MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 162: SISTERS

AMARIS

One week as Luna.

I kept waiting for that sentence to make sense and it kept failing to.

Nia had her hands in my hair, working through a section near the back, and I was sitting on the edge of my bed watching the wall and running through the past seven days the way you ran your tongue over a sore tooth. Over and over. Learning nothing new except that it still hurt.

Alpha Corvin had not summoned me to his room since that night. He had left for an Alpha trip the following morning, would be back in two days, and the gap he had left behind was either a mercy or a deliberate cruelty and I could not decide which. The pack had settled around me in his absence. I had been doing Luna things with Nia, sitting in meetings, signing things, learning which senior pack members wanted to be looked in the eye and which ones preferred the shelf three inches above your head. I had been very busy and very good at pretending I was not thinking about three separate men at the same time.

Three separate men who had each done something to me that could not be undone.

Corvin had not slept with me. What he had done was enough. My hands still remembered the feel of his headboard.

Rowan had pulled me apart with his mouth and his hands and then been interrupted by a knocked door, and had not once in seven days come back to finish what he started, too buried in acting-Alpha responsibilities to breathe.

And Ryker had told me he was falling for me and I had sent him away and watched him walk out drunk with Cole every evening since.

I was messed up.

That was the clinical assessment. I was messed up and I was Luna and Nia was braiding my hair.

"You’ve been quiet," I said.

"I’m concentrating." Her hands kept moving.

"You’re not. You stopped concentrating about ten minutes ago and started just holding my hair."

A pause. She resumed moving.

"Nia."

She came around and sat on the bed in front of me, cross-legged, her hands in her own lap. She looked at me and then looked at the floor and then looked back up at me.

"I need to tell you something," she said. "And you’re going to be upset and I need you to hear me out before you say anything."

I sat very still. "Okay." freēwēbηovel.c૦m

"When I was taken." She stopped. Started again. "Lila took me. It wasn’t a trip. She had me in her underground for days."

I stared at her. "What."

"I know—"

"Lila." I sat forward. "Lila took you. And kept you underground. And you came back and hugged me and let me hit you on the arm for disappearing and you did not say a single word about this."

"Amaris, please let me—"

"Why." My voice cracked on it. "Why didn’t you tell me. I was here. I was right here the entire time and I was so worried about you and you just—" I pressed my hand over my mouth for a second and then took it away. "Why did you hide it."

Nia’s eyes filled. "Because I was ashamed of how I ended up there."

"Where were you going when it happened."

"I was looking for Cole." She twisted her hands in her lap. "It was the night of Lila’s full moon party. I went looking for him and I found the wrong room." She looked at me directly. "Amaris, Lila was hosting an orgy. A full one. Multiple people, bodies everywhere, and she was right in the middle of it all. I stood in the doorway and I could not move. And then someone saw me standing there and Lila looked straight at me and smiled." She stopped. "That smile. Like she had been waiting for exactly this. And then they grabbed me."

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

"She had people drag me downstairs," Nia continued, her voice steady in the way that meant she had rehearsed this too many times. "Chained me up. Kept me there for days. And the whole time she knew I had seen something I was never supposed to see."

"Cole." I said his name before I fully knew what I was asking. "Where was Cole while all of this was happening."

"He didn’t know." Nia’s jaw tightened. "He wasn’t in that room. He was somewhere else in the house and he had no idea I was there until Lila decided to tell him. That was her play. Once she had what she needed from me she went and told Cole and used him to get me out."

I sat with that. Lila using Cole to clean up her own mess. Lila knowing exactly which tool to reach for.

"What did she need from you," I said.

Nia looked at the floor. "She interrogated me. About you. About what I had seen between you and Ryker and Rowan. She already knew things. She just needed someone on the inside to fill the gaps." Her shoulders curved inward. "And I broke. I’m sorry, Amaris. I held out as long as I could and then I broke and I told her and I have been carrying that every day since you found me."

I crossed back to the bed and sat in front of her and took her face in both hands and made her look at me.

"She had you locked underground," I said. "She had you frightened and alone and isolated and she used that against you. You did not betray me. She took it from you." I held her face until I felt her stop pulling away from it. "There is a difference between breaking under pressure and choosing to hurt someone. You did not choose this."

Her chin trembled.

"And Cole." I let go of her face. "He got you out."

"He did." She pressed her lips together. "But Lila set the terms."

"What terms."

"She let me go on one condition." The words came out flat and careful. "That I stay in place. Report back to her. Tell her what you’re doing, who you’re seeing, what you’re saying." Her eyes met mine. "I said yes because I was chained in a room underground and I needed to get out. And then Cole brought me home and told me to play along and he would protect me. And I have been trying to find a way to tell you ever since."

I stood up from the bed.

I went to the window and put both hands on the sill and breathed. Down below, the pack grounds were quiet and ordinary, someone crossing between buildings with their morning coffee, two sentinels talking by the gate, everything looking exactly like a normal Tuesday in Gravemoon pack.

Lila. Who had attended the mating ceremony in deep green and watched everything fall apart with those bright patient eyes. Who had kept my best friend in a basement and then released her like a piece on a board, positioned exactly where she needed her.

I turned around.

"Cut Cole off," I said.

"Amaris—"

"I know what I’m asking." I crossed back and sat in front of her. "But he told you to stay in place for Lila. Even if he didn’t know what she was doing when it started, he knows now and he is still choosing her. You being close to him puts you in her line of sight."

"I love him." The words came out completely certain. No drama, no apology, just the solid fact of it sitting between us. "I know exactly how that sounds."

"It sounds true," I said. "And I understand being in love with someone you know is complicated. I understand that with a specificity I cannot explain right now."

She looked at me with her wet eyes and almost smiled.

"We need to tell Rowan," I said.

Nia shook her head slowly. "He won’t believe it. She’s been lying to his face for years and he has never caught a single edge of it. She would deny everything, compose herself in thirty seconds flat, and Rowan would stand there choosing to believe the version that didn’t ask him to blow up his own relationship." Her voice was gentle but absolutely certain. "We need something she cannot explain away. Until we have that, we hold it."

I hated that she was right.

She opened her arms and I went into them before I thought about it, both arms around her, her face against my shoulder, mine against her hair, and we held on to each other in the morning light while everything settled around us.

She was shaking. I was too.

"I missed you," I said into her hair. "Every single day you were gone."

"I missed you too." Muffled against my shoulder. "Every day."

"We’re going to be okay."

"You don’t know that."

"I’m Luna now. I have to say things like that."

She laughed, wet and real, and held on tighter.

The door opened.

We both turned.

Ryker stood in the doorway in the same dark clothes he had worn every evening this week before walking out with Cole, and he looked at me and then at Nia and then back at me, and something moved across his face that he put away before it finished crossing.

"Can I talk to you," he said. His eyes stayed on mine. "Amaris."