Chapter 185: TWENTY FOUR HOURS LATE

CORVIN

I sat in the car for three seconds before I got out.

Not because I was afraid of what was on the other side of that door. Fear and I had not had a meaningful relationship since my twenties. I sat because I was doing the thing I had done since I was nineteen years old and first accepted this title, which was finding my face before I let the pack see it, and tonight that was taking considerably longer than it usually did.

I was tired in a way the drive had not caused and the drive was not going to fix.

I got out.

Marco was standing at the bottom of the steps.

I knew what that meant before he opened his mouth. Marco did not meet cars. Marco ran the pack house and sent people to meet cars and the fact that he was standing here himself in the dark instead of anywhere else in the building told me that whatever had happened at that wall today was the kind of news he did not trust anyone else to deliver to me with the right shape on it.

"Walk with me," I clipped, and started moving.

He walked. He reported. Victor at the gate, thirty men, two hours, the ultimatum. Rowan holding the wall alone. Ryker arriving with time to spare. Victor walking back into the trees with his men behind him.

I listened and kept my pace even and my hands loose at my sides.

What I was thinking about was everything that could have happened today that did not. The pack house behind me was still standing. My sons were alive. Victor walked away. I could work with all of that. I had been working with worse for thirty years.

My eyes went to the third window.

East wing. Second floor.

She was there.

Freya had the window cracked open and her gaze on the drive and when it found mine something in my chest did what it always did, the ache and the fury arriving together, inseparable, unreasonable, completely uninterested in any of the decisions I had made about how I was going to handle this.

I was furious at her.

I had come back from a village two days east of here with a witch’s confirmation sitting in my chest and fury in my throat I had not been able to speak yet, because I was not a man who spoke before he was ready and I had not been ready. I was still not ready. She had stood across from me a decade ago and told me she was a beta female with a weak wolf and I had believed her because she delivered it without blinking and because I was already past the point of thinking clearly about her by the time she finished. She had lived in my house and in my bed and in my chest for ten years and she had kept this from me the entire time and I was going to need considerably more than three seconds in a car before I could walk into a room with her without overturning something heavy.

And she was still at that window.

And the ache was still the ache.

I hated it.

"My sons," I murmured.

"Both here." Marco matched my pace. "Rowan handled the wall well."

"Amaris."

"Inside. Safe the whole time."

I nodded and kept moving. I had decided in the car, in those three seconds, that I would see Rowan and Ryker first. Amaris after. And after both of those things I would go to Freya and have the conversation that had been sitting in the walls of this pack house for three days, quiet and patient, waiting for me to be ready.

That had been the plan.

Marco held the front door.

I walked into the pack house and the smell of it hit me the way home always did after time away, stone and wood and the settled warmth of a building full of wolves, and underneath that something else, something with an edge I did not immediately name and did not immediately welcome.

I turned toward the staircase.

Three sets of footsteps coming down together.

I turned the corner and stopped.

Amaris was on the stairs. Ryker on her left, Rowan on her right, all three of them moving together and stopping the moment they saw me. The entrance hall went very quiet.

I took her in.

Navy dress. Hair up. Perfume working very hard. And underneath the perfume, underneath all of it, the specific and unmistakable fact that my mate had spent three days in a house with my sons and something had shifted between them in a direction I had not sanctioned and had not been present to stop.

My chest tightened. That part had nothing to do with Freya.

Ryker held my gaze and did not flinch. His jaw was set, his hands were loose, and his expression had the quality it took on when he had made a decision and closed the door on discussing it.

Rowan’s jaw moved once. He held his ground on Amaris’s right with his shoulders squared and his face carefully arranged and I knew my son well enough to know what that careful arrangement cost him.

Amaris did not speak.

I had stood across from this woman at a dining table six months ago and told her she was nothing more than a vessel for an heir and I had meant it because the alternative was admitting that the bond had already gotten its hands into me by then and I was not willing to admit that to anyone, least of all myself. Six months ago. People shifted in six months. Apparently they shifted considerably in three days.

I opened my mouth.

A door opened to my right.

Freya came through it.

She stopped when she saw me. Her eyes went to Amaris, to Ryker, to Rowan, and then came back to mine and held there.

I had not planned for this. I had planned to do things in a specific order and none of that order was available to me now because Freya was three feet to my right and my sons were on the staircase flanking my mate and the entrance hall was too small for everything currently occupying it.

She did not retreat. Freya never retreated. It was one of the many things about her that had always driven me past reason in two different directions at once.

I held her eyes.

She held mine.

Thirty years of knowing how to keep my face still in front of the pack.

It failed me completely.