RYKER

My father exhaled, slow and controlled, and his eyes moved across the silent room and came to rest on Amaris where she sat at the front. He looked at her a beat too long, his face before he locked it away, and then he dragged his gaze off my mate and turned it back to the room full of waiting people.

"Zoya was a faithful Luna," he began. "For twenty-two years she gave everything she had to this pack. Her loyalty to it was never once in question. Her love for every wolf under this roof was never in question."

He stopped. Glanced sideways at Freya. Freya gave a small, regal nod, granting him leave to keep speaking in his own house, in front of his own council, and the rage came surging back up my throat hot and acidic.

"And then Freya arrived," he continued, "and everything changed. The pack changed. And most of all, I changed. She was my fated mate. The moon goddess had bound me to her and I had lived twenty-two years without ever knowing it, and the day I understood what she was to me, I crossed lines I had no business crossing. Lines that drove Zoya to the very edge of herself." His jaw flexed hard. "And out there, on that edge, she lost herself completely."

I looked at my brother.

Rowan gave the smallest shake of his head. Not yet. Don’t.

My father’s eyes came back and fixed on me, level and unblinking.

"She came to your room that night to kill you, Ryker. Both of you, in your sleep. I followed her in and I stopped her, and in the stopping of her, she died. That is what happened in that room. That is the entire truth of it."

I was on my feet again, the chair clattering over behind me, and neither sentinel dared move this time.

"You lying bastard." My voice shook so hard I barely got it out. "She would never. She loved us more than she loved her own breath. She would have torn her own heart out before she laid a single finger on either one of us."

"Marco." My father did not look away from my face. "Give him the toxicology report from the wine served that night."

Beta Marco crossed the room with two thin files and laid one in front of me and one in front of Rowan, his face carefully blank.

I did not want to open it.

I opened it.

It was all laid out there in cold clinical type. Every guest at that table. Every glass poured. The same compound traced in all of them. A heavy sedative, refined down from a single herb.

And I knew the herb.

I knew it because she grew it. My mother grew it in the far corner of her own garden, the bed with the small white flowers she would not allow the gardeners to so much as breathe on, the patch she tended with her own bare hands on quiet Sunday mornings while I was small enough to sit in the dirt at her feet and pass her the trowel.

My eyes dragged across the words and my mind threw itself against every one of them, refusing, shoving back. She would never. She grew those flowers for tea. She grew them because they were beautiful and they were hers. She would never have done this. Not to us. Never to us.

"I did everything in my power that night," my father said into the brittle silence, and there was something underneath his voice now that I had never once heard there in all my life, something worn through at the seam.

"I tried to disarm her without harming her. And I have carried the exact manner of how I lost her every single day since, and I let every soul in this pack believe I was the monster, because it was easier to let them hate me than to let them know what she became at the end."

I closed the file.

I stood and turned toward the door because I could not breathe one more breath of that room, and then I stopped with my back to all of them.

"And now you want me to forgive you." I did not turn around. "That’s the shape of this. She would never have done any of it if you had not pushed her into the dark first. You opened the wound yourself and then you blamed her for bleeding out in front of you."

"I am not asking for your forgiveness." His voice followed me across the room.

"I gave up any right to that a long time ago. But Freya is as much a victim in all of this as anyone standing here. Victor is alive. He is out there right now, and the moment he learns she still breathes, he will come for her with everything he has. She needs the protection of this pack to survive it."

I turned back around at that.

"And why," I said, slow and cold, "should I give a single solitary fuck what becomes of her."

"Because she is my fated mate."

My eyes cut to Amaris.

She sat at the front of the room with her hands knotted white in her lap and her chin lifted and her eyes far too bright, fighting back tears she refused to let spill in front of all these strangers, and the sight of her holding it together did something to me that the toxicology report had not managed to do.

"And what about Amaris," I said.

My father followed my gaze to her, then brought it back to me. "She is my mate. By law."

I laughed.

It came out wrong, jagged and too loud, the laugh of a man standing in the wreckage of everything with nothing left to lose.

"You greedy brute," I said. "You want every last piece of it. The fated mate kept down in the dungeon, the legal mate displayed at the front, a fresh heir already planned for the oven, and your own dead wife carved up into a villain so your hands photograph clean for the council."

I shook my head slowly. "Greed burns people, Father. It always has and it always will. And it is going to burn you down to the foundations. I am going to make certain I’m standing there to watch when it does."

I felt Rowan come up to stand at my shoulder.

My father’s eyes shifted to him, and for one single breath I saw it cross his face, the flicker of a man reaching for the last ally in a room that had turned entirely against him.

"Rowan," he said.

It came out almost like a question.

My brother stepped up level with me, and when he spoke his voice was quiet and even and absolutely final.

"You’re right about one thing," Rowan said. "My loyalty has always belonged to my brother long before it ever belonged to you. And tonight you proved exactly why that was the right place to put it." He let it hang there.

"You stood up in front of this entire pack and you tore our mother’s name to pieces, you made her into a thing that wanted her own sons dead, and you did all of it so you could walk Freya back through the front gate with clean hands and a clear story. I watched you do it with my own eyes."

He drew a slow breath.

"You will burn for that. And I will not lift one finger to put the fire out."

I looked at my father standing alone on that platform, fated mate at his back and legal mate at his front and both his sons turned to stone against him, and I let every trace of the calm he prized so highly bleed right out of my voice.

"You will meet your end," I told him. "And I am going to be the one who carries it to your door."