MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 176: COME TO ME

ROWAN

Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be Alpha because I can’t seem to make one stupid decision.

I had been pacing for seven minutes when Marco walked back in.

I knew it was seven minutes because I had counted my steps and the steps had become the only thing keeping me from making a decision I was not ready to make.

Victor Hale was at my gate. Victor Hale was not here for war. He was here for one person and he was prepared to wait twenty minutes for me to bring her out and he had sixty years of experience watching Alphas like me do the math and arrive at the same conclusion.

The math was not adding up in my favor.

"Did you reach my father." I kept my eyes on the floor.

"No." Marco’s voice was tight. "The line is dead. Either out of range or the signal is being blocked."

I turned. "Ryker."

Marco shook his head.

"Cole."

Another shake. "Nothing from either of them."

I pressed two fingers against my mouth and breathed through my nose and stared at the far wall of the command room. Ryker. I needed my brother and my brother was not answering and I did not have the time to feel what that meant right now. I was going to feel it later. Right now there was a field full of men and a clock running down.

I turned back. "Where is Freya."

"Her room. She hasn’t come out since this morning."

"The pack. Who is in the bunker."

"No one yet." Marco held my gaze. "They’re waiting to see if it becomes war."

"Do they know what Victor is demanding."

"Those of us on the wall know. No one else."

"Keep it that way." I moved to the window. The training yard below was too quiet. People standing in the wrong configurations, watching each other instead of moving. A pack that did not know what to do because the people who were supposed to tell them had not told them anything yet. "Keep it that way until I give the order."

Marco crossed his arms. "Rowan. What are you going to do."

I didn’t answer.

He exhaled slowly. "You have to decide. Whatever you decide, you bear the consequences. But you have to decide."

He was right. He was entirely right and it did not help even a little.

I left the room.

I did not plan to go to Amaris’s room. My feet made that decision without consulting the rest of me and by the time I was halfway down the corridor I had stopped trying to argue with them. My brother was missing. My father was unreachable. Victor Hale was standing outside my gate asking me to choose between handing over a woman my father would die for and watching my pack pay for the refusal.

There was Freya. A woman who had come back from the dead and spent a year living quietly in a house she had disrupted before she ever disappeared. A woman who had caused my family more damage than most people managed in a lifetime. A woman who was also my father’s fated mate and who my father would burn everything to the ground before he let Victor have.

And there were thousands of wolves behind these walls who had not asked for any of this.

I knocked.

Nia opened the door. She took one look at my face and stepped aside and was gone before I had cleared the threshold, pulling the door shut behind her without a word.

Amaris was on the bed. Still in the pink dress from this morning, sitting cross-legged against the headboard with her knees pulled up, and her eyes found mine the moment I walked in. She did not say anything. She just moved over on the bed and tilted her head toward the space beside her.

"Come here," she murmured.

I went.

I lay down beside her and she shifted and my head found her chest and her hand found the back of my neck and I breathed her in and held the breath and let it out slowly.

The quiet held for a moment.

"Victor is not here for war," I murmured into her chest. "He wants Freya. He says if we hand her over he pulls every man back and leaves. Nobody dies. Pack stands. My father comes home to exactly what he left."

Her hand moved slow across the back of my neck.

"And if you don’t," she murmured.

"Then we find out what thirty men and whatever is behind that tree line is willing to do. With no Alpha, no Ryker, and a pack that hasn’t run a real engagement in eleven years."

I exhaled slowly. "I cannot hand Freya to Victor. My father would never forgive it. She is his fated mate. Whatever she did, whatever happened between them, he would rather burn the pack to the ground than let Victor take her."

I pressed my eyes shut. "And I cannot fight Victor and protect the pack at the same time. Not without Ryker. Not without my father."

"I know," she murmured, her hand still moving.

"Tell me what to do."

Her hand stilled on my neck. "I can’t do that."

I lifted my head.

"I can’t." Her voice was even but not cold. "I can tell you that being Alpha costs something real. I can tell you that hard decisions are hard because both options are wrong and you still have to pick one. I cannot pick it for you."

Our eyes held.

"You and I could just run," I murmured. "Right now. Get in the car and drive. This would not be our problem."

A smile formed at the corner of her mouth. "That does sound like a plan."

"We could be across the border in four hours."

"I’m already packed," she murmured back.

I laughed. It came out shorter than I meant it to but it was real. She was smiling and I was laughing and there were thirty men at my gate and the whole thing was so impossible it had circled back around to almost funny.

I reached up and cupped her face and drew her down to me and her mouth met mine and she did not hesitate. Her hands went into my hair and mine went to her jaw and her waist and I pulled her in and she pressed back without reservation, her hands tightening in my hair, and there was nothing held back in any of it. I held her there for one moment longer than I had planned because the gate and the wall and Victor and the impossible math of all of it was somewhere on the other side of a door I had closed and I was not in a hurry to open it.

I pulled back.

Her forehead came to rest against mine.

"Let me go talk to him," I murmured. "Stall. See if there is a deal to be made that doesn’t cost us either."

She held my eyes for a moment. Then she nodded once. "Go."

I stood.

I took a breath.

I went back to the wall.

Victor’s voice came through the radio before I had reached for it.

"I don’t see you with Freya."

I took the radio from the sentinel. "You don’t. I wanted to talk first. Before anyone makes a decision we cannot walk back."

The line stayed open. Victor let the silence run, deliberate, the way a man who had done this before let the other side feel the weight of it.

"Talk then," he said finally.

"You don’t want war with Gravemoon." I kept my tone measured. "You don’t want Corvin coming back to a battlefield. You want Freya. So let’s look at what this actually costs both of us and find a better answer. I can give you immunity. A formal declaration. You are no longer an enemy of Gravemoon and I carry that to every allied pack. Other doors open to you. You stop being rogue. That is not nothing."

Silence on the other end. Long enough that the sentinels on either side of me shifted their weight.

Then Victor spoke. "You are better at this than your father." He did not say it warmly. He noted it the way a man noted a fact that surprised him. "You are right. Immunity is worth something." He let that sit for a moment, and I could hear in the silence that he had already moved past it. "And you are right that I want something more."

"Name it," I clipped.

"I will be generous," Victor murmured. "I am not a man who enjoys cruelty without purpose. So I will give you a choice."

My hand tightened on the radio.

Victor’s voice came through even and unhurried. He spoke the way a man spoke when he had the time and knew it. "Give me Freya. Or give me Amaris. One of them. You choose which one. And I will leave."