Chapter 13 013

Chapter 13 013

DARIUS

Nobody moved for a moment.

Meira stood in the doorway and her father sat across from my desk and the three of us were in the same room with everything that had just been said hanging in the air between us.

Then Nicholas stood up.

"Meira," he said. His voice had shifted. Softer than it had been with me, but not genuine. I knew the difference. That was the voice men like him used when they needed something from someone and had to adjust their approach to get it.

She didn't move from the doorway.

"Come home," he said. "Whatever this is, whatever he's told you, you don't know the full picture. Come home and we'll talk."

She looked at him for a long moment. Something was working behind her eyes, quiet and careful, the way she always looked when she was thinking something through before she spoke.

"What did you do to his family," she said.

Nicholas blinked. "That's not—"

"What did you do to his family," she said again. Same tone. Same pace. Not louder, just repeated, like she had all the time in the world to wait for the answer.

He looked at me over her shoulder. Like I was the problem. Like she was a situation that needed managing and I was the one making it difficult.

"This is between me and Vael," he said. "Old business. It has nothing to do with you."

"I'm standing in his house," she said. "Because of choices you made. It has everything to do with me."

Nicholas's expression shifted. I watched him try to find the version of himself that could talk her down from this and come up empty.

"You don't understand how things work," he said. "Pack politics, territory, alliances — these things require decisions that aren't always clean. What happened with the Ironwood Pack was—"

"Was what," she said.

He stopped.

"Was what, exactly," she said. "Say it."

He looked at her the way he'd looked at me earlier. Measuring. Except with her it was different — there was something else underneath it, something that wasn't calculation. Something older than that.

He couldn't say it. I could see that from where I was sitting. He could sit across from me and talk around it and negotiate and perform, but standing in front of his daughter with her looking at him like that he couldn't find the words.

"Meira," he said. "You're pregnant. You're not thinking straight. Just come home and—"

"I'm thinking very straight," she said quietly. "I've been thinking straight for a long time. You just never noticed because it was easier not to."

The room went still.

Nicholas looked at her and something moved through his face that I hadn't expected to see. Not guilt — men like him didn't do guilt. But something close to it. Something that looked like the faintest recognition that he was standing in front of a person he had never actually looked at properly.

It lasted about three seconds. Then it was gone.

"I'm not going to stand here and be spoken to like this," he said. He straightened up and buttoned his jacket and looked at me. "This isn't over."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

He looked at Meira one more time. She didn't look away, didn't soften, just stood there in the doorway and watched him. He walked toward her and she stepped to the side to let him pass and he was gone, footsteps down the hall, the front door, the sound of a car starting on the drive.

Then quiet.

Meira stayed in the doorway with her back to me for a moment. I watched her shoulders rise and fall with one slow breath.

Then she turned around.

Her face was composed. That composure she wore like armor, the one I'd seen the first night at the ceremony, the one she pulled on when things were at their worst. She had it on now. But underneath it something was moving, I could see it at the edges.

She came into the room and sat down in the chair her father had just left. Put both hands in her lap. Looked at me.

"Tell me," she said.

I looked at her.

"All of it," she said. "Not the version you decide I need. All of it."

I sat back in my chair. Outside I could hear the car disappearing down the drive, the gates, then nothing.

"My father built the Ironwood Pack from nothing," I said. "Spent thirty years on it. It wasn't the biggest territory but it was solid. Good land, loyal wolves, a name that meant something." I kept my voice even. "Your father wanted the land. Not the pack, not the people — the land. It sat on a border that would have given him access to three other territories."

She was listening. Completely still, just listening.

"He started with alliances," I said. "Came to my father like a friend. They had an agreement, a partnership, the kind that's supposed to mean something between Alphas." I paused. "Then he started moving the borders. Small at first, things that could be explained away. Then bigger. When my father pushed back Nicholas went to the council and buried him in false accusations. Challenged his leadership, his decisions, his bloodline." I looked at her. "By the time it was over my father had nothing left to defend. The council stripped his title. The pack dissolved. The land went to Nicholas."

Meira didn't look away. "How old were you."

"Seventeen."

She was quiet for a moment. "And your father."

"Died two years later. He never recovered from it." I said it flat, no performance. Just the truth.

She looked down at her hands in her lap. I watched her sit with it, really sit with it, not rushing to say something or fill the space.

"He told me once," she said slowly, "that the land the pack sits on now was always ours. That it had been in our bloodline for generations." She looked up. "He said that."

"He lied."

She nodded. Like she'd already known that, already filed it alongside every other lie, just needed someone to confirm it.

"Why me," she said. "Of everything you could have done. Why take me."

"Because nothing embarrasses Marcus Nicholas more than losing something to the son of the man he destroyed," I said. "Taking his land back would have started a war. Taking you cost him something he can't fight without looking worse than he already does."

She held my gaze. "So I'm the thing that hurts him most without bloodshed."

"Yes."

She looked at me for a long time after that. I let her look. Didn't move, didn't try to soften it or add anything to it. She'd asked for all of it and I'd given it to her and now she could do what she wanted with it.

"He's not going to stop," she said finally.

"No."

"He'll come back."

"Yes."

"And when he does."

"He'll find you still here," I said. "And he'll have to keep watching."

She looked down again. Her hand moved to her stomach, that quiet automatic thing she did. She sat there for a moment just breathing.

Then she looked back up at me and something had shifted in her face. The armor was still there but underneath it something had settled. Like she'd taken everything I'd just handed her and found a place to put it.

"Okay," she said.

Just that.

She got up and walked out and I heard her footsteps go down the hall and up the stairs and the house went quiet again.

I stayed where I was and looked at the empty chair across from me.

My father's face. That image I had carried for fifteen years.

Today Nicholas had sat in that chair and asked me what I wanted and I had watched his daughter stand in my doorway and look at him like he was a stranger.