Chapter 6

Ava sat in a high-backed chair at the edge of the ruined dining room and didn't move. Glass crunched underfoot as Ryder's men dragged the surviving assassin toward the service corridor. Cold air poured through the shattered window in steady waves. Nobody had offered her a coat.

She didn't ask for one.

Ryder stood ten feet away with his back to her, speaking in low, clipped sentences to Marcus. She couldn't hear the words over the ringing in her ears. The gold had faded from her eyes — she could tell because Marcus had stopped shooting her sideways looks — but the warmth beneath her skin hadn't gone anywhere. It sat in her palms like banked coals.

She pressed them flat against her knees.

"Clear the room."

Ryder's voice. Short. Final.

Marcus and the remaining security filed out without a word. The door closed.

The silence pressed in from every direction.

Ryder turned.

He crossed to her slowly. Not the measured, deliberate walk of a man approaching a negotiation. The walk of a man deciding something with every step. He stopped three feet in front of her and looked down and the expression on his face was unlike anything she'd seen from him yet — not cold, not certain. Something held down hard beneath the surface.

"The triplets," he said. "They're mine."

Not a question. A statement dropped onto the floor between them like something heavy.

Ava lifted her chin.

"Yes."

He laughed.

It came out short and wrong — a sound that had nothing to do with humor, scraped from somewhere that was reacting faster than his control could manage. He turned away, one hand moving to the back of his neck, jaw working.

"An omega," he said, mostly to the wall, "hid a pregnancy from me. In this building. For—" He turned back. "How long have you known?"

"Since two months after the summit."

He stared at her.

"Two months." He said it like he was testing the weight of it. "And you signed the contract anyway. You sat across from me in that limo and you—" He stopped. Started again. "Why?"

"Because you were going to erase the debt regardless of whether I told you. And if I told you—" She held his gaze steady. "You'd made it clear in that hotel room what you thought of me. I didn't trust you with them."

Something shifted in his face. She'd landed something real and they both knew it.

He pulled his phone out and called without looking away from her.

"Get Dr. Vance up here. Now."

He didn't pace. He stood at the window with the cold air hitting him and looked out at the city with his hands clasped behind his back, and Ava watched the set of his shoulders and tried to read which version of him was going to come through this — the War God, or something rawer and less armored.

Dr. Vance arrived in twelve minutes. Mid-fifties, silver-streaked hair, the calm efficiency of a pack doctor who had seen worse things than a blood-spattered dining room. He drew Ava's blood without commentary and disappeared.

While they waited Ryder moved to the chair across from hers and sat in it.

He didn't speak. He didn't threaten. He put his elbows on his knees and stared at a fixed point on the floor between them, and Ava watched his jaw muscle tick once, twice, three times.

She wanted to say something. She had no idea what.

The door opened.

Dr. Vance returned with a printed sheet still warm from the portable analyzer. He set it on the table between them.

"Paternity confirmed," the doctor said quietly. "Ninety-nine point nine percent. Three viable fetuses. All healthy. Approximately sixteen weeks."

He left.

Ryder didn't move for a long moment.

Then he slid off the chair.

He went to one knee in front of her — and then both knees, on the glass-strewn floor, crimson eyes lifting to hers, and whatever he'd been holding down had broken through. His face was open in a way she'd never seen it. Something almost desperate lived behind his eyes.

His hands came up and hovered near her midsection — not touching, waiting.

She looked at his face.

She thought about the hotel room. About the auction stage. About Logan's message sitting deleted in her phone and the red markers on Evergreen's map and her father's voice calling her *payment.*

She didn't reach for his hands.

"Don't," she said.

His jaw tightened.

"Ava—"

"You don't get to kneel now." Her voice stayed even. She was proud of that. "You made your position very clear four months ago. This—" she gestured between them, "—doesn't change because of a DNA result."

He stayed on his knees.

The city hummed behind him. The cold air moved between them.

"Then what changes it?" he asked.

She looked at him for a long moment.

"I don't know yet," she said.

She stood up, stepped past him, and walked out of the ruined dining room with gold embers still burning quietly beneath her skin — and his eyes following every step.