spectacular disaster this evening had been from start to finish, and felt a tired laugh try to work its way up my throat and decided to let it stay where it was.
Nia turned to face me with her arms crossed and her head tilted at that specific angle she reserved for conversations I was not going to enjoy.
"Amaris." She said my name the way a person said a name when they were gathering patience from somewhere very deep inside themselves. "What exactly are you doing?"
"Please do not judge me." I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both palms to my face.
"I have had the single longest day of my entire life and I do not have the capacity to be judged right now. I was almost mated, then I was not, then I was by law, and somewhere in between my brother announced my personal history to three hundred people and the moon goddess made my blood stay red in a bowl. I deserve one free pass tonight."
She crossed to the bed and lowered herself onto it carefully, favoring her left side. "I heard everything. The ceremony. What Darius did. Freya showing up."
"Then you are fully caught up."
"Amaris." She waited until I moved my hands from my face. "Rowan is bad business. He is your now mate son. You are legally mated to his father. Do you understand how many layers of disaster that sentence contains?"
"I cannot help it," I said.
"You can help it. It is as simple as not doing it."
"It is not that simple."
"Why is it not that simple?"
I looked at the floor. The ceiling. My hands. Back at her face because she was going to sit there all night if she had to and I had no energy left to perform the version of me that had things under control.
"Because he is my fated mate," I said.
Nia’s mouth opened.
It stayed open for three full seconds while she processed that, her jaw doing everything it could to remain attached to her face, her eyes wide and completely fixed on mine.
"Amaris." Her voice came out slightly strangled. "That isssss—"
The knock at the door cut her off.
She turned her head toward it and then back to me. "I swear if that is Ryker I am leaving this pack forever and never coming back."
She pulled the door open.
Beta Marco stood in the hallway in full formal attire, still completely composed despite the hour, and his eyes moved from me to Nia and something happened in his expression. Not obvious. Not dramatic. Just a small controlled brightening that he caught and tried to put somewhere less visible within about half a second.
"I am back, Luna." He cleared his throat quietly. "Nia. You are back."
"I am back," she said.
"I am glad," he replied curtly, which was the most Marco had ever communicated about his feelings on any subject in all the months I had known him.
I looked between the two of them for exactly one second, and picked up my shoes from the floor.
"I will talk to you in the morning," I told Nia. "I have to go perform my wifely duty."
She gave me a look that contained an entire conversation I was choosing to postpone indefinitely. I followed Marco out into the corridor and he pulled the door shut behind us.
We walked through the quiet pack house, down the corridor that led to the Alpha’s wing, every step taking me further from the room I wanted to be in and closer to the one I had agreed to stand in when I said yes in front of three hundred wolves earlier tonight.
The pack house was completely still at this hour, every hallway dim and empty, the kind of quiet that only settled after everyone had been thoroughly exhausted by the same long evening. I thought about Nia’s face when I told her about the fated mate bond. I thought about Rowan walking out that door. I thought about the ceremony, the blood bowl, Darius standing up, all of it stacked on top of each other like a very tall pile of very poor decisions, most of which were not even mine.
I stopped outside his door.
Stared at it for a moment longer than I needed to.
Then knocked once.
Footsteps. Then the door opened.
Corvin stood there in the low light and his eyes moved over me slowly, from the floral dress to the hair that had come most of the way down, taking me in the way he did when he thought nobody was paying close enough attention to notice.
He said my name.
"Amaris."
He said it like he was breathing it in.
"Can I come in?" My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect from it.
He opened the door wider and stepped back.
"Sure," he replied making way for me to enter what would now the climax of this long night.
