The Alpha's Hidden Debts

Chapter 35: Her Father's Name

Sera's Pov

Mara brought us inside, to the small sitting room off the main hall, and made tea that nobody drank. Coran sat in the armchair near the window, his hands folded on his knees, watching me with those steady, patient eyes. Riven stood near the door, close enough to hear everything, far enough back to make it clear that whatever happened in this room was mine to lead.

I sat across from Coran and looked at him properly for the first time.

He was older than he had seemed in the dark outside. The white hair, the slow way he held himself, the particular kind of stillness in his face that only came on a person who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and had learned to move around it without letting anyone see.

"Tell me from the beginning," I said. "All of it."

He nodded once, slow, like he had been waiting for permission and now that he had it, he was going to do it properly.

"Thirty years ago I was young," he said. "Low rank. I served under a council sub-division that most people did not know existed. My job was mostly transport and perimeter work. I did what I was told and I did not ask questions, because asking questions in that kind of organization was not something that kept you safe."

He paused, his hands tightening briefly on his knees before they relaxed again.

"They called it a relocation," he said. "That was the word they used. A hybrid settlement, out in the northeast territories, twenty or so people living quietly, keeping to themselves. The council decided they were a problem. I was part of the team sent to handle the relocation."

"Relocation," I said. Flat. Not a question.

"Not everyone," he said quickly, and something in his face tightened with the shame of it. "Some of them were taken. Not killed. The official report said otherwise, but I was there. I saw what happened. They took the strongest ones, the ones whose blood read the clearest. They put them in vehicles and drove them away, and they told the rest of us not to ask where."

The room was very quiet.

"My job was the perimeter," he said. "I was on the east side. And when the vehicles came out, I saw the man they loaded last." He looked directly at me. "He was young. Dark eyes, the same shape as yours. He looked at me when they walked him past, and I did nothing. I just stood there and I let them take him."

I kept my breathing even. I made myself do it deliberately, in through the nose, out slow.

"He was not killed," I said.

"No. He was taken to a facility. I did not know which one then. Over the years, I heard things, pieces, the way you hear things in old networks when people who used to serve together talk more freely than they should." He shifted in his chair. "There is a private council facility, not officially acknowledged. It holds people they want access to but cannot afford to be seen holding. Thirty years is a long time, but..." He stopped. "I have reason to believe he is still alive."

I sat with that for a moment.

My father. Alive.

I did not let myself reach for it yet. The same way you did not reach for something you were not sure would hold your weight. I filed it carefully, set it somewhere I could find it again, and kept going.

"Which facility?" I said.

"I have a location. Approximate, but specific enough." He reached into his coat and produced a folded piece of paper, held it out to me. "I wrote it down. In case something happened to me before I got here."

I took it without opening it.

"Why come now?" I said. "Why not five years ago. Or ten."

He looked at his hands. "Because ten years ago I did not know you existed. Word travels slowly in old networks, and I am old, and I spent most of those years telling myself it was too late to matter." He looked up. "And then I heard there was a young woman. Hybrid blood. Surfaced in Northesk. And I thought, if she is real, and if she is looking, then maybe it is not too late for the one useful thing I have left to do."

I asked him everything after that. Every detail he could remember about the facility layout, the team that had taken the group north, the names of anyone he could still recall. He answered all of it, slow and careful, the way a man answers when he understands that accuracy matters more than speed. Some things he did not know. He said so plainly rather than guessing.

When he was done, I stood up and walked him to the door myself. Mara appeared from somewhere to see him out, and I watched him go down the steps and into the dark with the walk of a man who had put something down that he had been carrying too long.

Then I went back to the sitting room and sat down.

I sat there for a long time. I did not cry. I did not pace. I just sat, my hands loose on my knees, and let myself look directly at the thing I had been keeping carefully at arm's length since Coran first opened his mouth.

My father might be alive.

Alive, and inside a room somewhere, the same way Coran had been inside a room for years, waiting for something he had stopped believing would come.

I heard footsteps. Riven came in an hour later, or thereabouts. I had lost track of time somewhere in the middle of sitting. He looked at me once, seemed to understand the shape of what I needed, and sat down on the chair beside me without a word.

Not asking. Not filling the silence. Just sitting.

I did not know how long we stayed like that. Long enough that the lodge grew quieter around us, the sounds of the evening winding down to almost nothing, just the building and the wind outside and the two of us in the small room with the cold tea on the table.

Then something hit me.

Not a thought. Not a feeling. Something else, lower than either, a certainty arriving in my chest all at once the way it had arrived before the lockdown, before Gideon, sudden and absolute and impossible to ignore.

East side. Someone was about to open fire on the east perimeter. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat.

I grabbed Riven's arm before I understood that I was doing it.

"East side," I said. "Right now."