Chapter 183: HOLD ME BACK

RYKER

I was moving before the chair hit the floor.

My arm went across Rowan’s chest a half second before he cleared the table and I planted both feet and used my full weight because Rowan had stopped thinking and a Rowan who had stopped thinking was not a small problem. I had eight inches of reach on Cole and Rowan had twenty years of controlled fury that had just found somewhere to go and none of that was going to end well for anyone in this room if I did not stay exactly where I was.

"Rowan."

"Get out of my way."

"No."

He pushed against my arm. I did not move. We had done versions of this our whole lives, him pulling me back from something, me pulling him back from something else, and neither of us had ever loved it and neither of us had ever stopped because it was the only system we had and it had worked so far.

"Rowan." I kept my voice level. "Stop."

"He knew." His jaw was tight enough to crack something. "He sat at my table for four years and he knew."

"I am aware."

"He knew while she was—"

"I am aware of what he knew," I said. "I have been aware of it longer than you have. Move back."

He pushed against my arm again. Harder. I held it.

Here is the part I was not going to say out loud: I understood Cole. Not the four years of silence, not what he had done with the information. That part I was still working through. But the bond. The pull of it. The way it did not ask whether the timing was good or whether the woman it assigned you made sense for your life. The way it just showed up and rewrote everything without consulting anyone.

I had spent months walking past a door I was not supposed to want to open and opening it anyway. I had kissed my father’s mate in the rain and then had the audacity to stand here with my arm across my brother’s chest acting like I had the moral authority to hold him back from a man whose only crime was the same one I had committed in a different direction.

I did not think about that too loudly.

"You don’t get to hit him for something the bond did," I said instead. I meant it. Hating that I meant it did not change anything.

Rowan turned his head and looked at me.

Not calm. Nothing about his face was calm. The calculation that lived there every other hour of every other day was completely gone and what was underneath it was something I had not seen on my brother’s face in years. Hurt. Actual hurt. Not processed or filed or converted into something more useful. Just the raw version of it sitting on his face where anyone could see it.

That was the part that cost me something.

Rowan did not let hurt show. He was not choosing to let it now. It was just there.

"Do you hear yourself," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"You’re defending him."

"I’m holding you back from something that cannot be undone. That’s different."

He looked at me for another long second and then his eyes moved past me to Cole. Cole had not moved from the desk. Hands flat on the surface. Not looking at me. Not looking at Rowan. Looking at the middle distance between them the way a man looked when he had said everything he had to say and was waiting to find out what it cost him.

Nia had moved herself to the far side of the room. Arms around herself, staring at nothing. I noted that and filed it. There was a separate conversation there for a separate time.

Amaris was still in her chair.

She was watching my arm across Rowan’s chest and her face had the quality it got when she was adding something up. Not the armor version. Not the commentary. The underneath version of Amaris that was sharp and quiet and got there before anyone in the room expected it to.

I could not look at her for long. Not because I could not bear it. Because there were only so many things I could hold at once and Rowan’s full weight against my arm was using most of my available capacity.

Rowan stopped pushing.

He stepped back. One step. He pulled the front of his shirt flat with one hand, the reflexive gesture he made when he was putting himself back together, and he did not look at Cole and he did not look at me and he did not say anything.

Cole exhaled.

I dropped my arm.

The study went quiet. The specific quiet that came after something had almost happened and hadn’t.

I looked around the room. Nia against the far wall. Amaris in her chair. Cole at the desk with his jaw tight and his hands still flat on the surface. Rowan with his back to most of it now, one hand on the chair he had stood up from, not sitting back down.

I thought about what I knew that none of them were focusing on yet.

Victor had known exactly when to come. He had known exactly how many sentinels we ran on the north gate. He had known Corvin would be gone, had known my father’s route and his timeline to the hour. He had known the pack’s defensive formations, the response protocols, where Rowan would stand on the wall.

Victor had trained us. But that alone did not account for current operational detail. You could train someone and still not know the living internal state of their pack from inside.

Unless someone on the inside had been telling you.

Not deliberately. Not knowing they were telling you.

I looked at Cole.

His hands were still flat on the desk.

He was not looking at me. He had not been looking at me since Rowan stepped back. He was looking at his own hands on the desk surface, and his face had moved through something in the last thirty seconds that I had been watching Rowan and missed.

I looked at his face now.

He already knew.

Whatever I had just worked out standing in the middle of this room, Cole had been sitting with it. That was what that expression was. Not guilt about Rowan. Not guilt about Lila. The specific expression of a man who had just understood the full shape of what he had been used for and was deciding whether he was going to be able to live with it.

He had not been Lila’s secret.

He had been her source.

And he had not known it.

I looked at him and he finally looked up and our eyes met and I did not say anything and he did not say anything and we both understood that the conversation we needed to have was not happening in this room.

Rowan turned around.

He looked at Cole for a long moment. Not with the calculation back. Not with the cold version of himself he used in pack meetings. With something that was done calculating for the night and was not interested in being managed into anything useful.

He picked up the chair.

Set it back upright. Slowly. The deliberateness of it was worse than if he had thrown it.

Then he walked to the door and opened it and walked through it and did not slam it behind him. He pulled it shut. Quiet. Controlled. The way he did everything when what was underneath it was the opposite of controlled.

His footsteps went down the corridor.

Then nothing.

I stood in the room with Cole’s hands still flat on the desk and Nia against the far wall and Amaris in her chair and the space where Rowan had been standing, and I thought about going after him.

I didn’t.

Some things you let a man walk away to be alone with. Some things you chased and some things you let run because chasing them just pushed them further and I had known Rowan long enough to know which one this was.

I looked at Cole.

Cole looked at the door.

"Give him the night," I said.

Cole said nothing.

I pulled the study door open.