MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

AMARIS

The next evening I was at my window again when Rowan found me.

I have been at this window a lot lately. I am beginning to think it is my processing spot. Something happens in this house and I come stand here until I have figured out what I think about it, or until someone finds me first, whichever wins the race.

Tonight it was a lot of things at once, which is generally how it goes now. Corvin’s confession from the night before was still sitting in my chest, unfiled, next to Freya’s half brother and Cole’s empty chair and the general fact that I had somehow ended up mated into a household where everyone was carrying a secret that turned out to be load-bearing. I had come to the window to think about all of it in an organized fashion.

I had not managed organized. I had managed staring at wet grass.

He did not knock. I heard the door, then his footsteps crossing the room, and then his reflection appeared in the glass behind mine, watching me the way he does when he has been turning something over and has not decided yet whether to say it out loud.

I let him stand there.

Outside the pack grounds were wet from the afternoon rain and the lights along the training yard were coming on one by one as the evening came down, and it was quiet in a way the last several days had not managed to be. No radios. No thirty men at a tree line. No chairs going back from tables. Just rain-soaked grass and lamplight, doing the most boring, most welcome thing in the world.

"Rowan."

"I know."

I turned around.

He was closer than I had realized. His eyes went over my face the way they always do, taking inventory, checking what was there against what I was actually saying out loud. He has done that since the first dining room breakfast — reading the version underneath the version I present — and I have never fully decided how I feel about being that legible to one person.

His hand came up to the side of my face. His thumb moved along my cheekbone.

Then he kissed me.

It was not slow. It was not the careful thing Corvin had brought to this room the night before. This was Rowan, and Rowan does not do careful when something is sitting heavy in him — he does certain, he does deliberate — and right now he was very certain and very deliberate, his hands sliding into my hair, my back finding the wall, and I stopped thinking about the window and the wet grounds and everything this house had been carrying for a week straight.

His mouth moved to my jaw, then my neck, and my hands fisted in his shirt, and I could feel the exact weight of the last seven days pressing against both of us — the vote, the study, Cole’s empty chair — all of it still sitting in the room even now, even like this.

This is the thing that survives everything, I thought. This specific thing between us. It had survived the study and the wall and the vote and the chair at the end of the table that nobody had moved. It had survived all of it, and he was still here, and I was still here, and his mouth was on my throat like he intended to prove both facts personally.

He pulled back enough to catch my eyes. His had gone dark and his hands were still tangled in my hair.

"You stayed," he murmured.

"Of course I stayed."

"I need to hear you say it sometimes." His thumb pressed once against my jaw, grounding, like he was checking I was solid. "Not because I doubt it. Because some days this week, I did."

Something in my chest folded quietly at that. Rowan Grave, who calculated everything, who had stood on a wall and negotiated with a man like Victor without his voice ever shaking once, admitting a doubt out loud, at a window, with his forehead nearly against mine.

That admission cost him something. I understood that the way I understood most things about Rowan — not because he explained it, but because I had learned to read the price on his face when he paid it.

"Then I’ll say it every time you need it." I pulled him back down. "I stayed. I’m staying. You could hand me a written contract and I would sign it in front of witnesses."

That got the smallest exhale out of him, almost a laugh, which for Rowan under this much weight counted as a full comedy set.

"Do not tempt me," he murmured against my mouth. "I would draft it tonight."

"Calculative and passionate. It’s a lot for one man."

"You mated into it."

"I mated into it," I agreed. "Nobody warned me it would come with contracts."

He kissed me again, slower this time, like the confirmation had loosened something in him that certainty alone hadn’t reached, his hands finding the back of my neck, my waist, mapping ground he already knew and returning to it anyway because knowing it did not stop him wanting to confirm it.

The rain outside kept falling on the grounds and the lights kept coming on one by one and none of it mattered nearly as much as the wall at my back and the man in front of me, solid and certain and finally, for one evening, saying the doubt out loud instead of just calculating around it.

I felt his hands slide beneath the hem of my shirt, warm against my skin, and my breath caught, and whatever else this house was carrying could wait until morning.

He lifted me. One arm under me, no warning, and I let out a startled laugh against his mouth as my back left the wall entirely, and he carried me toward the bed with the same certainty he brought to everything, and I decided, somewhere in the crossing of that room, that I was done thinking about window-processing for the night.

Outside, the pack grounds finished going dark.

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