Chapter 181: THE FIVE

COLE

I knocked on the study door and did not wait for an answer. It was noon and we all had woken up burnt out from yesterday’s event.

She looked at my face and filed whatever she saw there without commenting on it and took the chair by the window and tucked her leg under her. Nia came in behind her. She sat beside Amaris and finally looked at me, the first time since I had come back.

I had told her before I went to the infirmary. Not everything. Just: I am going to tell Rowan today. I need you there.

She had not asked what I was going to tell him. She had looked at me for a long moment and then said okay and that was the whole of it.

I pulled out the chair across from him and did not sit in it. I put my hands on the back of it instead and looked at him.

Twenty years. I kept thinking that. Twenty years I had been in this man’s life and I had spent four of them carrying something that was going to change the shape of every year that came before it once it was out in the open. There was no version of this that landed clean. I had known that for a long time and I had come anyway because the alternative was carrying it until it finished what it had already started.

"I have been sleeping with Lila," I blurted out because I know that there is no easy way to put it.

The room went quiet.

Rowan did not move. He was looking at me the way he looked at things that required all of him, full attention, the kind that did not leave space for reaction yet because there was still incoming information that needed to land somewhere and be placed correctly.

"How long," he said.

"Four years."

I heard Amaris pull in a breath through her nose.

"The bond formed the night I met her," I said. "Before you. Before she was anything to any of us. I did not understand what it was. She never named it. She came when she wanted me and left when she didn’t and I could not walk away and I spent a year believing the fault was mine before I understood it wasn’t a choice. It was never a choice." I held his gaze. "She is my fated mate. That is what it was. That is what it has been for four years."

Ryker’s jaw moved once.

Nia was looking at the table.

Amaris had her hands in her lap and her eyes on nothing.

Rowan unfolded his arms.

He did not say anything immediately. He looked at the desk between us and I watched him do the thing he always did with large information — going quiet and internal and sorting it, placing each piece where it belonged before saying anything out loud. It lasted four seconds and those four seconds were the longest ones I had sat through in recent memory.

Then he looked up at me.

"You knew," he said. "Every time I talked about her. Every time I came to you for your opinion. Every conversation, every dinner, every time I sat across from you and told you what I was thinking about her and you sat there and listened." He did not raise his voice. "You knew."

"Yes."

"You let me get engaged to her."

"Yes."

He took one step around the desk toward me. Not fast. Deliberate. The way Rowan moved when he had decided something and the decision had been made cleanly and without room to negotiate.

"You let me call you my friend," he said.

"Rowan—"

"Do not say my name right now." Quiet. Each word placed. "You sat at my table for four years. You looked me in the eyes at my table and you knew what she was to you and you knew what she was doing and you said nothing."

He was closer now. Not quite arm’s length.

"I know," I said.

"You knew," he said again, "while she was in my bed."

His hands had been loose at his sides and they were still loose and I knew what deliberate looseness looked like on Rowan and it was not the same as calm. It was the thing before calm decided not to be enough.

He took another step.

Ryker pushed off the wall. "Rowan."

"Don’t." Rowan’s eyes stayed on mine. "Don’t tell me to stay where I am. I am going to stay where I am." He was arm’s length away now. Maybe less. "I am going to stay very still and Cole is going to explain to me what reason exists for him to continue being in this house after today."

I did not have an answer for that.

He was right and he knew he was right and I knew he was right and there was nothing I was going to say that changed the shape of four years sitting between us.

He reached for the chair.

His hand closed around the back of it slowly and I watched his knuckles go white at the grip and I watched him hold it and I did not move and Ryker was three steps off the wall already and Amaris had her hands pressed together in her lap and the whole room was balanced on the edge of whatever came next.

Then Nia stood up.

Her chair pushed back and she stood and her voice cut across the room like something thrown. Not loud. But with the kind of weight behind it that stopped everything mid-motion.

"Rowan."

He did not look at her immediately. He held the chair and held my gaze for another two seconds like he was deciding whether to hear her.

"There is more," Nia said. "There is more you need to hear before you do anything."

His fingers moved on the chair back. Tightened once. Then released.

He turned to look at Nia.

She was standing with her hands at her sides and her chin up and there was something on her face that was not fear and was not confidence but sat somewhere between them, the expression of someone who had been dreading this moment and was now inside it and had decided the only thing left to do was finish it.

Rowan looked at her for a long moment.

The study was completely silent.

Then one word came out of him requiring nothing after it.

"Speak," he said.