Chapter 167 Showdown
Chapter 167 Showdown
Gen's POV
We moved through the ballroom the way water moves through a narrow channel — unhurried but with direction, and with the particular awareness of being watched.
The crowd parted by degrees, conversations pausing mid-sentence, champagne flutes arrested halfway to mouths.
Ryker's hand rested at the small of my back with the same steady certainty it had held all evening, and I kept my chin level and my pace even, letting the eyes follow without giving them anything to feed on.
Through the bond, I felt his interior stillness — not the performed composure of a man managing a public moment, but something older and more structural, the kind of calm that comes from having decided something irrevocably and finding the decision sufficient.
It steadied me in a way that no words would have. We crossed the last stretch of polished marble toward the exit and the noise of the party closed behind us like water over a stone.
The car was cool and quiet when the door shut. The city moved past the windows in amber and white, and for a few minutes there was only the low hum of the engine and the settled warmth running between us through the bond.
Then Ryker's phone lit up on the center console.
The display read Father.
He accepted the call and brought it to his ear. "Christopher." His voice was even, stripped of inflection, offering nothing.
Whatever came through the line arrived at volume. I couldn't make out words, but I didn't need to — the register was unmistakable, the compressed fury of a man accustomed to compliance who had just encountered its absence. Ryker listened without interrupting, his free hand relaxed on the wheel.
"I'm not aware of any changes on Calloway's end," he said when the first torrent paused. "You'd have to take that up with their legal team."
Another wave. Longer this time.
Through the bond, underneath the surface stillness he was projecting, I felt the current — cold and precise, the temperature of something being carefully measured before use. Not rage yet. Calculation.
Then Christopher's voice sharpened into something I could actually hear from across the console, and the words landed clearly enough.
— throwing everything away for some divorced trash — a washed-up woman who's been used and discarded, and you're parading her around like she's something—
The current in the bond went from cold to incandescent in the span of a single breath. Ryker's knuckles tightened on the wheel and I watched the faintest edge of gold surface in his eyes before he blinked it back. I reached across the console and covered his hand with mine.
He registered it — the small, deliberate pressure of my palm over his fingers — and something in the current shifted, not extinguished but redirected, like a fire given a controlled channel instead of open air. He drew one slow breath through his nose.
"There was also the Aurora Phillips matter," Christopher was saying, his voice dropping into the register of a man cataloguing damages. "I arranged that introduction personally, Ryker. A woman from the right bloodline, the right standing—"
"Watch how you speak about her." Ryker's voice came out with an evenness that was somehow more dangerous than volume. Each word placed with the precision of something being set down carefully.
"Her name is Genevieve. She is my fiancée. Whatever word you used just now — don't use it again."
A sharp sound came through the line. Then: The video. Half of Oakhaven has seen it. You got down on one knee in a conference room — do you understand what you've done to this family's—
"I'm marrying her." A pause, clean and absolute. "Twenty-four days from now. That's not a conversation I'm inviting you into, Christopher. It's a fact I'm informing you of."
The explosion that followed was loud enough that I heard it clearly. I watched Ryker's expression through it — still, almost bored, the face of a man waiting for weather to pass. When it crested, he spoke into the first available silence.
"You want to give my position to Damian." His tone carried nothing but mild acknowledgment. "You can try that. I'd recommend arranging his funeral in order beforehand." A beat. "I'm hanging up now."
He ended the call before any response could form, set the phone on the passenger seat, and leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes for exactly three seconds.
"Don't let him reach you," I said quietly.
Ryker turned his head toward me. The gold had gone from his eyes entirely. He turned his hand over under mine and threaded his fingers through my fingers, his grip unhurried and complete.
"He can't reach anything that matters." His thumb moved once across my knuckles. "Not anymore."
We drove in silence for another block before he reached for his phone again. He unlocked it with his free hand and typed without hesitation, and I watched the words take shape on the screen.
Twenty-four days from now, I marry the love of my life. Genevieve Marlowe will become Mrs. Sterling.
He attached a single image — my left hand, the ring caught in the warm light of the car, the engraved band sharp and unambiguous — and posted it before I could fully process what I was watching.
I stared at the screen. Then at him.
"Ryker."
His eyes were already on mine, steady and unrepentant, carrying the quality of a man who has planted a flag and intends to stand on the ground beneath it. "Let them all see it," he said. "Him included. There's no version of this where I'm quiet about you, Gen. There never was."
The bond ran full and warm between us, and I didn't have an answer that wasn't inadequate, so I didn't try to find one. I pressed my shoulder against his arm instead and watched the notification count on his post climb in the corner of the screen.
---
The descent into the Sunrise Bay parking structure was familiar by now — the slight drop in ambient light, the change in sound, the cool underground air. I had closed my eyes briefly and was only half-attending to the exterior when I registered the shift in Ryker beside me. The arm against mine went subtly different — not tense exactly, but aware, the way a wolf's shoulder changes a fraction of a second before the rest of it moves.
I followed his gaze through the windshield.
The figure was standing beside a dark car two rows in, jacket open despite the temperature, arms loose at his sides. The stance had the studied casualness of someone who wanted to appear to have arrived incidentally and had been there long enough that the pretense had begun to wear thin.
Dominic.
He had found us here before. I didn't wonder how.
I felt the bond shift — a brief, contained spike, something with edges, quickly organized into something colder and more directed. Ryker pulled into his space and killed the engine, and the smile that came to his face as he looked at Dominic through the glass had nothing warm in it whatsoever.
He stepped out first, moving to my side before I had fully opened my door, and positioned himself at a slight angle in front of me with the unhurried naturalness of someone for whom this was simply the correct geometry of the situation. Dominic had straightened from his lean against the car and was watching with an expression that had started as contemptuous and was recalibrating itself in real time.
Ryker looked at him the way a man looks at something he has already finished thinking about.
"Mr. Whitmore." His voice carried easily in the concrete space, light and entirely without warmth, the tone of a man who has just found something mildly interesting underfoot.
"Here to RSVP? The invitations aren't printed yet, but I can put you on the waitlist."