MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

AMARIS

Corvin’s convoy was twenty minutes out and I was standing at my window in the aquamarine dress thinking about every decision I had made since I first put it on.

That was three days ago.

Three days ago I was a woman who had never been taken on a date. I was now a woman who had been on a date, been kissed against a tree in a rainstorm, watched Ryker hold his brother back from dismantling Cole in the study, and was currently wearing the physical evidence of at least two of those things on a dress I absolutely needed to change before my husband walked through the front door.

I was thriving.

Nia had gone to her room after the study without a word. She had stood up, pulled herself together the way she did when she was done being in a room, and walked out, and I had let her because I knew what her face did when she needed to be alone and right now it was doing exactly that. Pushing her would not help. Nothing I could say would help. The only thing that helped Nia was space and time and eventually something to be angry at, and she had plenty of all three.

Rowan had gone somewhere too. I did not follow him. There were things Rowan needed to do alone and feeling things he did not want anyone watching him feel was one of them.

I knew that. I also knew that wherever he had gone, he was going to come back out of it having already decided what to do next, because that was just who Rowan was. He did not fall apart. He absorbed things and built with them.

Cole I did not go looking for.

I was still at the window when I heard the door.

I knew his footsteps before I turned around. I was aware of the fact that I knew them and had chosen not to examine what that meant.

Ryker crossed the room without a word. He came and stood beside me and his eyes went to the same empty road I had been staring at for twenty minutes. He did not ask what I was thinking about. He did not tell me it was going to be fine. He just stood there, shoulder near mine, and after a moment his hand came up to my jaw and he turned me toward him and his mouth found mine.

Slow. No urgency in it. Not asking for anything, just putting itself there because it needed to be there.

I pressed into it and held the front of his shirt and let him.

When he pulled back he kept his forehead against mine and we stood there with the window behind us and the empty road beyond it and twenty minutes left and a study two floors down where something irreversible had happened.

"Whatever he says when he walks through that door," he murmured, low, just for me, "none of it changes this."

This was doing a significant amount of work as a word. I was fairly sure this meant the rain and the tree and the forehead against mine afterward.

I was also fairly sure it meant the arm across Rowan’s chest forty minutes ago and what that had cost him to hold. I thought it might also mean the date and the wine and the corridor door and a handful of other things that neither of us was ready to line up and look at directly.

"Okay," I murmured.

He pressed one more quick kiss to my mouth and pulled back. "Go change."

I thought about pointing out that Rowan had told me the exact same thing an hour ago and that both of them were managing me and I was allowing it, which was a personal failing I would examine later. I decided not to point it out.

I turned and went down the corridor to find something that did not smell like everything I had done in the last seventy-two hours.

My room felt smaller than it had that morning. I stood in front of the wardrobe and thought about Corvin’s nose. Corvin’s nose was going to do the math the moment he was within ten feet of me. I had exactly one bottle of perfume strong enough to present a competing argument and it was going to be a close race.

In what universe did I think this week was going to be manageable.

I changed into the navy dress, the formal one I wore to pack gatherings, the one that announced Luna where the aquamarine one had been announcing three days of very poor decisions.

I fixed my hair and sprayed the perfume twice and then a third time because I was not taking any chances, and then stood there trying to decide if a fourth would cross from strategic into suspicious and decided it probably would.

Act normal. You are absolutely fine. Nothing about the last three days was unusual.

I stood up.

Corvin’s convoy was five minutes out. I could feel it through the pack the way you felt weather changing, that shift when an Alpha got close to his own territory, the thing that arrived before the man himself.

I opened my door.

Ryker was leaning against the wall across the corridor, hands in his pockets. His eyes came up when the door opened and went over me once.

"Better," he murmured.

"Enormously helpful, thank you." I kept my voice flat.

He pushed off the wall and we walked toward the staircase. At the top of the stairs Rowan was waiting. He held my eyes when we reached him and something moved between the three of us in that moment that nobody named and nobody had to.

Ryker on my left. Rowan on my right.

We went down the stairs.

The front door opened before we reached the bottom.

Corvin walked through it.

He stopped when he saw us.

His eyes moved from my face to Ryker’s to Rowan’s and then back to my face and he went very still. Not the controlled stillness he wore as Alpha. Something underneath it, something that had not finished becoming whatever it was going to become. His jaw tightened. His nostrils moved fractionally.

His eyes settled on mine.

Nobody in this house was ready for this hour. I had known that. I had been correct.

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