Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 102: Tyran’s Term

~RYLAND’S POV~

I stood outside the door for a long time before I opened it.

Not because I was afraid of what was on the other side. I’d faced things considerably more immediately dangerous over the past months and I’d learned to go through doors without hesitation when the situation required it. This was different. This was my father’s door. The man I’d spent my entire adult life trying to be a corrected version of was on the other side of it, with a supernatural entity occupying the space his worst self had left open, asking for terms.

I put my hand on the door and I stood there and I thought about the last real conversation we’d had, not the trial, the trial was formal, that didn’t count, the last actual conversation. I’d been twenty-three. He’d told me that strength required the willingness to make hard decisions without sentiment. I’d thought at the time that he was right. I’d spent the subsequent years discovering the specific ways that belief had distorted everything he’d ever done with authority.

I opened the door.

—

The room was dim and smelled like iron and salt. Tyran was sitting on the floor, not in the corner where the guards had consistently reported finding him, not in the staring-at-walls posture that Mira had described. On the floor near the centre of the room, back straight, hands on his knees, in a posture that looked less like defeat and more like someone who had done a long piece of work and had arrived somewhere and was sitting with the arrival.

The purple-red eyes were still there. But dimmed. The saturation had lowered noticeably since the initial report, the the vivid wrong colour still present, but receding, like something that had been burning at full intensity and had come down to coals.

The Dark Alpha entity was quiet. Maybe resting. Maybe waiting for whatever came next.

I stayed near the door. I didn’t sit down.

"You want to make a deal," I said.

He looked up at me. My father’s face, with the wrong eyes, and under the wrong eyes something that was recognisably and specifically him, more recognisably him, I realised, than he’d seemed in the years before the trial. Like whatever the entity had consumed had been the layer between him and the person he actually was.

"I want to make a correction," he said.

His voice was his voice. Not the stretched, performed version it had been through most of the preceding months, the voice the Dark Alpha used when it was occupying him fully. This was his actual voice. Tired. Old. Carrying weight in a way that had nothing to do with performance.

"You know what you did," I said.

"I know what I did," he said. "To her. To you. To the boy you’re trying to bring back." A pause. "To the twenty-three years before any of that, which I don’t need to list because you lived every one of them."

I said nothing.

"I have been sitting in this room for weeks with something inside me that feeds on exactly what I am," he said. "On the guilt and the ambition and the fear. The particular mixture that I have apparently been producing in significant quantities for most of my adult life." He looked at his own hands. "And the remarkable thing about that experience is that you run out of fuel eventually. It’s not infinite. Whatever you’re made of, there’s a limit to how much of it can be consumed before there’s nothing left for it to eat."

"And now you’re empty," I said.

"I’m empty," he confirmed. "Which means I can think clearly for the first time in, I don’t know how long. Years, probably. Longer than I want to admit." He looked up at me. "And when I think clearly, what I see clearly is what I cost this family. This pack. Her. You." He held my gaze. "It’s quite a specific and complete picture."

I looked at him. At my father sitting on the floor of an iron-locked room with dimming wrong-coloured eyes, telling me the clearest thing he’d ever said to me.

"Eren’s research on the soul exchange," he said. "I know about it. Sound travels through these walls more than the guards realise, and I have had nothing to do for weeks but listen." He paused. "I want to volunteer."

My jaw tightened before I could stop it.

"No," I said.

He looked at me with the patient expression of someone who had expected that response and had prepared for it. "Son..."

"No," I said again. "You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to spend twenty years making decisions that damaged everything around you and then resolve it by dying conveniently. It doesn’t work like that."

"I’m not trying to resolve it," he said. His voice stayed even. "There’s no resolution for what I’ve done. I understand that. The people I’ve hurt don’t un-hurt because I die. Kael doesn’t come back and then everything is fine, he comes back and there’s still everything that was wrong before, and I’m just not there to answer for it anymore." He looked at me directly. "I’m not offering this as redemption. I’m offering it as the most useful thing I can do with what’s left of me, given what I’ve spent the rest of it on."

"The most useful..." I started.

"A soul that goes freely," he said. "That’s the requirement. I’ve been listening. The exchange requires a willing soul, not coerced, not desperate, genuinely willing. I am, with complete clarity and for the first time in years, willing." He paused. "And I am the person who put everyone in the situation that requires it. That seems relevant."

"You’re telling me you want to die so Kael can come back," I said.

"I’m telling you I want to do the only thing that’s currently available to me that isn’t sitting in this room waiting for whatever comes next," he said. "The entity in me is starving and I am going to run out of the capacity to keep it at bay eventually. What I am offering you is a window."

I looked at the floor.

I looked at my father sitting on it.

The argument I’d been building died somewhere between my chest and my mouth because he was right about the window. The entity was going to find something to feed on eventually, or Tyran was going to give out entirely, and either outcome was a different kind of terrible. I knew that. I’d known it since Mira’s report. I just hadn’t wanted to have this conversation yet.

"You understand what it actually means," I said. "Not just the abstract version. What goes into the in-between in exchange for Kael."

"I’m not an idiot," he said. "A soul goes into the in-between in exchange for Kael’s coming out. The balance the Goddess maintains gets satisfied. I go in and I stay there, and whether that’s permanent or whether there’s something that comes after that is..." He paused. "Not my call, I suppose." He met my eyes. "I put myself in this. I put all of you in it. Kael went into the in-between protecting Lyra, who I spent months trying to destroy. Let me be the one who puts it right."

I stared at him for a long time.

My father. The man who had run Silverclaw with the specific brand of authority that had shaped everything about how I’d learned to lead, shaped it largely through the process of my deciding at every turn to do it differently. Who had tried to have Lyra killed. Who had sat in this room for months being hollowed out by something that found his accumulated cruelty and ambition an adequate food source.

Who was now sitting on the floor, clear-eyed and tired, asking to trade his life for the man who had died protecting a woman he’d spent months trying to destroy.

"The decision isn’t mine," I said finally.

"I know," he said. "Tell her."

—

I came out of the room and leaned against the wall in the corridor.

Cade was there. He’d been waiting, which I’d expected. He had the particular quality he wore when he’d decided the right thing was to be present without requiring anything.

"Well?" he said.

I ran a hand through my hair. "He means it," I said. "He genuinely means it." I looked at the closed door. "He’s not performing it. He’s not making a calculation. He means it the way someone means something when they’ve run out of everything else and the only thing left is the true thing."

Cade was quiet for a moment. "Does that change anything?"

I stared at the floor. At the particular texture of the stone in this corridor that I’d walked a thousand times. "I don’t know if I can let him."

A pause.

"It’s not your call anymore," Cade said. Very quietly. "It’s Lyra’s."