MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 163: RESOLUTION

RYKER

I did not know where I was taking her until we got there.

My feet knew before I did, which was typical of the decisions I made involving this woman. I had asked to talk and she had followed and I had walked us through the pack house and up two flights of stairs to the door that opened onto the east wing roof, the one I had found when I was eleven and never shown anyone.

She came through the door behind me and looked out at the view and said nothing.

The roof was flat and wide, the surface rough underfoot, a low stone parapet running along the edges that had always made it feel like the edge of something without quite being dangerous. The wind up here had a different feel than it did on the ground, cleaner and cooler, carrying nothing except itself. I had come up here as a boy when my father’s voice got too loud and the walls got too close and I needed somewhere nobody was going to find me.

I stood with my hands in my pockets and looked at it with her. The pack grounds below, all of it quiet now, just the distant light of a sentinel checkpoint at the gate and the dark beyond the tree line and above us the specific black of a very clear night, the stars sharp and cold and spread all the way to the horizon.

Nobody had ever found me here.

I was glad it still worked.

She crossed her arms and turned to face me, her hair moving in the wind, her face pale and steady in the dark.

I said the first true thing I had. "I’ve been avoiding you."

"I know," she said.

"I’ve been going out every night and getting drunk with Cole because every time I saw you in this house I wanted to do something I would regret and that was the only thing stopping me."

She looked at me without saying anything. Just held my eyes and waited, which was what she always did.

I turned and looked back out at the grounds. "I’m toxic."

"Ryker—"

"I’m not asking you to argue with me about it." I kept my voice level. "I’m not saying it so you’ll tell me I’m wrong. I’m saying it because it’s true and I know it’s true. I run hot and I run cold and I blow things up and I’ve watched myself do it to people who didn’t deserve it and I did it anyway." I looked back at her. "That’s what I am. I’m not going to disguise it."

She tilted her head. "Why are you telling me this."

"Because you deserve to know who you’re dealing with." I took my hands out of my pockets and held them at my sides. "Because I told you I was falling for you and then you walked into that ceremony and I have spent a week trying to figure out what to do with that and I cannot figure it out on my own."

She uncrossed her arms staring at me

"You told me on the morning of the ceremony," she said. Her voice was careful. Not cruel. Just exact. "Not two weeks before. Not three weeks before when I might have had room to do something with it. You told me when it was already done and then you were surprised that it was already done."

I did not have anything for that.

"I know," I said.

She blinked.

"You’re right." I looked at her directly. "The timing was mine and it was bad and I knew it was bad and I did it anyway because I needed you to know before it happened and I did not think far enough ahead to see what that did to you." I paused. "That is also what I am. I act from the chest and then deal with the wreckage."

She was quiet for a long moment. The wind moved through her hair and she did not push it back and she stood there looking at me with those eyes that never seemed to be looking for an out.

Then she took a step toward me and stopped close, her face tilted up toward mine. Up close like this I could see the tiredness she had been carrying all week under everything else, the particular kind that came from holding too much together for too long.

"It meant something," she said. "What you told me that morning. I want you to know that. I did not walk away from it easily and I have not walked away from it since." Her chin stayed level. "But I am standing on a roof in the middle of the night legally mated to your father and I need you to understand what that actually means for both of us before we keep having this conversation."

I reached out and took the piece of hair that had blown across her face from the wind and tucked it back behind her ear.

I made myself do it slowly because the version of me that acted fast broke things and I was trying, for once in my life, not to break this. My fingers grazed her jaw on the way back and I felt her go still at the contact, not pulling away, just going very quiet.

I brought my hand back.

"I know what it means," I said. "I’m not asking you to pretend it doesn’t mean that."

"What are you asking then."

We talked about it properly for the first time. About my father and what the mating was and what it was not. About the bloodline and the heir and the arrangement she had walked into. I told her I knew my father did not love her. She said she knew. I told her I was not my father. She said she knew that too, and the way she said it told me she had been sitting with the comparison herself.

I reached over and took her hand.

Not the way I usually reached for things. Not fast and possessive, not the way I took what I wanted before anyone could stop me. I just opened my palm next to hers and waited until she put her hand in it and then I held it. Her hand was warm and her fingers curled slightly around mine and I looked down at them for a moment before I looked back up at her face.

She let me.

"What do you actually want," I asked. "Not what the arrangement says. Not what makes sense given everything. What do you want."

She looked out at the grounds below and was quiet for long enough that I thought she was not going to answer. The wind moved between us and the pack slept below and the stars sat cold and sharp above and none of it moved.

"Something real," she said finally. "I want something that is not about bloodlines or politics or using each other to get at someone else. I want one thing in this house that is just what it is."

"I can do real."

She turned her head and looked at me and one eyebrow went up slightly. "Can you. Can you actually do real or is that a thing you say in a moment and then wake up tomorrow still being who you are."

There it was.

I looked at her and felt the old pull of irritation, the flash of wanting to prove her wrong immediately and dramatically, the part of me that had never been able to sit inside a challenge without detonating it.

I sat inside it.

"Probably a bit of both," I said. "I’m going to try and I’m going to be bad at it sometimes because that is what I have shown you I am capable of. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’m going to be different and have no evidence for it." I looked at her face. "What I can tell you is that I mean it. Right now. And that meaning it right now is more than I have given most things in my life."

She looked at me for a long time.

I held her hand and waited.

"Come on a date with me," I said.

She blinked. "What."

"A real one. Not this." I turned slightly and gestured at the two of us standing on a dark roof in the middle of the night having a secret conversation. "An actual date. I take you somewhere. We eat food. We talk like two people who are trying something instead of two people managing a disaster." I held her eyes. "No agendas. I’m not asking you to betray anyone. I’m asking you to have dinner with me."

She looked at me like I had said something in a language she was still translating.

I waited.

"You," she said carefully. "Are asking me. Your father’s legal mate. On a date."

"Yes."

"A normal date."

"As normal as anything involving us is going to get."

She looked at me for a moment longer and I watched her run through every reason it was a bad idea, which was a long list, and I did not rush her through it. The wind picked up slightly and moved the hair she had just pushed back and she left it this time, standing there in the dark with her hand in mine and her eyes on my face.

Then the corner of her mouth moved.

"Yes," she said. "I’ll go on a date with you."