MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 167: REACTIVE

VICTOR

Freya is alive and I am yet to pay her a visit.

I know they fucking want me to strike now, they are expecting me to strike now and that would be foolish of me.

As much as I want to strangle that bitch back to death I wouldn’t because that is how they will get me.

The bag swung back and I caught it on the return, drove my right into the center of it and felt the impact travel up through my knuckles and my wrist and my shoulder and into the muscle behind it.

Again. Left hook, overhand right, two jabs fast enough that the chain rattled against the ceiling mount. I circled on the balls of my feet, light, chin tucked, shoulders loose, every combination landing exactly where I put it. The gym smelled like sweat and rubber and I had been in here for an hour and I was nowhere near done.

Soft men die fast.

Your body was the first thing to fail you. You let it go soft and everything else followed. I had watched strong men become slow men and slow men become dead men and I had decided very early that I would not join them. So I was in here every morning and most evenings too and I did not take days off because the people who wanted me dead also did not take days off. That was the thing people who wanted comfortable lives never understood. The other side was not resting.

This is why I don’t rest.

I rolled my shoulder. Circled the bag. Three jabs, a cross, a left hook that made the chain sing and the bag torque hard on its mount. Footwork. In and out. The kind of movement that kept you alive when someone came at you in a tight space with something sharp and a reason to use it. I had been in those spaces before. I intended to be in them again.

The door opened.

I did not stop moving.

She stood in the entrance with her arms crossed and her jaw set, her mouth already forming the first word of whatever she had rehearsed on the way here.

"Victor." Sharp. Impatient.

I drove one more right hand into the bag, rocked it hard on the chain, and stepped back and let it swing.

"You look agitated, Lila."

She is wearing that perfume she puts on when she wants something. She always wants something.

"How soon," she snapped. "How soon are we actually going to move? Rowan hasn’t spoken to me in a week. I don’t even know if we’re still engaged because he is too busy playing acting Alpha to acknowledge my existence, and I am sitting in that house watching Amaris walk around with a Luna title she did not earn—"

She has been composing this speech since this morning. I can always tell.

"Your engagement status," I drawled, reaching for my towel, "is not a variable I am accounting for."

Her eyes narrowed. "We are supposed to be partners."

"We are." I wiped my face slowly, starting at my forehead and working down. "Partners who operate on different timelines."

"You are not operating at all." She pushed off the doorframe and walked into the gym, her heels sharp and deliberate against the floor, stopping a few feet from me with her chin up.

"You are in here hitting a bag while that girl sleeps with my Rowan. I thought Freya coming back from the dead would shake you loose. All that history between you two." She tilted her head. "Still nothing. You are completely unbothered."

She is crying over a man who barely cares about her.

I pulled the gloves off, one at a time, careful about it. Set them down on the bench. Picked up my water bottle and drank from it slowly, watching her over the rim while she stood there and the red climbed up from her collar and her jaw tightened the longer I took.

Let her wait. Waiting costs her something.

I set the bottle down.

"Do you know why I failed the last time I went after Gravemoon?"

She stared at me. "I’m sure you’re going to enlighten me."

"Guess first."

She hates this. This game I play with her.

She uncrossed her arms and then crossed them again. "Maybe because you were too caught up in your feelings about Freya and Alpha Corvin."

"Exactly." I held her eyes. "My emotions. That was the entire reason. Corvin was barely defending his pack. I had every structural advantage and I still walked away with nothing because I let what Freya was doing get inside my head. I became reactive. I was irrational. I was behaving like a man who had been personally insulted rather than a man with a clear objective and a cold head."

I let that settle. "And now I am watching you do the exact same thing. Standing in front of me with your jaw clenched because Amaris is sleeping with Rowan."

She thinks I am being confessional. I am building something.

"I am not—"

"You are." I walked toward her slowly, each step deliberate. "Tell me why you released Nia."

Her chin lifted. "Because Cole is there to manage her. I need eyes inside Gravemoon and Nia gives me exactly that."

I shook my head. Once. She had no idea how badly she had miscalculated.

I have counted four separate moments this month where she almost figured it out. She didn’t.

"Lila." I stopped in front of her and lifted her chin with two fingers and held it there. "For someone as genuinely brilliant as you are, you make remarkable errors at regular intervals."

I watched her decide whether to pull back. She didn’t. "Cole is Freya’s brother. Nia is in love with Cole. Not with you. Not with this arrangement. Her loyalty runs through Cole and Cole runs back to Freya. You released your only leverage inside that house and handed it directly to the other side and called it strategy."

She blinked. "Freya also wants Amaris gone. That puts her on our side."

Brilliant woman. Wrong cards.

I smiled.