MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

FREYA

I had planned to be standing when he walked through that door.

Standing felt like the right posture for this conversation, like something I could control, and I had spent enough of my life being deliberate about the posture of hard conversations that sitting had felt wrong when I rehearsed it. I was going to stand.

But he comes through the door and he looks the way he looks after a long absence, the set of his jaw and the weight behind his eyes and the exhaustion of a man who has been holding something for days and is finally in the room where he can put it down, and I cannot make myself stand up.

I am tired.

I have been tired since the cabin. Since before the cabin, if I am honest. And I am done not being honest.

I reached for the words I had arranged. "I need to tell you why."

He did not speak. Still standing in the middle of the room, not moving toward me, not away. I did not know what his stillness meant and not knowing what Corvin’s stillness meant was one of the few things in my life that had ever genuinely frightened me.

I started with my father.

"A Gravemoon wolf." I kept my voice even. "He passed through my mother’s village before I was born. I don’t know the shape of what happened between them. My mother never told me that part. What she told me was his name and his pack and the fact that there was another child, a son, who had grown up inside those walls." I pressed my hands together in my lap. "She told me when she was dying. She gave it to me like it was a gift."

His jaw moved.

"I had no wolf and no way to get inside a pack border without explaining things I could not yet explain. And I had a brother who did not know I existed." I held his eyes. "I watched Cole from the outside for a long time. Just enough to know he was alive and inside a wall and not entirely alone."

"And then you came here." His voice was quiet. The kind that had edges.

"I made sure the door was open for him." Not a confession. A fact. "Not his friendships. Not what Ryker and Rowan built with him. That was his entirely. I just made sure the door existed before I walked through it myself." I paused. "I needed to be near him. And I needed to be near you."

He moved then. He crossed to the chair across from mine and put his hand on the back of it and stood there and I watched his knuckles go white.

"The fire." He stopped himself. His jaw tightened. Started again. "You survived it."

"The fire was real." He needed to know that before anything else. "I did not arrange it. I was there for legitimate reasons and the fire started and for the first hours I thought I was going to die in it and spent the next hours deciding whether that was preferable to what came after." I let that sit. "It was not. So I healed."

"In hiding." His voice came out flat and cold. "You healed in hiding and did not find a way to tell me you were alive."

"I tried twice. Through channels I trusted. Neither attempt arrived." I held his eyes. "By the time I understood that, I had been a ghost long enough that ghosts do not simply walk back through doors. You cannot reappear and expect the world to arrange itself around your return."

He pressed his mouth together. "I buried you." His voice went low. Personal. The anger still there but underneath it now, wrapped around something else. "I sat in this house and I arranged myself back into something functional and I held the space your death left and I decided to carry it quietly because that was what I did." He released the back of the chair. "And you were in a cabin."

"Yes. I know."

"And you sent nothing."

I held his eyes and I did not apologize for being alive and I did not apologize for surviving but I owed him the truth of the fear and I was going to give it to him plainly.

"I was afraid. Of what it would look like to you. Of what silence of that length would mean by the time I ended it. I had been concealing what I am my entire life and then suddenly people knew and Victor knew and I did not know how far the knowing had spread." I stopped. "Fear held me there longer than anything physical did. Being alone for that long makes you afraid of things you would not be afraid of if someone was beside you."

The room was very quiet.

He stood without moving and I watched him do the thing he did with difficult information, the going still and internal, the turning it over slowly, and I waited because Corvin could not be rushed through the turning.

I reached across the space between us.

My hand out, palm up. Not demanding. Not reaching. Just making it possible.

His eyes went to my hand for a long moment.

Then his hand came down and closed around mine.

He did not pull me toward him. He did not speak. He just held on and his grip was tight in a way that cost him something to admit, and I felt the tight of it in my chest, the thing that was not forgiveness yet and was not an ending of anything sitting in this room, but was something real.

I held on too.

Then his other hand came to my chin, just his fingertips, tilting my face up toward his, and he held me there and his voice when it came was quiet and direct.

"Why did you place Cole here?" He held my face carefully. "Before you knew me. Before any of this existed between us. You came to this pack and you made sure he was in my household and you had reasons for that I have not heard yet."

His thumb moved once against my chin.

"Tell me the rest of it, Freya."

His eyes held mine.

And I knew then that the hardest part of this conversation had not yet begun.

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