Claimed By Silver

Chapter Fourteen: The Father

Freya’s POV

I know something is wrong the moment I turn onto my street.

There's a car parked outside my building that doesn't belong there — sleek, black, the kind of expensive that doesn't need to announce itself — and a man leaning against it with his arms crossed, watching my building's entrance with a patience that feels less like waiting and more like ownership of the wait itself.

He looks like Sterling. That's the first thing I notice, underneath the immediate spike of fear — the same dark hair, though threaded through with gray at the temples, the same sharp lines to his jaw. His eyes are gold instead of silver, and even from across the street I can feel the weight of them land on me, assessing, cataloguing, the way Sterling's did the very first night on my doorstep. There's something else underneath the resemblance, though, something colder — where Sterling's stillness has always felt coiled, like restrained violence waiting for permission, this man's stillness feels finished, like someone who's never once needed permission for anything in his very long life.

"Freya," he says, when I'm close enough. Not a question. He already knows exactly who I am.

"You're his father." I don't make it a question either.

"Marcus Voss." He inclines his head slightly, an old-world gesture that doesn't match the coldness underneath it. "I believe you've heard my name before, in a different context. It seems my son has a habit of borrowing family names for things he shouldn't."

I go very still, understanding arriving slowly, unpleasantly. Marcus. The same name as the man who died at a dinner table with eight witnesses, choking on nothing at all. I wonder, distantly, whether that was coincidence or something crueller — Sterling's father's name attached, deliberately or not, to one of the deaths that started all of this, a private joke or a private cruelty I don't yet understand the shape of.

"What do you want?" I ask, keeping my voice steadier than I feel.

"A conversation. Five minutes of your time. I think you'll find it worth the inconvenience." He gestures toward the entrance of my own building, an invitation to let him inside a space that's mine, not his, and something in the casualness of the gesture makes my skin prickle. "Or we can speak out here, if you'd prefer an audience for whatever I have to say."

I don't want him inside my apartment. Everything in me recoils from the idea of this man standing where Sterling has stood, breathing the same air, touching the same doorframe. "Here is fine."

Something almost like approval flickers across his face. "Sensible. My son could learn something from your instincts."

"I'll be direct," he says, once we're settled into the stilted, wary distance of two people who both understand this conversation was never going to be friendly. "You are a disease, Freya. Not because of anything you've done — I don't hold you responsible for existing, or for the accident of a bond that found you without your consent any more than it found my son without his. But a disease doesn't require malice to be dangerous. It simply requires proximity."

"That's a horrifying thing to say to someone." I say.

"It's an accurate one, which matters more to me than whether it's comfortable." He says it without heat, entirely matter-of-fact, which is somehow worse than if he'd been cruel about it. "Nine men are dead because of what you are to my son. A city's worth of careful secrecy has been strained past what any reasonable Alpha should tolerate. And my son — my son, who I raised to understand that control is the only thing standing between our kind and extinction — has spent six years unravelling in front of the entire Council because he can't bring himself to do what needs to be done about you."

"What needs to be done." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.

"Mark you, and accept the consequences if your body can't survive it. Or remove you, cleanly, and let him grieve the way any wolf grieves an unfinished bond, which is painful but survivable. Either resolution ends the instability. What he's doing instead — this indefinite indulgence, this pretence that time alone will produce a solution neither history nor biology has ever offered — that ends in exactly the kind of exposure that gets our entire species hunted."

I stand there, absorbing the casual, clinical way he's just laid out two versions of my death like they're equally reasonable administrative options, and feel something harden in my chest that wasn't there a few minutes ago.

"You talk about my death like it's a scheduling problem," I say. "Like whichever option is more convenient is the one that should win."

"I understand it feels that way to you. I assure you it doesn't feel that way to me." For a moment something almost human moves behind his gold eyes, gone as quickly as it arrives. "I have presided over Council matters for longer than your entire species has had electricity, Freya. I have watched exactly this situation unfold before, in different centuries, with different names attached to it, and it never ends well when sentiment is allowed to override what biology and history have already taught us repeatedly. I am not cruel for the sake of cruelty. I am simply unwilling to pretend this time will be different when nothing about the facts has changed."

"You want me to just accept that?" I ask. "That my life is an inconvenience you're entitled to resolve."

"I want you to understand what you're actually costing him, whether or not you intended to." For the first time, something shifts in his expression, something that might almost be sympathy if I squint at it right. "I watched what happened to my other son when his bond died the way bonds like this are supposed to end, tragically but cleanly, without any of this prolonged unravelling. Grant grieved. It nearly broke him, but grief has an end point. What Sterling is doing to himself instead — the indecision, the killing, the increasingly public unravelling of everything he was raised to protect — that doesn't have an end point. That just gets worse, the longer you allow it to continue."

"So your solution is to threaten me?" I ask.

"My solution," he says, voice going flat and hard in a way that finally matches the coldness I expected from the start, "is to tell you plainly what happens if my son continues failing to see reason. I will force the resolution myself, Freya, one way or another, whether either of you consents to it or not. I would prefer he arrive at that resolution on his own, because I do still love my son, whatever he currently believes about that. But I have watched this instability threaten our exposure for years now, and my patience for waiting on his heartbreak has a limit. That limit is closer than either of you seem to understand."

"And if he refuses. If he keeps refusing, all the way to the hearing and past it."

"Then I will do what a father does when a son cannot see past his own grief to protect what matters most." His voice doesn't rise, doesn't sharpen — if anything it goes quieter, which is somehow more frightening than if he'd shouted. "I raised him to lead, Freya. To make difficult decisions clearly, without letting sentiment cloud judgment the way it's clouded his these past years. If he cannot make this decision himself, I will make it for him, and he will thank me eventually, once the grief has run its natural course. Sons often do, in my experience, once enough time has passed to let them see clearly again."

The threat sits in the air between us, unmistakable despite the calm, reasonable tone he's delivered it in, and I understand, with sudden clarity, that this man is more dangerous than anything Sterling has ever confessed to me — not because he's cruel for cruelty's sake, but because he genuinely believes what he's telling me, believes it with the absolute certainty of someone who's never once had to reconsider his own convictions.

"Stay away from him," Marcus says, straightening, the conversation apparently concluded to his satisfaction. "Or don't, and force my hand sooner than I'd prefer. Either way, I suggest you prepare yourself for the hearing with a clearer understanding of what's actually at stake than my son has apparently given you."

He's gone before I can find an answer, sliding into the black car with the same unhurried certainty he arrived with, and I stand alone on my own street with my heart hammering, understanding for the first time exactly how outmatched we actually are.

I don't go inside right away. I stand on the sidewalk for a long time after the car pulls away, replaying the conversation, trying to find the version of it that isn't as frightening as it actually was and failing every time. There's something unsettling about a threat delivered without malice, without raised voices, without any of the theatre I've come to associate with danger. Marcus Voss didn't need to shout. He simply told me the truth as he understands it, calmly, the way you'd explain an unfortunate but unavoidable diagnosis, and somehow that composure frightens me more than anger would have.

I think about Sterling's face whenever his father comes up in conversation — the careful blankness he wears over something clearly much rawer underneath, the way he's never once, in all our conversations, described his father with anything approaching warmth. I understand it differently now, having stood across from the man myself. I understand exactly what kind of upbringing produces a son capable of both the tenderness Sterling's shown me and the violence he's confessed to without remorse. Marcus didn't raise a monster by accident. He raised one deliberately, believing all along it was the only survivable shape a son of his could take.

When Sterling arrives that night, he knows immediately that something's wrong — reads it in my face before I've said a single word, the way he seems to read everything about me now.

"What happened?" he asks, already crossing the room toward me.

"Your father found me." I say taking a step away from him.

He goes very still, silver eyes going dark in a way I've learned means something dangerous is moving underneath his control. "Where."

"Outside my building. He was waiting for me." I tell him everything — the disease, the two acceptable resolutions, the threat to force Sterling's hand himself if the Council's timeline isn't fast enough for his patience. I watch Sterling's jaw tighten with every sentence, watch something violent and barely leashed build behind his expression, his hands curling slowly into fists at his sides as I speak.

"He had no right," Sterling says, voice low and rough with violence at its edges. "Approaching you directly, without me present — that's a violation even by Council standards."

"He doesn't seem like a man who cares much about violations." I argue.

"No." Sterling's hands close into fists at his sides. "He never has, when he's decided something is necessary."

"He talked about you like you're already grieving," I say quietly. "Like this is just a matter of waiting long enough for you to accept what he's already decided. He said Grant thanked him, eventually, after Elena."

Something cracks visibly across Sterling's expression at that — old fury, old grief, both at once. "Grant has never thanked him for that. Not once, not ever. My father has spent years telling himself a version of that story that lets him sleep at night. It isn't true."

I reach for him, needing the contact as much to steady myself as to steady him, and feel him exhale slowly under my touch, some of the coiled violence easing back into something more controlled.

"I'm not afraid of him," I say, which isn't entirely true, but feels important to say anyway. "I'm afraid of what he's willing to do. There's a difference."

"There shouldn't have to be." Sterling pulls me closer, arms wrapping around me like he can physically shield me from a threat that's already found its way to my own doorstep once already. "I should have anticipated this. I should have protected you from it."

"You can't protect me from everything, Sterling. Not from a Council, not from your father, not from whatever's still coming before this hearing." I press my palm flat against his chest, feeling his heartbeat hammering beneath it. "What you can do is help me understand exactly what we're walking into, so I'm not blindsided again the way I was tonight."

He's quiet for a long moment, and when he finally speaks, his voice carries a weight I haven't heard from him before — something that sounds almost like fear, real fear, for the first time since I've known him.

"Then we prepare properly," he says. "Whatever it takes. I won't let him take you from me, Freya. Whatever that requires of either of us."