MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 175: THE LAND OF NO RETURN (PART 2)

COLE

I tried.

I want that on record before anything else. In whatever version of this story gets told later, I tried.

The other thing I want on record is that I did not choose this.

Nobody chooses a fated mate. That is the whole point of the word fated. The moon goddess does not ask. She does not check your schedule or your friendships or whether the woman she has decided is yours happens to be engaged to one of your oldest friends. She just puts the bond there and steps back and watches what you do with it and I have hated her for it every single day since the night it formed.

I did not go looking for Lila. I did not sit across from Rowan and decide to want the woman he was going to marry. I woke up one morning with a pull in my chest that had not been there the night before and it had her name on it and I have been trying to survive that fact ever since.

That is not betrayal. That is the worst luck in the world. Those are different things even when they arrive at the same address and I know how that sounds and I know that Ryker Grave does not care how it sounds and that is exactly where we are.

"Ryker." I kept my voice easy. Hands visible. Two men having a reasonable conversation in a field. "I was drunk. You know how I get when I drink. Half of what I say means nothing and the other half means even less and you cannot hold a man accountable for what comes out of his mouth when he is three quarters through a bottle and barely keeping himself upright."

"Stop." He wasn’t angry. His hands were loose at his sides and his eyes were on mine and not moving and he had already finished whatever thinking he needed to do. That was the part that made my chest tighten. "Do not do that."

"I am not doing anything." I spread my hands. "Whatever you think you heard—"

"Cole."

"—was not what it sounded like. I was drunk and running my mouth and if you would just—"

"Cole." My name the second time like a door closing. Final. "I know your drunk. I know your lying. They do not sound the same and we have known each other too long for you to try to make them."

I held his gaze across the roof of the car.

I had three more things to try. Three angles I had not used yet. A different approach on the same argument. A redirect toward what this would cost him. An appeal to the twenty years we had run together. That skill was the only reason I was still breathing and I had never once found it fail.

The field was wide and still and pale and there was nobody for miles and it had failed now.

I dropped it.

"What goes on between me and Lila is private," I started again, slower. "It has nothing to do with Rowan. Nothing to do with you. Whatever I said that night was coming from a personal place and if you would just give me five minutes—"

He was not in human form anymore.

No warning. Just the black wolf standing where the man had been, shoulders at my chest height. Black and massive and still, nothing soft in the line of him anywhere. Eyes amber going red at the center.

I shifted.

My wolf had never been his wolf. His was made for ending things. Mine was made for surviving them. Leaner through the flank, longer in the leg. I was never going to out-muscle him. What I had was speed and I was going to use every bit of it.

He cleared the car in one movement and I was already gone.

I put sixty metres of open grass between us before he found his full stride and felt the bond snap open the way it always did in this form, the telepathic channel that only worked between wolves who had run together long enough.

Ryker: You have been fucking Lila. Rowan’s woman. Behind his back. You piece of shit.

I cut left hard and he cut the angle. Right, he was there. I pushed a burst of speed and gained thirty metres and used them to breathe.

It is not that simple, I threw back.

Ryker: The hell it isn’t. She is his fiancée. She is sleeping with you. You have been sitting at his table every night and saying nothing. How simple do you want it.

I dropped my shoulder left and drove right. He read it before I finished and his shoulder caught my haunch and this time it was not a correction. His claws raked across the back of my leg and I felt the heat of it immediately, blood matting into my fur as I pushed forward and found my footing.

Ryker: I taught you those moves. You stupid bastard. I taught you every move you have and you sat at my brother’s dinner table and smiled at him.

I pushed harder across the field, pulling him toward the longer grass and the dips and rises. He tracked me steady and did not rush and was not even breathing hard and I understood from that alone what I was dealing with.

I stopped running.

I planted and turned and came at him from a dead stop, generating momentum in three strides, going low at his front legs.

He sidestepped it clean. My weight carried me past him and his shoulder clipped my flank and I hit the grass hard, face first, the impact driving the air out of me. I scrambled up before he could follow. My muzzle was bleeding where it had caught the ground and there was a burning line across my ribs from something I hadn’t felt until I was already on my feet.

Ryker: Good.

Do not do that, I snapped back.

Ryker: Twenty years. Twenty years I have run with you and yet you threw it away for some cheap fuck with some slut. You let Rowan call you brother.

Ryker—

Ryker: Do not say my name like we are still what we were. You have three moves left. After those you are running on instinct and instinct has never been enough to beat me.

He was right and I knew it.

I used the rise in the eastern edge of the field, the terrain I had been saving. Drew him toward the crest and cut back down the slope with the momentum behind me and hit him low at the shoulder with everything I had.

He went sideways in the grass.

I had his scruff for two full seconds. Maybe three. Then he rolled and I was not on top and his claws caught my neck on the way past, three lines of fire opening up across my shoulder, and I scrambled clear and pushed distance between us. My lungs were burning. Blood was running freely down my shoulder and soaking into my front leg and dripping into the grass. He was barely winded.

Ryker: That is the best you have.

I know, I threw back.

Ryker: Then we are finished.

He came at me the final time and I had one move left and I used it. He had seen every move I had before I finished deciding to make it. Twenty years. He had watched me for twenty years. His jaws locked on my scruff before I reached full stride and my back legs left the ground and when I came down I came down underneath his full weight and the breath left my body completely on impact.

I pushed. He pressed his full weight down and his jaws tightened and I felt the deep ache of it spreading through my neck and skull, the specific pressure that said he could close this and had not closed it yet.

I stopped pushing.

The grass was cold against my flank. Blood from my shoulder and neck soaked into the ground underneath me. The gash on my leg had stopped burning and started throbbing. The sky above was empty and vast and entirely uninterested in what was happening below it.

Ryker: Last chance. Tell me the truth. I will decide what it is worth. Was the pussy really that good?

I was out of road.

Every move tried. Every angle exhausted. I was pinned under a wolf I could not shift, bleeding into the grass, and I had one card left. The one thing I had never said out loud to anyone. The one truth I had kept since the night a bond snapped into place between me and a woman who had been using me with both hands ever since and I had let her because the bond was real.

I had tried to stop. The bond was there every time I woke up and it was still there every time I decided and it did not care about my decisions. It did not just explain what I had done. It explained why I had never once been able to walk away.

I was not ready to say it.

There was no other option.

Ryker. My voice through the bond stripped bare. Get off me.

He did not move.

The jaws pressed closer.

Lila is my fated mate.