MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS-Chapter 28: BREAK HER

ALPHA CORVIN

Every woman I had ever met was simple once you found the right pressure point. Amaris was taking longer than expected to locate.

Zoya had worshipped me from the first day I looked at her, done everything I asked without needing to be asked twice, moved through this pack house like a woman who understood her position and was grateful for it, quiet and devoted and completely uncomplicated in all the ways a chosen mate needed to be.

Freya was a different matter entirely and one I was not going to get into tonight.

But Amaris, I had miscalculated her completely, looked at the file Marco brought me and seen a young virgin from a broken pack with no resources, a father who didn’t give a fuck about her and no experience of the world beyond the walls she had grown up inside, and I had assumed that meant malleable, assumed it meant she would walk into this house wide-eyed and grateful and easy to shape into exactly what I needed.

She had been disproving that assumption consistently since she arrived.

She walked into my room slowly, her eyes moving across the space with the careful attention of someone mapping exits, her hands fidgeting at her sides, and I sat at the edge of the bed and watched her take it in, the dark furniture and the high ceilings and the particular heaviness a room collected when the man who slept in it had made enough bad decisions to fill a lifetime.

This was the first time she had been in here.

I had not invited her before because this room was not built for bonding and I had no interest in pretending otherwise.

She was here for a purpose and sentiment was not part of it, but looking at her standing in the middle of it now, her chin set and her shoulders pulled back even with her hands giving her away, I registered details I had not paid proper attention to before, the line of her jaw, the particular way her amber eyes moved, and taking in far more than she let on, the way she carried herself upright even when she was clearly calculating how much trouble she was in.

She was prettier than convenient.

I kept my face neutral.

"Why did you slap her," I said, watching her face, "do you have any idea who Lila Cross’s father is."

She met my eyes without flinching, "She slapped me first."

"And so you retaliated."

"Because I had to," she said, her voice carrying that particular evenness of someone who had made peace with the consequences before walking through the door, "or she would have done worse and taken my restraint as permission to keep going."

She was not wrong and I was not going to let her see that.

"You will go and apologize to Lila Cross," I said.

Her expression shifted, not quite disbelief, something sharper than that, "With all due respect, Alpha, I will do no such thing."

The room went very quiet.

"You dare defy me," I said, my voice dropping rather than rising, which was always more effective.

"I am not in the wrong," she said, standing her ground with her hands still fidgeting at her sides, the only tell she had, "so why should I apologize for something I am not responsible for starting."

I looked at her for a long moment, at the defiance sitting so openly on her face, "This is not about right and wrong," I said, rising from the bed, "this is about the position you are being prepared for, a Luna does not slap the guests of this pack regardless of provocation, she manages relationships, she controls rooms, she does not set fire to them."

"Luna indeed," she scoffed and I stood up, "You mean your breeder." She added, watching me cross toward her and took one step back, then another, her shoulders connecting with the chest of drawers behind her, nowhere left to go.

I stopped in front of her and lifted her chin with two fingers, tilting her face up to mine, and her jaw was tense under my hand, pulse visible at her throat.

"You think you can speak to me this way and I will simply absorb it," I said, studying her face from close range, the set of her mouth, the anger she was working to contain behind her eyes’

"You think because I have shown you a degree of tolerance that it is unlimited." I let the silence sit for a moment. "I am not your gambling father from the Stormshadow pack, Amaris, I am not a man you can outlast or outwait or talk back into a corner."

Her jaw tightened under my fingers.

"Do you know who I am," I pressed, my voice quiet and absolute, "and what I am capable of doing to you."

Her eyes held mine, wet at the edges but refusing to break, "Yes," she said, "I do." 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

I released her chin, letting my hand drop, and stepped back and returned to the bed and sat down, and looked at her standing against that chest of drawers with her back straight and her eyes blazing and her hands pressed flat against the wood behind her like she was using it to hold herself upright.

She was going to be a problem.

Not the manageable kind either, not the kind that wore itself out quickly and settled into compliance, the persistent grinding kind that required a different approach entirely.

I had broken difficult things before and I would break this one too, but it was going to require more thought than I had initially allocated to it.

I studied her face, the anger there, the fear she was refusing to perform for me, the way she was already calculating her next move even standing against a wall with nowhere to go, and I made a decision.

"Strip," I ordered my voice even and cold.

Her eyes went wide, color draining from her face, "What."

I held her gaze without blinking, "You heard me correctly. Amaris, I said strip"