MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

NIA

I had practiced this.

In the mirror at five in the morning when I could not sleep. In the shower with the water too hot. In the long walk down this corridor with my heart doing whatever it was doing that I was choosing not to examine too closely. I had run through every word of it until I thought I had found the arrangement that made it something I could say out loud.

It still came out wrong.

But Amaris’s hand was on mine and that was the only reason I opened my mouth at all.

I started with the estate. The drive to Ironcrest. Two of Lila’s people, the blindfold for half of it, the smell of old stone when they took it off. The underground entrance. The mask they pressed into my hands before the door at the end of the corridor.

I stopped there. "There was a door. They told me to put the mask on before they opened it."

I paused.

Amaris’s fingers tightened on mine.

"It was not the worst part," I finished.

I kept going before anyone could respond because stopping felt worse than continuing and the only way I had ever been able to do hard things was straight through the middle of them.

"She told me she would hurt people I cared about if I did not come back to this pack and report to her. What people were doing. Where they were. What was being discussed."

Rowan had his arms folded and his chin level and his face was doing absolutely nothing. I had known him long enough to know that when his face moved he was surprised. When it went still like this he was putting things somewhere permanent and the putting was not gentle.

I kept going.

"Lila is not just a manipulative bitch," I bit out. "She is calculated. Organized. She had a file on this pack. On people in this pack. She knew things she should not have known unless someone inside was feeding her information for years. She does not run men out of boredom or loneliness. She runs them like a fucking operation." I held Rowan’s eyes. "She had you. She had Cole. She had at least two others at the same time — men who each thought they had something exclusive, men she kept available depending on what she needed and when. She scheduled these men. That is what I am telling you. She had a system and you were all in it."

Ryker’s eyes cut to Cole.

Cole held his gaze and did not move.

"She uses people and puts them back when she is done," I continued. "That is all she has ever done. The version of Lila any of you thought you knew, she built that version for exactly what she needed from you at the time." I pressed my mouth together for a second. "She finds what a person cannot leave and she moves in and she stays until she is finished with it."

Cole’s jaw was tight. I caught it from the corner of my eye and thought — not for the first time since I had agreed to come into this room — that he had known some of it. Not all. But something. And the knowing and the staying quiet about it was something I was going to have to decide what I felt about at a later time, in a room by myself, when I could actually afford to feel it.

I stared at the table. "They told me what would happen if I talked. To anyone. Inside this pack or outside it. And I came back and I did what they told me to do because I was scared." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I am not usually scared. I want that on the record. The thing Lila builds around herself is specifically designed for people who are not usually scared. She finds the version of you that is and she lives in it."

I stopped.

The room was very quiet.

Ryker had not moved from the wall. Not one muscle the entire time I had been talking. In my experience Ryker perfectly still was more alarming than anything he did when he was in motion.

Rowan’s jaw was a locked door.

Amaris still had my hand.

I exhaled and dropped my eyes to the table and thought at least it is not just mine anymore. At least it exists somewhere outside my chest where I have been carrying it for months alone.

Then Cole’s voice came across the room. "There is something else."

Everyone stayed exactly where they were but the room shifted.

Cole kept his eyes on Rowan. His hands were flat on the desk. "I found out something about Lila while I was at the estate. Before they released Nia." He pressed his palms down harder on the surface. "I found out who else she has been sleeping with."

Rowan held his gaze and said nothing.

Cole pushed the word out flat. "Jason." His voice stayed even. Whatever else was true about him in that moment, the voice stayed even. "And Victor."

Victor.

That word landed in the room the way a dropped weapon landed.

Ryker came off the wall.

Amaris made a sound beside me that never quite became a word.

Rowan’s voice came out very low and very even. "Say that again."

Cole repeated it.

Lila. Jason. Victor. Same sentence. Same even voice.

Rowan’s chair went back.

He stood up from it and the chair scraped back from the motion and hit the floor and the sound of it was the sound of a man who had been holding something contained for a very long time deciding whether to keep holding it.

The answer was somewhere in the air between him and Cole, hanging in the half second before anyone moved.

Ryker was already between them.

I was watching Rowan’s face — the face that had been a locked door the entire time I had been talking — and I was watching what happened when the door finally came open.

Whatever was on the other side of it did not have a name yet.

But it was pointing directly at Cole.

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