Chapter Three: My father is dead?

Levrae

Three years.

That was how long I had been living in this house, sleeping in this bed, sitting across from this man at dinner and pretending that this was a life. That was how long I had been telling myself it would get better. That Lucas would soften. That I would stop dreaming about someone else. That the mate bond sitting quietly in the center of my chest would eventually go cold and leave me alone.

It never did.

And Lucas never softened.

I was sitting at the vanity when he came back to the room that evening. I could smell the alcohol on him from across the space. I kept my eyes on the mirror and kept brushing my hair and told myself not to say anything that would give him an opening.

"Still awake," he said, not as a question. 

I set the brush down. "Yes."

He dropped into the chair near the window and looked at me with that expression I had learned to dread — the one that meant he was about to say something he had been sharpening all day. His deep brown eyes moved over me slowly, taking inventory of everything he found disappointing.

"I ran into Sana downstairs," he said.

Sana was one of the house maids. She was young, pretty in a soft, uncomplicated way. I had noticed Lucas noticing her for months and I had said nothing because saying something meant having a conversation I didn't have the energy for anymore.

"Good for you," I said.

He smiled. That was the worst sign. Lucas smiling meant he had already decided how this was going to go.

He got up, went to the door, and opened it. He said something low into the hallway. A moment later Sana stepped inside, her eyes down, hands clasped in front of her. She didn't look at me. 

I stood up from the vanity. "Lucas …."

"Sit down, Levrae."

"What are you doing…."

"I said sit down." His voice didn't rise. That was the thing about Lucas — he was cruelest when he was calm. "Or leave. I genuinely don't care which one you pick. But if you're going to stand there with that face, at least be useful and watch. Maybe you'll learn something."

I went completely still.

He pulled Sana toward him by the wrist, easy and proprietary, like she was something that belonged to him. She went without resistance. He sat back in the chair and drew her down onto his lap, one hand sliding to her waist, and he looked straight at me the entire time, making sure I was seeing every second of it.

"You know what your problem is?" he said, his hand moving over Sana's hip while his eyes stayed locked on mine. "You're empty. You just exist in a room. You don't feel anything, you don't give anything, and your body can't even do the one thing a woman is supposed to do." He tilted his head. "Three years and not one child. Not one. Do you know how embarrassing that is for me?"

I didn't move. I had learned that moving gave him something to react to.

"Other women," he continued, "know how to make a man feel wanted. They know how to be warm. How to be soft. You walk around this house like you're above everything, like you're still the precious alpha's daughter, like I should be grateful you're even here." He laughed quietly. "You're barren and you're boring and I am so tired of pretending otherwise."

Sana still wasn't looking at me. 

I looked at my husband — this man my father had handed me to like a parcel, this man I had spent three years trying to be enough for — and I felt the tears come. Not because of him. I had stopped crying over Lucas a long time ago. They came because I was tired. Because somewhere in the back of my mind, under everything, always, was the ghost of a mate bond that refused to die and a man who had sent me here anyway.

I hate you, Father.

The thought moved through me before I knew it. 

I hate you telling me this was necessary. I hate you for using the word alliance like it was worth more than your own daughter. 

And I hate you, Finn.

I closed my eyes for just a second. Just long enough to feel the full weight of it.

I hate you for being a coward. I hate you for letting me love you for years and then standing in that study like a statue while my life was signed away, for the way you said "last night was a mistake" like it cost you nothing. 

 I hate that even now, in this room, with my husband's hands on another woman, the only person I can think about is you.

"You can go, Levrae," Lucas said, bored now. He dismissed me like I was a meeting that had run over its time.

I opened my eyes.

He wasn't even looking at me anymore.

I picked up my phone from the vanity, and I walked to the door. I kept my spine straight and my chin level because I would not let him see me break. Not once in three years had I let him see that, and I was not going to start tonight.

I closed the door behind me and stood in the hallway and pressed my back against the wall and breathed through my nose until the shaking in my hands stopped.

Then I slid down the wall the same way I had slid down the wall in a different hallway three years ago, on a different night, after a different man had walked away from me.

I was so tired of walls.

I sat there for a long time. The house was quiet. Through the door I could hear moaning coming from Luca's room, our room. I stared at the floor and let myself feel every ugly thing I normally kept buried — the loneliness, the humiliation, the grinding exhaustion of being somewhere you were never truly wanted.

My phone lit up.

Jonathan.

I stared at his name on the screen and let it ring out. I couldn't talk right now. I couldn't do anything right now except sit on this floor and exist.

It rang again immediately.

I picked up.

"Lev." His voice was strange and tight in a way I hadn't heard since we were children and something had gone very wrong. "I need you to listen to me."

I straightened up against the wall. "Jonathan, I can't really …"

"Levrae." He said my name like it was the only thing holding him together. "Something happened tonight."

The tone of his voice reached through everything — through the exhaustion, and the humiliation, i had been wrapping around myself for three years — and grabbed me by the throat.

"What," I said, not a question. I already knew what had happened, the way you sometimes know things before the words arrive, that whatever came next was going to split my life into a before and after.

Jonathan was quiet for one second. Two.

Then: "Our father, the Alpha. He's dead."