Chapter 177 CLXXVII

Chapter 177 CLXXVII
Levi's POV

I drove faster than was safe and arrived at my building with two minutes to spare. My father's vehicles were already in the street. Two black cars, large, the kind his security team used when they were working rather than traveling socially. They were parked with the precision of people who had been placed there deliberately, one at each end of the building's frontage, covering exit points.

He had sent security ahead.

I sat in my car for exactly four seconds, assessing the positioning of the vehicles, the number of men I could see, the light in my apartment window which was not on, and the specific quality of stillness that told me nobody had responded to the doorbell yet.

Isabel had gotten out good. I got out of my car and walked to the building entrance.

Two of my father's security men were in the lobby. They were large and professional and they looked at me with the neutral expressions of people who were doing their job and understood that I was not someone to be physically obstructed.

"He is upstairs," one of them said.

"I know," I said.

I took the lift my father was in the corridor outside my apartment door when the lift opened, standing with the precise posture he had maintained for as long as I had known him, upright and still and communicating authority through the simple fact of occupying space. 

His silver-streaked hair was immaculate despite the hour his coat was the long dark one he wore when he wanted to look like someone arriving with purpose rather than someone making an informal visit.

Two of his personal security team stood at a distance behind him. He looked at me when I came out of the lift, and the look had several layers to it that I read in the order they presented themselves. 

The surface layer was controlled calm beneath it was something he was managing deliberately. And beneath that was the thing he had not quite suppressed, which was anger.

My father's anger was not loud it was never loud. It was the specific cold quality of a man who had decided that what he was looking at was not acceptable, and who had come to say so in person.

"The door isn't answering," he said.

"Because nobody is home," I said. "Come in."

I unlocked my apartment and went inside and turned on the lights. He followed, and his two security men positioned themselves in the corridor without being asked, which told me he wanted this conversation to be private.

He came in and looked around the apartment with the assessing survey he applied to every space he entered. His eyes moved across the kitchen, the living room, the details that told a story about who had been here and how recently.

Aria's cereal bowl was in the sink i had not noticed it when I left he noticed it. He looked at the bowl for a moment, then at the living room where two small boots had been until an hour ago, and where the impression of a child's presence was still in the arrangement of the space in ways that were not present in my apartment when I lived alone.

"She was here," he said.

"This is my apartment," I said. "Various people are here at various times."

"Don't be obtuse," he said. "The woman and a child."

I said nothing.

He turned to face me fully. "Who is the child, Levi?"

"Someone under my protection," I said. 

"Connected to the current security situation in the pack."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the answer I'm giving you," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment with those eyes that were the same as mine in structure and colour and entirely different in everything that lived behind them.

"I came here tonight," he said.

"Because I was told that you had moved a woman into your apartment the woman you have been refusing to end your involvement with. And I was told there was a child with her whose origins nobody has clearly explained." 

He paused. "I came to understand the situation firsthand because the information I was receiving was incomplete."

"Who told you?" I asked.

"That is not relevant."

"It is to me."

"The source is not the point," he said.

"The point is what I found when I arrived, which is an apartment that has clearly been occupied by a woman and a child, neither of whom are the person you are supposed to be preparing to bond with."

"Vanessa," I said.

"Your bonding ceremony is in three weeks," he said. "The council has been informed. The family has been notified. Your stepbrother Marcus has been briefed on the transition of pack leadership that will follow.”

“These are not plans that exist in isolation, Levi. They are interconnected with the Blackthorn family's obligations to multiple packs and multiple councils they cannot simply be cancelled because you have developed an attachment."

"It is not an attachment," I said.

"Then what is it?"

"It is my life," I said. "The one I am actually living, not the one you arranged for me before I had any say in what I wanted."

My father's expression did not change this was one of the things I had never been able to fully manage, his ability to receive what should have been difficult words with a composure so complete it made you feel like you were shouting at a wall.

"What you want," he said, "is a consideration that the Blackthorn family has always balanced against what is required. You were not raised to believe otherwise."

"No," I said.

"I was raised to believe that what I wanted was irrelevant. That is different from being raised to understand the balance."

"Semantics."

"It's not semantics," I said. 

"It is the difference between a child who understood the weight of his family's obligations and chose to accept them, and a child who was never given the choice in the first place."

He looked at me. "You are talking about the arrangement with Vanessa."

"I'm talking about everything," I said.

"Every decision made about my life before I was old enough to be consulted on it. The succession. The position the bonding. All of it decided and then presented to me as fact."

"Because it is fact," he said. "You are a Blackthorn that is not a role you can opt out of."

"I'm not opting out of being a Blackthorn," I said. "I'm refusing to bond with a woman I don't love and step into a position I never agreed to because you decided when I was six years old that it made strategic sense."

"Love," my father said, and the word came out with a specific quality, not contempt exactly, something more like a diagnosis. 

"You are choosing personal sentiment over the responsibilities of your bloodline."

"Yes," I said. "I am."