Chapter 12 012

Chapter 12 012
DARIUS

Rhen called just after seven.

"He's coming."

I put the phone down and looked at the window. Grey sky, nothing moving outside yet. Still early.

Marcus Nicholas was coming to my territory.

I'd been waiting for this moment for fifteen years. Not this exact morning but the moment when the man who destroyed my family finally had to come to me. I'd imagined it many times. What it would feel like when it finally happened.

It felt like nothing. Just quiet. Just the steady feeling of something that had been a long time coming finally starting to move.

I went downstairs.

Rhen was in the kitchen with Cole. Both standing, both waiting. Neither said anything when I walked in.

"How long," I said.

"Two, maybe three hours. Four men with him."

"That's it?"

"That's what we're hearing."

I poured coffee and stood at the counter. Four men meant he wasn't coming to fight. He was coming to talk. Coming to sit across from me and figure out what I wanted and whether he could walk away without giving it to me.

He couldn't. But I'd let him think so for a while.

"Where's Meira," I said.

"Still upstairs," Cora said. She'd come in without me noticing. She did that.

"Keep her up there until I say."

She looked at me.

"I'm not hiding her," I said. "I want to talk to him first."

She turned back to the stove without a word.

Rhen pushed off the counter. "You want us in the room."

"Outside the door."

"Darius—"

"Outside the door."

He held my gaze for a second then nodded and left with Cole.

I stood there in the quiet and drank my coffee and thought about the last time I had seen Marcus Nicholas. I was seventeen. No wolf, no pack, nothing. Standing in what was left of everything my father had built while Nicholas stood on the other side of it looking like a man with a clean conscience. He hadn't even looked at me. I was nobody. A wolfless boy with no future and nothing worth his time.

My father's face that day. That was the image I had kept. The one I came back to when I needed to remember what this was all for.

Today Nicholas was coming through my gates asking for something.

I finished my coffee and went to get ready.

\---

He arrived at half past nine.

Black car. Four men, all of them clocking the grounds as they came up the drive and pretending they weren't. Nicholas got out last.

He was older. Heavier in the face. But he carried himself the same way he always had, like a man who had never once considered he might be wrong about anything.

I met him at the door and didn't offer my hand. Watched that register.

He looked at me the way men like him look at other men like me. Measuring. Trying to figure out where he stood. His eyes moved over me once and something shifted in his face. He hadn't expected what he found. People who knew me before never did.

"Darius Vael," he said.

"Nicholas," I said. No title. That landed too.

I took him to the study and closed the door. His men stayed in the hall. Mine stayed closer.

He sat across from my desk and looked around the room with that particular looseness people perform when they're trying to seem comfortable and aren't.

"You've done well," he said.

I didn't touch that.

"I'll get to it," he said. "My daughter is here."

"Yes."

"I want her back."

"I know."

"She's not yours to keep."

"She came here on her own," I said. "I didn't go looking for her."

"She had nowhere to go because—"

"Because of what you did to her," I said. "You put her on a platform in front of your whole pack and offered her up. She walked out and got in my car. That's what happened."

His jaw moved. "She's pregnant and she's not thinking clearly and whatever you think you're—"

"I know she's pregnant. She has a doctor. She's eating, she's sleeping, she's fine." I looked at him. "More than she ever was with you."

Quiet.

He sat back and looked at me and the measuring was still going on behind his eyes. He was trying to find the angle, the thing he could offer, the way through this that cost him the least.

"What do you want," he said. "Just tell me. What is it you actually want."

I looked at him across the desk.

Fifteen years of work had brought me to this room. This man sitting across from me having to ask me what I wanted. I had thought about what I'd say. Gone over it many times. All the ways I could do this.

But sitting here looking at him something had shifted. Something I hadn't fully planned for.

"Do you know who I am," I said. "Not the title. Who I actually am."

Something moved in his eyes. Slow. Like a man starting to remember something he'd buried a long time ago.

"Vael," he said quietly.

"My father was Edmund Vael," I said. "Alpha of the Ironwood Pack. Until you took it from him."

The color in his face changed.

"That was—"

"Fifteen years ago," I said. "I know. I was there."

He went still.

The version of this conversation he'd prepared on the drive over was gone and he knew it and I watched him know it and I felt nothing about that. No satisfaction, no heat. Just the flat quiet of a thing finally said out loud.

"My father lost everything," I said. "His pack. His title. His name. He never got back up. Died two years later with nothing left." I kept my voice level. No anger in it, just the facts. "You did that. Then you went home and kept living and never thought about it again."

He said nothing.

"I thought about it every day," I said.

The door opened.

I turned.

Meira was standing in the doorway. Hair loose, the clothes she'd slept in, bare feet. She was looking from me to her father and back again and her face had gone completely still.

She'd heard. How much I didn't know. But enough. I could see it in the way she was standing, the way her eyes had gone quiet and careful, putting the pieces together.

Her father looked at her.

Nobody spoke.

Then she looked at me. Only me. And I knew from her face that whatever she'd understood walking into this room had just changed something she couldn't take back.