Chapter 11

He didn't put her down for six floors.

Ryder carried her from the conference hall to the private elevator, through the executive lobby, and into the secured residential corridor without once seeming to consider the option of not carrying her. His arms were iron beneath her. His jaw was set. She could feel the tension running through his whole body like a live wire — not panic, nothing as loose as that, but a controlled fury that needed somewhere to go and was currently being rerouted into making sure she was vertical.

"I can walk," she said.

"I know."

"Ryder."

"Let me have this."

She let him have it.

He set her down in the bedroom and stood in front of her with his hands on her shoulders — not gripping, just present — and looked at her face with the scrutiny of a man doing inventory.

"The babies moved?" he asked.

"Yes. They're fine." She covered one of his hands with hers. "I felt them."

Something unlocked in his face at that. His shoulders dropped a half inch.

"Good," he said. "Good."

He stepped back and pulled out his phone. She watched the shift happen — the softness gone, the War God back, jaw re-set, eyes sharpened. His voice when he spoke to Marcus was flat and absolutely certain.

"Bring Logan to the lower level. Don't leave marks above the collar. I'll be down in ten."

He hung up.

"I want to come," Ava said.

He turned.

"No."

"He threatened my children. He's been threatening me for weeks. I have a right to—"

"You have a right to rest for twenty minutes after someone just tried to gut you at a press conference." His voice didn't rise, but it filled the room. "I'll debrief you on everything that comes out of that room. I won't hide it. But you're not watching an interrogation in your condition."

She wanted to fight it. She looked at his face and calculated — the set of his mouth, the absolute finality behind his eyes — and decided this was not the hill.

"Everything," she said. "You tell me everything."

"Yes."

He was back in forty minutes.

Ava was on the sitting room couch with tea she hadn't touched and a blanket she'd pulled around herself more for something to grip than for warmth. She heard his footsteps in the corridor — steady, measured, the deliberate pace of a man processing.

He sat beside her.

His shirt cuffs were rolled back. She didn't look at his hands.

"He was working alone at this point," Ryder said. "The original Evergreen Pack leadership has cut ties. They can't afford the exposure after the contract announcement." He paused. "Your father officially surrendered claim to any legal action two days ago. I didn't tell you because I was waiting to confirm."

She absorbed that. Her father, surrendering. She wondered if she felt something about that.

Mostly she felt tired.

"Logan had a contact inside the Whitmore Alliance," Ryder continued. "Someone feeding him our schedule. Marcus is identifying them now." He looked at her. "He wasn't planning to kill you. He wanted the triplets specifically. All three."

"The golden bloodline," she said.

Ryder's eyes sharpened.

"What do you know about that?"

"What the elders told me. What I feel." She pressed her hand to her collarbone, where the skin had been tingling for two days. "Ryder, someone told Logan what these pups are. Someone who understood the bloodline before I did." She met his gaze. "Logan is not smart enough to have found that alone."

A long silence.

He leaned back against the couch, head tilted toward the ceiling, eyes closed for exactly three seconds — a habit she was learning, his version of recalibrating.

"No," he said. "He isn't."

He turned his head toward her. The lamp on the side table made the scar on his jaw look very old.

"Are you really all right?" he asked.

Not the pups. Not the pack. *Her.*

Ava looked at him.

She thought about the dagger. The blade catching light. The specific, sick certainty of the moment she understood what Logan intended. She thought about Ryder's shaking hands afterward, the thing he'd tried to hide and hadn't quite managed.

"I'm frightened," she said. Honest, no padding around it.

He nodded.

He opened his arm.

She didn't move for a moment — a beat of old resistance, four months of walls — and then she leaned sideways into him and let his arm come around her and pressed her face against the warmth of his shoulder.

His hand settled at the curve of her belly. Light. Asking.

The triplets moved into it like they recognized his touch.

His breath caught.

She felt it — that small, fractured intake, quickly controlled. A man who had never expected to feel this and didn't know what to do with it and was choosing, very quietly, to stay completely still rather than risk losing it.

"Get some sleep," he said, very low.

She closed her eyes.

She didn't tell him she already felt safer than she had in four months.

She didn't need to.

He already knew.