MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

ROWAN

Corvin called the meeting for seven in the evening and did not explain what it was about.

He did not need to. The fact that he was calling it at all — the day after he came home to a pack that had nearly burned without him, the day after four hours behind a closed door with Freya, after which he had come out with the face of a man who had put down something heavy and was not sure he felt lighter for it — told me enough. I had known my father my whole life. When Corvin gathered the family without explanation, the explanation was something he needed to control the delivery of.

I was in the dining room first.

I am always in the room first. The habit formed before I was old enough to choose it and it has never left me. A room you enter first is a room you have read before anyone else starts performing in it. I took the chair to the right of the head of the table and set my hands flat on the wood and waited.

Amaris came in two minutes later.

She read the room in one sweep. Read my face in the sweep after that. Then she crossed to the chair beside mine, sat down, and slid her hand into mine under the table without a word.

She had gotten very good at knowing when I did not need words. She had gotten good at a great many things about me, and I had not told her that yet, and I added it to the list of things I had not told her yet, which was getting long enough to need a second page.

I closed my hand around hers.

Nia came in and took the seat across from us. The outer corners of her eyes were faintly red in a way she was hoping nobody would notice. I noticed. I kept it to myself. There is a kind of courtesy that consists entirely of pretending not to see, and Nia had earned it several times over this week.

Ryker came in and did not sit.

He went to the far end of the room and put his back against the wall and crossed his arms, the position he took in every room where something was about to happen — close enough to reach anyone, far enough to watch everyone. His eyes found mine. Mine found his. Something passed between us that has never once needed language.

Cole came in last.

He had the face of a man who had slept badly, knew exactly why, and had made his peace with the reason. He had vanished half the night and come back before dawn and not one of us had asked him where, which was its own held question sitting in the room. He did not take his usual chair. He took the one at the end of the table, put both hands flat on the surface, and stared at the middle distance between the candlesticks.

I filed that. Cole choosing distance. Cole positioning himself where everyone could see his hands.

Then my father came in and closed the door.

The room did the thing rooms do when Corvin enters them. It got quieter. Not because he asked for it. He simply occupies an amount of space that has nothing to do with his body, and everything else in the room adjusts around it.

He did not sit either. He stood at the head of the table with his hands behind his back and swept his eyes over all of us once, slowly, and I watched him decide where to begin.

Then he began.

He talked about Freya.

He told it evenly, in the flat measured register he used when he was being the Alpha instead of the man, the register that reports instead of feels. What she is. What she has been the entire time she has lived under this roof. What she was doing during the year this pack held a funeral for her. The fire that was real. The healing that happened in hiding. The two messages that never arrived. The confirmation he had gathered himself on the road home.

I listened and did the arithmetic beside the words the way I always do.

A first order witch. Inside our walls. The same witch Victor stood at our gate demanding by name three days ago. Which meant Victor’s intelligence was better than ours about our own household, which was a problem with a source, and problems with sources have names, and I already knew at least one of them and had thrown him out of my study for it.

Amaris’s fingers shifted in mine. She was doing her own arithmetic. Hers is faster than people expect.

Then my father paused.

"Cole."

He pronounced it the way you pronounce a name when you are about to attach something significant to it and need the person paying attention before you do.

Cole’s eyes came up from the candlesticks.

"Freya is your half sister," my father told him. "By blood. You share a father. A Gravemoon-born man who left this pack before either of you existed."

The room went quiet in a way that was different from the quiet it had already been.

Amaris’s hand clamped around mine.

I did not turn toward Cole. I kept my eyes on my father and took in the rest of it — the bloodline, the mother’s deathbed confession, the fact that Freya had known and had carried it alone and had engineered Cole’s place in this household to stand near a brother who did not know she existed — and I kept my face arranged, because half the room was watching my face right now, and a man who has held the Alpha’s seat even for a week does not get to react before he has calculated what the reaction will cost.

But underneath the arrangement I was moving pieces.

Cole. Lila’s fated mate. Freya’s blood. The one man in this house connected by bond or blood to every single player on the board — the witch Victor wants, the woman who betrayed me, and the family he served while lying to it.

Either the moon goddess had a plan.

Or somebody else did.

Across the table Cole had not moved. His hands were still flat on the wood. But his face had gone through something and landed somewhere pale, and his voice, when it finally came out, came out scraped down to almost nothing.

"Say that again."

My father held his eyes.

Amaris’s hand was very tight in mine. I held it back just as tight and watched my father’s jaw set, and I understood that whatever he said next was the actual reason he had called us all into this room.

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