MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 173: THE LAND OF NO RETURN (PART ONE)

RYKER

I stared at him blankly. "What did you just say?"

Cole picked up his glass, found it empty, put it back down. He picked it up again. Looked at it. Put it down again. Ran a hand through his hair and exhaled like the air had weight.

"Still," he muttered. "Last month I told myself it was done."

He reached across and took somebody else’s abandoned drink from the edge of the table and finished it without checking what it was.

"Two weeks ago she came to my room at three in the morning." He set the glass down hard. "And I let her in."

He shook his head. Slow and loose the way drunk people did when the thought was too heavy to move at speed.

Was he drunk and unaware of the rubbish he was spilling?

My fist tightened but I kept it together knowing well that I am fully aware that people don’t lie when they are drunk.

"She knows what she is doing." His voice had gone low and soft at the edges. "She gives just enough. Cold all day—" He snapped his fingers. "And then on her knees at night and everything from the day is just gone. She sucks me until I cannot think. Smiles at me after. Like she already knew exactly how it was going to go before she even walked in."

He pressed his thumb to his mouth. Stared at nothing.

"I keep going back." His voice had dropped to almost nothing. "I know what she is. I still go back every time."

He aimed that at the table. Not at me.

I did not move.

Lila. That bitch. I knew she was one.

But Cole?

The name sat in my chest like a coal. My brother had been watching Cole’s back. My brother had been calling this man a friend, feeding him at his table, trusting him with his house and his people and his plans.

And Cole had been counting every bit of it.

I picked up my shot glass and put it back down because what I wanted to do with my hands was not something I was doing here. Not yet.

I was twenty-seven years old. I had put down men for less than this. I had ended things for less than this. And I was going to sit in this booth and keep my face still and let Cole keep talking because the field was already in my head, the drive was already mapped, and Ryker Grave did not act until he was ready.

I’d liked Cole.One could say I considered him more of a brother than a friend.

That was the part that pissed me off the most. Not Lila. Not even Rowan. The fact that I had genuinely fucking liked this man and he had been carrying this the entire time and smiling about it.

Past tense on all of it.

PRESENT

I had been thinking about killing Cole since that night.

Not immediately. Not in a strip club over a bottle of something expensive. That would have been sloppy and Ryker Grave did not do sloppy. I had sat across from him and listened and drove him home and spent the next three days deciding whether I was going to change my mind.

My mind had not changed.

I had not told Rowan. Rowan would have gone straight at him, full emotion, no structure, and Cole would have ended up dead in a way that could be traced and that could not happen right now. There was a war building and we were going to need clean hands for what came after it.

Rowan would get his answer. He would know what Cole had done and why. Every detail.

But after. Not before.

I needed to be the one to put Cole down. That was not rage talking. It was the most practical solution available and also the one I wanted.

Both things could be true.

"Are we there yet?" He asked more impatiently.

He asked again.

Neither time did I answer.

I turned off the main road onto a dirt track I had driven twice before, years ago, for different reasons. The trees closed in on either side and then opened back out as the track ended and the field began. I cut the engine.

Gravemoon’s eastern edge. Three miles of open land before the boundary markers. No pack house visible. No road visible from here. Nothing in any direction but pale grassland running wide and flat and above it a sky the color of a bruise that had gone past hurting.

Cole stared through the windscreen and went very still.

"Is this not the land of no return?" He asked, his gaze darkened. "What are we doing here, Ryker?"

I stepped out of the car.

He got out slowly. He stood on his side and watched me across the roof with his jaw tight and everything easy from the drive entirely gone from him. He was running his options. I could see it in the way he held his shoulders, in the way his eyes moved to the tree line and back to me and to the tree line again.

There were not many options. He was beginning to understand that.

"Cole." My voice was even. No anger. No heat. Just the bare, unambiguous fact of it laid between us in the middle of nothing. "You betrayed my brother. I will not let you live for it."

His face went pale and he stared at me utterly shocked and livid to react.

"What," Cole said.

I held his eyes across the roof.

"Are you fucking Lila?" I said. "Or not."

Cole blinked, his jaw dropped and his words appeared to be stuck in his throat.

Then he went very still.

The shock on his face was not about the field or the quiet or the threat. It was about the question itself. The fact that I knew to ask it at all.

He had not known that I remembered.