MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

AMARIS

The summons came after dinner.

Not a knock on my door. Not Corvin appearing in a corridor. A message, carried by a staff girl who would not meet my eyes, that the Alpha requested the Luna in his study at eight.

Requested. The Luna. In his study.

I read the note twice and set it down on my vanity and stared at the woman in the mirror, and the woman in the mirror stared back with the face of someone who had been living on borrowed hours all week and had just been handed an invoice.

Well, I told her. We had a good run. Three whole days.

She did not laugh. She never laughs at my jokes. Rude.

I did not change my dress. I thought about it — stood in front of the wardrobe for a full minute running the calculation, formal armor versus deliberate casualness — and then I closed the wardrobe. There was no outfit for whatever this was. Pretending there might be felt like one lie too many in a week already sagging under the weight of them.

I walked to the study the long way.

Past the kitchen, where Mrs. Caroline’s pots were being put away for the night. Past the window where the training yard sat empty and blue in the dusk. Past Nia’s door, closed, the light still on underneath it. I collected all of it on the way, every ordinary sight, the way you run your thumb over a coin before you spend it.

I knocked.

"Come in."

The study was warm. Fire lit. Corvin was not behind his desk — that was the first thing I registered, and it registered loudly. The desk was where he sat when he was being the Alpha. He was in one of the two chairs by the fire, and the second chair was angled toward his, and there was a glass of wine on the small table beside it.

Poured. Waiting.

The wine is a trap, my brain announced. Everything is a trap. The chair is a trap. The fire is a trap.

The fire was not a trap. It was just a fire. But my brain and I have been through a lot together this week and I let her have her moment.

"Sit," he murmured.

I sat. I did not touch the wine. He noticed that I did not touch the wine, and something at the corner of his mouth moved — not a smile, an acknowledgment.

He watched the fire for a while.

I have learned things in six months of being married to a man I did not choose. One of them is that Corvin’s silences are not empty. They are work rooms. Something is always being built in them, and interrupting the construction gets you nothing but a colder version of whatever was coming. So I sat, and held my hands still in my lap, and waited, and hated every second of it with a purity I usually reserve for cardio.

"I told you that you were a vessel," he began.

The fire cracked into the pause.

"At my own table. In front of staff. I delivered it the way I would price livestock, and I watched your face while I did it, and your face did not move, and I remember respecting that and hating myself for the respect." He turned his head from the fire and his eyes found mine.

"I have commanded wolves for thirty years, Amaris. I know cruelty as a tool. I have used it on enemies, and I stand behind every one of those uses." His jaw shifted.

"You were not an enemy. You were a girl who had been traded across a border, standing in a strange house, and I made myself the coldest thing in it. That was not strategy. That was cowardice wearing strategy’s coat."

Say something. Anything. He just called himself a coward. Alpha Corvin. You are witnessing history and your mouth is just sitting there.

"Why," I managed.

"Because Freya had been dead a year and grief had made the shape of caring unbearable to me, and you arrived carrying the one thing I could not afford to feel again." He delivered it flat, the way a man reads his own charges aloud. "So I priced you like cattle before you could become a person to me. It worked for about a month."

I held the arm of the chair and stayed quiet, because there was nothing in my inventory for this.

"That is the first thing." He rose, crossed to the fire, set his forearm along the mantel. The light moved on his face and made him older and younger at once. "The second is Freya."

I went still.

"You sat in this house while a first order witch lived down the corridor from you. You caught her wrist in my kitchen when she moved to slap a cook, which—" something dry crossed his face, "—was reported to me in remarkable detail. She came to your room the night of the siege. You knew pieces before I gave the household the whole." His eyes came back to me. "So you deserve the piece I did not give at that table."

He let the fire fill a moment.

His hand closed slowly on the edge of the mantel. "I have spent three days deciding what to do with a woman who hid a sibling inside my own walls, and the honest answer is that I still love her past the edge of my own judgment, and I banished the brother while the sister sleeps in the east wing, and I do not know yet whether that was justice or just the only cruelty I had left that would not cost me her."

The room sat with that. I sat with that. The fire had opinions and kept them to itself.

"Why are you telling me this," I whispered. "Me. Not Rowan. Not Ryker."

"Because they are my sons and they need me certain." He turned from the mantel to face me fully. "You are my wife, and you have watched me be certain for months, and certainty is the costume. You are the only person in this house who met me at my cruelest and is still in the room. There is a kind of honesty that is only possible with a witness like that."

He crossed back and sat, closer than before, elbows on his knees. This near, in the firelight, I could see everything his title usually paid to keep hidden — the exhaustion, the grief, and something else that had been surfacing for weeks in glances I had catalogued and refused to file.

"Months," he murmured. "Married in front of two thousand wolves. Blood ceremony, rings, a shared name. And I have never once touched you as a husband. I made our bed a border and called it mercy, and it was punishment — for both of us — for a crime neither of us committed."

My pulse relocated to my throat.

"Corvin—"

"Let me finish." Quiet. Not a command. Almost a request, which from him was its own small earthquake. "I am done pricing things I am afraid of. So I am going to ask you a question, plainly, and you may answer it any way you choose, and nothing about your place in this house changes with your answer. You have my word before the question is even out."

He reached across the space between the chairs and took my hand. Deliberate. Warm. His thumb settled over my knuckles the way you hold something you have finally admitted is breakable.

"Amaris." His eyes held mine and did not blink. "Do you want to properly be my wife tonight?"

The fire cracked.

My mouth opened.

Nothing in my entire catalogue of wit came out.