MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 178: THE THIRD WOLF

ROWAN

The radio was still warm in my hand from the last time Victor spoke and the field was still full of his men and I had used thirteen of the twenty minutes he gave me and I still didn’t know what I was going to say when the last seven ran out.

Marco had not said anything since we came back to the wall and that silence told me more than anything he could have put into words.

Marco had been Beta of Gravemoon for eleven years. He had stood beside my father through three territorial disputes and two pack wars and the year after our mother died when the pack ran without an Alpha’s mate for eighteen months. Marco knew what bad looked like. His silence right now was its own language.

I kept my eyes on the tree line.

Then someone on the east side of the wall called out and I turned.

Ryker was running. Not moving at pace, not jogging. Running.

Cole was two steps behind him and something was wrong with Cole’s left side, his hand pressed against his ribs, his stride off in a way it had never been in the years I had seen him run.

My first thought was not relief.

My first thought was why is Cole bleeding?

I filed that away.

Ryker hit the rampart steps and took them two at a time and planted himself beside me on the wall like he had never left, like the last two hours had not happened at all. He didn’t explain himself. He didn’t look at Cole or at me. He just looked out at the field, read it in one long sweep, and stood there.

Like he had been standing there the whole time.

"What happened to Cole," I said.

"Later."

I wanted to push him on that. I didn’t, because the radio crackled and Victor’s voice came through and when it did it was different. Not afraid — Victor didn’t do afraid — but something behind it had shifted. The sound of a man rerunning numbers that had just changed.

"I see the family is all home," Victor said.

I lifted the radio. "Enough of the twenty minutes left to finish this."

Ryker put his hand out without asking and I passed him the radio and he brought it to his mouth and spoke into it. What he said was short and direct and not something I would repeat in polite company. It was not a greeting. It was a reminder.

Victor’s pause on the other end was the longest pause he had given all afternoon.

Then he said the offer stood until it didn’t and the line went dead.

Out in the field the black car’s engine cut off.

One by one the men at the tree line began to pull back. Not running. Not retreating in any particular hurry. Walking, the way men walked when they had decided something themselves instead of when something had been decided for them.

Marco let a breath out beside me. "They’re actually leaving."

I didn’t answer right away. I kept watching. Thirty men moving at a pace that was almost leisurely and the wrongness of it sat in my chest at an angle I could not straighten out.

Men who ran were men who had lost.

Men who walked like this had gotten what they came for.

"Victor doesn’t retreat," I said.

Ryker stood with his arms loose at his sides and his eyes on the tree line. "No."

"He did today."

A beat. "Because of me."

I didn’t correct him because it was true and because Ryker already knew it and false modesty had never been a language either of us spoke.

The field cleared. Marco was already on his radio calling the observation order down through the ranks. Keep eyes on that tree line, don’t trust the withdrawal, hold the second ring in position until further notice. Below on the training yard the pack that had been holding its breath for two hours started to breathe again, voices and footsteps and the particular sound of tension releasing all at once through hundreds of people who had been braced for something that had not come.

I handed the radio back to Marco and he took it and walked down the rampart still talking.

Cole was still standing a few steps back from us, hand pressed against his side, expression carefully neutral. I turned to look at him properly for the first time since he had come over the wall.

"What happened to you."

He opened his mouth.

Ryker cut across him before a word came out. "Later. We’ll get to that."

I looked between the two of them. Neither met my eyes at the same time. That was a tell. Two men who had never once had a problem holding my gaze, both suddenly very interested in something happening at the other end of the wall.

"Someone take him to the infirmary," I told the nearest sentinel, and the sentinel came over and Cole opened his mouth to object.

"I can walk fine," Cole murmured.

"Nobody asked," Ryker told him.

"I just feel like a thank you would not have—"

"Go, Cole."

Cole went. Still talking under his breath, something about gratitude and reasonable people and the particular ingratitude of wolves who had watched him bleed without commentary.

Then it was Ryker and me.

I turned toward him. He was still facing the field, the empty field Victor had left behind like a point he had made and was satisfied with. I stood beside him and let the silence run.

"You good," Ryker said.

"I don’t know yet." I kept my eyes on the tree line. "Where’s Amaris."

The pause before he answered was a half second too long.

Not by much. Barely anything. But I had spent twenty-six years living beside this man and knowing every response he had before it reached his face and that half second was not nothing.

"She’s fine." His voice was level. "She’s inside."

I looked at him.

He kept his eyes on the field.

"Ryker."

"She’s fine," he said again. Same level tone. Same forward gaze.

That was the tell. Not the words. Not the tone. The fact that Ryker Grave, who turned to face things he didn’t want to face simply because looking away was not something he did, was standing on this wall after a two-hour drive and a confrontation with Victor Hale and still had not once turned to look at me when I said her name.

"What aren’t you telling me," I said.

He finally turned. His face was the same face it always was. Controlled. Readable to nobody but me.

He opened his mouth.

And a sentinel’s voice cut across the wall from the direction of the pack house. Running.

"Acting Alpha." The sentinel’s voice reached us before he did, already carrying the sound of something wrong. "The Luna’s room. She’s not in it."