RYKER

One year ago.

My mother sat at her vanity brushing out her hair, and I watched her in the mirror, and I knew before she opened her mouth that something was wrong because she had brushed the same long section three times without noticing.

"Sit with me, Ryker."

I sat on the edge of her bed. She set the silver brush down and folded her hands in her lap and looked at her own reflection for a long moment before she found my eyes in the glass.

"Your father is seeing someone."

The words came out steady. That was the worst part of it. She had practiced them in her own head enough times that they had stopped breaking on the way out of her mouth.

"Her name is Freya. She came to the pack three months ago and she has not left, and your father looks at her the way he has not once looked at me in twenty-two years of being his wife."

I knew all of this, but I let her speak. Knowing that she needed somewhere to vent all that anger.

Her jaw trembled and she pressed it flat. "I have given this pack everything I have. I have given that man everything. My youth. My body. My pups. My whole life poured into a marriage I thought was sacred, and he sits across the table from me at dinner every night with his mind already in another woman’s bed."

I was on my feet before I knew I had stood.

"I will challenge him for it."

"Ryker. No." She turned on the velvet stool and caught my wrist with both hands, her grip far tighter than I expected from her.

"Sit down. You cannot beat your father. Not yet. He has thirty years of strength on you, decades of fighting you have not lived through, and you would walk in there proud and you would die on that floor in front of the whole pack. And then what would I have left. Nothing. I would have buried a son to make a point."

"Then what." My voice broke right down the center of it. "I’m supposed to sit here and watch him do this to you. Watch him humiliate you in your own house."

"No." An expression shifted in her face that I did not recognize at the time and would spend the rest of my life wishing I had read correctly.

"You do not beat a man like your father with strength, my love. You cannot reach a man like that with your fists or your fury. He is too hard. He has spent his whole life making himself too hard to touch."

She brought my hand up and pressed it flat between both of hers, against her chest, over the heart that was breaking in real time right in front of me.

"You hurt him where it actually costs him something," she whispered. "You find the one thing in this world he cannot live without, and you take it from him, and you make him stand there and watch you do it."

I thought she meant his pride. His standing. His name in the other packs.

I was nineteen and grieving a marriage that wasn’t mine and I thought she meant the cold things a man like that was supposed to care about.

I kissed her forehead. I told her I would protect her with my life. She smiled up at me and the smile did not reach her eyes, not even close, and I walked out of that room and shut the door softly behind me and did not understand.

Would not understand for a full year.

That she had already chosen the one thing.

That it was us. That it had always been going to be us.

*****

I came back into the boardroom with that memory lodged in my throat like a swallowed stone, and my father was standing on that raised platform calmly telling thirty people that my mother had been a murderer.

I stomped to my feet.

"I will not stand here and watch you desecrate her memory!"

Both sentinels came down on my shoulders at once with hard hands and I threw them off so violently one of them staggered back into the chair behind him and nearly went over it.

"Lay those filthy hands on me one more time," I snarled, rounding on the nearest one, "and I will break every bone in them. I’ll rip them clean off your wrists and feed them to the dogs in the yard and stand there and make you watch them eat."

"Ryker." My father’s voice sliced clean across the room. "Do not cause a scene in here. I have brought you here to tell you everything. The whole truth. For the first time in a year."

"I don’t want to hear one syllable of your shit." My chest was working hard, my breath coming fast and hot. "Now that Freya’s crawled back, now that your whore is sitting right there in the corner of the room, you want to wash your filthy hands of your sin. You want to stand up and rewrite the whole story so that you come out the other end of it clean."

"To what end, Ryker." He did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice and I hated him for it with everything in me, hated the unshakable calm of him, the iron control, the way he stood there solid and untouched while I burned alive in front of him. "Tell me. What could I possibly gain by lying to you now, with all of this already done."

A hand closed firm around my forearm.

Rowan.

"Let’s hear what he has to say," my brother murmured, low and even, meant for me alone.

I turned on him, and the small betrayal of it cut deeper than the sentinels’ hands had. "Not you too."

"I am not agreeing with a word of it." Rowan’s grip stayed steady on my arm. "I’m saying let him tell the lie out loud. Let him say all of it. Then we will know exactly what shape of man we are dealing with and exactly what he wants."

I held my brother’s eyes for a long moment.

Then I looked past him, across the room, at Freya.

She stood off to the side with her arms folded loosely and a small smug curl hidden in the corner of her painted mouth, the unmistakable look of a woman watching a long-promised plan finally click into place around her.

"I am going to have both your heads," I told her, soft, pitched so only the front of the room could catch it. "Yours and his. It is only a matter of time now, and I want you to sit there in your corner and think hard about it while he talks."

The smug little curl flickered and died.

I sat down.