MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 172: I REMEMBER

RYKER

Cole had not stopped asking where we were going since we left the pack house.

"You’ll see." I kept my eyes on the road.

"That is not an answer."

"I know."

He turned to the window and decided to let it go. That was the thing about Cole. He knew when to push and when to stop and most of the time he read it right. It was one of the reasons I had always tolerated him.

Had always.

The road stretched ahead. The sky above it was the color of old concrete. Neither of us spoke for a while. I drove. I was good at silence. I had been raised in it and had never seen any reason to fill it just because someone else was uncomfortable. Cole had never learned that. Most people hadn’t. It was a skill people only developed when they had been very alone for a very long time.

Cole shifted in his seat. "Do you remember a few nights ago?"

I didn’t answer.

"Because I don’t always remember my hangovers," he added. "Some of them I am choosing not to. It is a deliberate choice. A coping mechanism. But I am having some flashbacks."

"I remember."

He turned toward me. I kept my eyes on the road.

I remembered everything. I forgot nothing. Everything went somewhere in the back of my head that only I could reach, and I waited. Rowan had once called it my greatest weapon. I had not corrected him. Today Cole was going to find out what that meant in practice.

FLASH BACK

The club had been Cole’s idea.

I would not have agreed to it on a normal night but I had not been in a position to argue with going somewhere loud and dark and full of strangers who did not know my name or my father’s name or the thing I had been turning over since the night it rained.

I had been avoiding the pack house all week. A room in the east wing. The person in that room. The way she had watched me confessed my feelings to her and whispered leave like she was surprising herself, and then held my gaze afterward, steady, like she was daring me to say it meant something.

I had been driving circles around that for a week and had not found my way through.

I was supposed to be running a coup. I was supposed to be cold. Cold was the architecture of everything I had ever built and it had held without failing for twenty-seven years.

It was not holding.

The club was several miles between me and a decision I was not ready to make. That was enough reason to go.

The lighting inside was low and blue, the a club that stripped everything down to shadow and silhouette. Bass pressed through the floors and into my chest. On the main stage a woman worked a chrome pole with the ease of ten thousand repetitions, moving in long gentle arcs while the lights shifted red behind her. She wore almost nothing and moved like she had been assembled with a single purpose. Two others worked the floor with trays in next to nothing, reading each table in four seconds, knowing exactly what it was worth and what it would take.

Cole had been immediately at home.

I ordered tequila, took a shot, and set the glass down. One. I was not here to drink.

The woman found me in under ten minutes. They always found me. She materialized at the edge of the booth with dark hair to her waist and eyes that had already decided what they were doing.

"Are you not one of the Alpha’s sons?" she murmured, leaning close enough that her hair fell across my shoulder. Her hand found the back of the booth beside my head. "I have heard things."

I tilted my head toward Cole. "He’s the single one."

She held my eyes for a moment, read my face, and turned.

She pressed her back against Cole’s chest and rolled her body against him in one long fluid movement. Cole’s hands went to her hips first, then one gripped her ass while the other came around to cup her breast, his thumb working slow deliberate circles, and she tipped her head back against his shoulder and moved with whatever he gave her.

I turned away.

I turned the empty shot glass on the table and thought about Amaris.

She had been mated to my father.

Those five words and everything I needed was in them. She was his. Legally. By ceremony. The blood had stayed red at the mating.

She was in the pack house wearing his ring and I was in a strip club at midnight because something in me had decided that the pack house was not a place I could be right now. So I was here instead.

I had spent a week making sure I was not where she was. It was not complicated. It just required attention.

The part I had not planned for was that she took up more space in my head when I was not near her. I had thought distance would fix it. Distance usually fixed things. I had used distance my whole life to fix things and it had always worked.

It was not working.

I had never once cared about a woman enough to change my route to avoid her.

I cared enough. That was what I was sitting with.

My father’s mate. And I was his son. And I had spent a week pretending those two facts were enough to close whatever this was, and they were not, and I had run out of other things to try.

Cole sent the girl away eventually and dropped back against the booth with the loose boneless energy for he had stopped counting drinks long ago. I had been counting for him. Close to a full bottle.

Cole rubbed the back of his neck. "Nia keeps avoiding me. Since she came back."

"To be fair." I shrugged. "You only keep her around for fucking."

Cole’s head came up. "That is not true." Very serious for a man whose glass was at the wrong angle. "I really like her."

I studied him.

"I mean it. She knows the actual me. Not the version I show people." He set the glass down. "She just gets me."

It came out like it surprised him to hear it.

"Then stop keeping her on a string."

His jaw tightened. "I can’t."

I waited.

Cole’s voice dropped. "Don’t tell Rowan."

I didn’t answer. He was obviously drunk.

"He is the cause. Rowan is what Lila takes for letting me keep Nia." He blurted out incoherently.

I set my glass down. "Explain." Because he wasn’t making any fucking sense now.

"Lila still has me." He stared at the table. "I cannot get out of it."

I held his gaze. "Are you still in love with that bitch."

Cole laughed. Not a happy sound. "Lila is truly a bitch." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Do you know I am still fucking her."