MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 177: DOWN HARD

RYKER

I did not let him up immediately.

Cole was face down in the grass with my jaws still at the back of his neck and his blood soaking into the ground and I was going to stay exactly where I was until I had worked through what he had just pushed through the bond.

Lila is my fated mate.

I sat with that.

The grass was wet under my paws and his pulse was fast under my teeth and I held him there and let the information settle into me the way bad information always settled, slowly and with full weight, refusing to be hurried.

My fated mate was the woman my father had married. I had kissed Amaris in the rain and pressed her against a tree and taken her apart in the dark and not one moment of any of it had been under my control, not since the bond formed, not for a single day. So I was going to be very careful about the stones I threw right now.

But I was still going to throw some.

I released him and stepped back and shifted. The field came back loud and bright the way it always did after wolf form, everything too much at once, the cold air and the smell of blood and the particular silence of two men standing in a field with something irreversible between them.

Cole shifted beside me, slower than usual, the way you moved when you had taken that kind of damage and your body was still deciding how offended it was. He sat up in the grass and pressed the back of his hand to the gash on his neck, checked the blood on his fingers, then tilted his head back and held my eyes.

I crossed my arms and looked at him, at the man I had run with for twenty years, and felt the particular exhaustion of finding out that someone you trusted had been carrying something this size for this long without letting you see any of it.

He got to his feet. One knee at a time. Braced a hand on his thigh before he straightened. His neck still bleeding slow and he pressed his forearm against it and waited.

"Four years ago." I kept my voice level. "Walk me through it."

He exhaled. "The bond formed the night I met her. Before Rowan. Before any of it."

He shifted his weight slightly, working out how to say something he had held a long time, the way you arranged words when they had been sitting inside you so long they had calcified.

"I didn’t understand what it was. She never named it. She came when she wanted me and left when she didn’t and I told myself the weakness was mine." He held my gaze. "Not once did she acknowledge the bond. A year of that before I even understood what I was carrying. By the time I did, she had everything she needed from me already."

"And when Rowan brought her home." I bit it out. "You kept quiet."

"I stood there and couldn’t get the words out." His jaw worked. "And then time passed and it became something I couldn’t say cleanly. And then something I couldn’t say at all."

I let that sit in the air between us.

Cole had always been the most controlled person in any room we walked into together. Trained twice as hard, said half as much, watched everything. I had always respected that about him. Standing here looking at him now with blood on his neck and twenty years of a secret finally out in the open I understood for the first time how much of that control had been spent on this one thing.

I uncrossed my arms. "What are you getting from her." I kept my voice level. "She ignores the bond. She picks you up when she wants something and puts you down when she is done. So what are you actually walking away with."

His eyes dropped to the ground for a beat.

"The sex," he murmured.

"That’s it."

"That’s it."

I turned away from him and stared at the road and ran a hand across the back of my neck and thought about what twenty years of loyalty looked like when it had been quietly rotting at the foundation the entire time and nobody noticed because the man holding it up was too disciplined to let it show.

I thought about telling him I understood. About how the bond did not choose its timing or its target and how I was not exactly standing on clean ground here myself given everything with Amaris and what had happened in the rain and what I was still not naming out loud even inside my own head.

I decided against the speech. He already knew all of that.

"She owns you for free," I told him, turning back. "She gives you nothing real. She just shows up when she wants in and you open the door and she walks right through it every single time. And a man she can walk through whenever she wants is not a man making his own choices." I held his eyes. "End it. Not step back. Not take space. End it completely. Because as long as that door exists she will keep using it, and you will keep letting her, and Rowan will keep not knowing."

He pressed his lips together. "I know."

"Does Rowan know any of it."

"No."

"You’re telling him." I held his eyes. "Not me. You. Face to face. This week."

The silence stretched between us, long enough to have weight.

He exhaled. "I’ll tell him."

"Mean it when you do."

He nodded once. Held my eyes when he did it.

That was the whole of it.

I pulled my phone out.

Seven missed calls. Five from Marco. Two from Rowan.

I turned the screen so Cole could see it and watched his face go through three things in quick succession before settling on the fourth which was the one that had no name but meant he already understood this was bad.

"Get in the car." I was already walking. "Now."

He came without a word.

I had the engine running before his door was closed and I was calling Marco before we hit the road and Marco picked up on the first ring.

"Where are you." Not a question.

"Forty minutes. Talk."

"Victor Hale is at the north gate. Thirty men minimum. Been there two hours. Not moving." Marco’s voice was tight and clipped and fast. "Rowan has been on the radio with him. Victor came demanding Freya. Says he takes his men and leaves, pack stands, no blood. But Rowan has been pushing back and Victor just changed the terms again and we do not know which way Rowan is going to break."

I dropped the phone on the seat.

Cole was watching me from the passenger side, jaw set hard, already putting it together from Marco’s end.

I pushed the accelerator down, "Victor is not there for Freya."

Cole straightened.

"Think about Jason." I kept my eyes on the road, "What Jason told us before any of this started. Victor has been hunting the white wolf bloodline for years. He knows exactly what Amaris is." I gripped the wheel harder, "He picks the one day Corvin is unreachable. He rolls up with thirty men and parks them at the north gate and does not move them because they are not the real move. They are the picture. He puts Rowan on the wall negotiating over something Rowan can never give him because Rowan cannot hand over Freya and Victor has always known that."

Cole turned in his seat. "Freya is the cover."

"Freya gets Rowan to the wall. Keeps the whole pack watching north while something else comes from a direction nobody has their eyes on." I pressed the car harder, the engine pushing back against me, "Victor planned this for exactly this window. Corvin out. Me gone. The pack watching the wrong gate."

Cole’s voice came out flat. "Amaris."

"Amaris."

He faced the windscreen and went quiet and I let him because there was nothing left to say that the silence was not already saying.

He did not know about Lila and Victor yet. That conversation required time and a level of calm I did not currently have access to, and right now the only thing that existed was the road and the distance between me and a pack house and a woman who did not know what she actually was to Victor Hale or what he had been building toward since before she ever arrived.

Thirty men at the north gate.

Rowan on the wall looking north.

Amaris alone.

I pushed the car as hard as it would go and thought about the rain and the dark and her face when she turned around and looked at mine and felt something cold move through my chest that had nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the fact that I had spent months telling myself she was collateral damage and I was done lying about that.

She was not collateral damage.

She had not been for a long time.

And Victor was not going to touch her.