MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

ROWAN

Three weeks.

Twenty-one days since Cole walked out the boundary line with Ryker’s envelope in his hand, and the pack house has settled into something that is not quite normal but is at least functional, and I have decided to count functional as a victory. Actual normal is on back order. I do not have the bandwidth to wait for it.

I am at my desk at seven in the morning with Marco’s weekly report in front of me and a coffee that has gone cold because I forgot it existed, and this is what being acting Alpha looks like from the inside. Nobody tells you that part. When I was younger and thought I wanted this, I imagined decisions. Big rooms, big moments, a pack turning on the weight of what I chose. Nobody mentioned the cold coffee and the margin notes and the eleven problems stacked on a desk like firewood, each one waiting its turn to burn.

The north wall repairs are almost finished.

Marco has the numbers laid out in the report — materials, labor, projected completion — all of it in his handwriting, which has not changed since I was twelve years old. I know this because at twelve I used to slip into my father’s study and read the Beta reports when no one was watching. I believed, at twelve, that knowing things other people did not know was the same as being prepared.

I was not wrong, exactly.

I had just not priced what the knowing costs.

I read the wall section. Materials on schedule. Labor holding. Completion projected Friday. I move on.

Jason.

Jason is still in the dungeon and healing slower than our medic expected. She has flagged it twice. I have noted it twice. I have not yet decided what to do about it, because Victor’s son in my dungeon is a variable with no clean answer attached to it — too valuable to release, too dangerous to keep, too injured to move, and every week he stays he grows roots into this house.

And he is talking.

Not to himself. To the guards. The rotation reports through Marco are consistent on this. He learns their names. He asks after their families. He remembers the answers and asks again the following week, follows up, builds continuity. A prisoner making himself a person. A person is harder to leave in a cell. A person is harder to watch. A person, given enough weeks, acquires a favorite guard, and a favorite guard is a door that does not know it is a door yet.

His father would be proud. That is exactly the problem.

I underline the line in the report.

I write in the margin: Rotate the guard rotation. No one sits with him longer than a single shift two days running.

I will think harder about Jason later, when I have more information and less cold coffee. I add him to the stack of firewood.

Freya is still in the east wing.

She has been there since the confrontation with my father, and she has caused no trouble, and she has asked for nothing beyond what she needs, and she moves through this house like a woman being very deliberate about occupying exactly the space she has been allowed and not one inch past its border. I pass her in corridors. She nods. I nod. Two people performing civility across a canyon of things unsaid.

I do not know what to do with Freya.

A first order witch. My father’s mate. Cole’s blood. The person Victor stood at our gate and demanded by name. Any one of those facts would be a full week of thinking. All four of them live down the hall.

I have put Freya in a drawer and closed the drawer. I will open it when I have solved the other eleven problems on this desk. The drawer is aware it is being ignored. Drawers like that always are.

My phone has forty-three unread messages from Lila.

I know the number without opening it, because I checked this morning the way a man checks a barometer. Forty-one at dawn yesterday. Thirty-eight the day before. Thirty-five before that. The trajectory is consistent, climbing, and every message I do not answer adds pressure to the line.

I have not answered one.

I am not going to answer one.

I do not know yet, precisely, what I am going to do about Lila. The full shape of it is still assembling. But I know this much: answering is not part of it. And I know she knows I am reading them. Lila does not operate on hope — hope is for people who lack information, and Lila has never once permitted herself to lack information. She operates on data. So every day, my silence hands her one clean data point, the same one, over and over.

He reads. He does not reply.

Let her chew it. A woman like Lila metabolizes silence into fury, and fury makes even careful people careless, and careless is the only version of Lila that has ever made a mistake. I cannot beat the careful version. Nobody has. So I am starving her into the other one, one unanswered message at a time, forty-three and climbing.

It is the only conversation we are having. I intend to win it.

I pick up the coffee and drink it cold, which is its own small penance, and I go back to the wall numbers.

The figures have not changed since I read them ten minutes ago. Materials. Labor. Friday. My eyes run the columns and collect nothing, because my mind is not on the wall.

Outside my study window the grounds are quiet with early morning. The training yard is empty. The lamps along the paths are still burning against the last of the dark, and at the far edge of everything the north wall stands rebuilt and solid, taller in its repaired sections than it ever was before Victor came, and it should comfort me.

It does not comfort me.

Because at the far east corner of these same grounds, under them, in a cell with good food and rotating company, Jason Hale is learning the name of every man who opens his door. Asking after daughters. Remembering birthdays. Building, brick by patient brick, a wall of his own — and his kind of wall does not show up in Marco’s reports with materials and labor and a completion date.

I am thinking about that more than the numbers.

I write another note in the margin.

I pick up the next page of the report.

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