Chapter 6 what my Father Knew

Odessa

The car ride home was the longest hour of my life, and I had been in a car with mannequins.

Evan sat on the other side of the back seat with his hands folded in his lap like a man in church. He hadn't said a word since we left the Sorrel estate. The driver kept glancing at us in the rearview mirror. I kept glancing at the window.

Thirty days.

I did the math in my head again. Then again. It never came out any different.

"You can ask," Evan said quietly.

"Ask what?"

"Whatever you're thinking. Anything. I can't lie to you." His mouth twitched. "Apparently it's a medical condition."

"That isn't funny."

"No." He looked down at his hands. "It isn't."

I turned from the window. In the dark, with the passing streetlights cutting stripes across his face, he looked younger, closer to the boy who used to wait for me outside the training grounds with a bottle of water because he knew I would forget mine.

"Did you ever think about me?" I asked, before I could stop myself. "These six years. Even once."

I watched him hold his breath.

"Every day."

No pain. No cough. Nothing.

My throat closed up. I turned back to the window so he wouldn't see my face.

"Okay," I whispered.

Neither of us said anything else.

The Kade house was lit up like a stadium when we turned onto our street. Every window glowed. Cars lined the driveway, and half the pack seemed to be out on the lawn, men in dark jackets, women with phones pressed to their ears, someone holding a flashlight and a map. My mother was on the porch steps with her arms wrapped around herself.

Then she saw the car.

I was out before it stopped rolling.

"Mom!"

She made a sound I had never heard from her, half scream and half sob, and then she was across the lawn and her arms were around me so tightly I couldn't breathe. She smelled like jasmine and fear.

"My baby. My baby, my baby, my baby." She pulled back and held my face, checking me over like I might have pieces missing. "Where were you? We thought... your car was on the side of the road, there was smoke, and your phone..."

"I'm okay. Mom, I'm okay."

"Odessa."

My father stood at the top of the steps.

He looked wrecked. His shirt was untucked, his hair was a mess, and there were dark circles under his eyes that hadn't been there at breakfast yesterday. John Kade, who hadn't raised his voice at me once in twenty-three years, looked like a man who had aged a decade in a single night.

Then his gaze moved behind me, and his face changed.

I turned. Evan had stepped out of the car. He stood perfectly still on the driveway with his hands open at his sides and his head slightly bowed, the way you stand before an Alpha.

Not in front of mine. In front of my father.

"Sir," Evan said.

Nobody on that lawn breathed.

"I'd like to explain," Evan said. "Before anything else. I'd like to explain it to you privately, if you'll allow it. And then you can do what you need to do."

My father's jaw worked. For a second I thought he would come down those steps and rip Evan's throat out in front of the entire pack, and I wouldn't have blamed him.

"Inside," he said. "The study. Odessa, you too."

Evan

I had faced down rival Alphas. I had been in two border wars. I had once stood in front of my father's council and told them they were wrong, to their faces.

None of it prepared me for the silence in John Kade's study.

He sat behind his desk. Odessa stood by the bookshelf with her arms crossed, and her mother hovered in the doorway until John said, "Elaine. Please," and she closed the door behind her very slowly.

I told him everything. The collapse. The blood. The touch that stopped it. The healers, the full moon, the bond, all of it, in the plainest words I could find. Odessa added the parts I couldn't. The kidnapping. The mannequins. John's expression barely moved through any of it.

Which was how I knew.

"You're not surprised," Odessa said. Her voice had gone very quiet. "Dad."

He didn't answer.

"Dad, I just told you that Evan Sorrel is my fated mate. And you look like I told you it might rain."

"Odessa..."

"You knew."

I felt the room tilt, and it had nothing to do with the bond. My mouth was already open when he finally looked up at me, and I saw that he wasn't angry. He was exhausted. He was so tired.

"Six years ago," John said slowly, "your father came to me in this room, Evan, and told me his son had felt the bond snap at a family dinner. He told me you had come to him in tears. You were twenty. You were engaged to Mia. You were so ashamed, you wanted to resign your position and leave the territory so you'd never see my daughter again."

I stared at him. "He told you that?"

"He told me everything." John's voice cracked. "And I told him to keep you away."

Odessa made a sound like she'd been hit.

"What?" she whispered.

"Sweetheart..."

"You told them to keep him away?" She took a step toward the desk. "You knew he was my mate. You knew, and you let me spend six years thinking he was a coward who took Joshua's..." She couldn't finish. "I cried over him, Dad. I cried for a year."

"I know."

"And you knew why?"

"Yes." He didn't look away from her. I'll give him that. He never looked away. "And I would do it again."

"Why?"

John stood up. He walked to the window and stood with his back to us for a long moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was so quiet I had to lean forward to hear it.

"When you were born, Odessa, the Moon Priestess came to bless you. It's tradition. She holds the infant and reads the thread of her life, and if it's a good one, she says so, and everyone eats cake."

"Dad."

"She held you for a very long time. And then she went pale, and she handed you back to me, and she asked your mother to leave the room."

Nobody moved.

"She told me you would meet your mate young," John said. "And that he would be of the House of Sorrel. And that you would love him. And that on the night the bond was sealed, the night he marked you, the moon would take what it was owed."

The silence that followed was so absolute I could hear the clock on the wall.

"What was it owed?" Odessa asked.

My chest was already tight. I think I knew. I think I'd known from the moment he started speaking.

John turned around. His eyes were red.

"You," he said. "She said the moon would take you."

Odessa's face emptied. I moved before I could think, and my hand closed around hers. She let me. She didn't even seem to notice.

"That's why I broke things with Grayson," John said, and his voice finally cracked all the way. "That's why I stepped down. That's why I let the company fall apart, so we'd have no reason to ever see them again. I thought if you never met, never touched, the bond would stay asleep. I thought I was saving you."

Thirty days, I thought.

Thirty days to save me.

And one night, the night I'd need to seal the bond, to save my own life, that would cost hers.

Beside me, Odessa let out one long, shaking breath. Her fingers tightened around mine until it hurt.

"Dad," she said very softly. "Then who is going to save him?"

Nobody answered.

And for the first time since I was seventeen years old, I understood exactly what I was asking of her.