The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 28: UNKNOWN NUMBER

COLE

I snatched the phone from her hand before her fingers had completely registered what they were seeing, my entire body tensing at the sight of those three innocuous words blinking on the screen.

"Who is this?" I said out loud, already dialing the number back before either of us had agreed that it was a good idea.

It rang twice before the phone was picked up, the voice on the other end unfamiliar, younger than Elias Thorne, and sharper, with an almost amused edge to it as it greeted me.

"Cole Arden. I was hoping I'd get you instead of her. Saves us both time."

"Who are you? What do you know?"

"I know your father has been lying to you about the shield clause." The voice said. "It's real, technically, buried deep enough in Silverclaw's old code that most modern pack members have never even heard of it. But it doesn't work like he tells her it does. The shield only holds if both parties enter the bond willingly and with full and complete knowledge of every possible consequence. If your father has hidden even one relevant fact before she agrees to it, and I'm afraid Cole Arden, he has hidden several, then the entire claiming becomes legally void as soon as anyone with standing chooses to challenge it in front of the council." A pause. "Which means the 'protection' he's dangling in front of her right now is actually a trap with a very slow-closing door."

My stomach plummeted to the floor of the porch. "What hasn't he told her?"

"That's not information I'm prepared to give out for free." The voice replied, and I could hear the grin in it, even through the phone. "But as a gesture of good faith, I'll give you this much. Ask your father what actually happened to Lena's parents. Not the county records version. The real one. Ask him why a mechanical failure on a well-maintained car, driven by two people who'd evidently spent six years successfully dodging every pack that might have wanted them dead, occurred on that particular night." Another pause, this one intentionally drawn out and cruel. "Ask him what part Silverclaw played in that accident, Cole Arden. Then ask yourself whether the man offering to protect her tonight is actually so different from the man who may have taken her parents out of the equation quietly enough that nobody ever thought to question it."

The line died out before I could say another word, the silence that followed far louder than any conversation we'd shared.

I slowly lowered the phone, my hands shaking, and turned to find Lena staring at me, having heard every word through the speaker I hadn't thought to cover off of, her face completely drained of color in the porch light.

"Cole." She said, very quietly. "Was that true? Could your family actually have had anything to do with my parents' accident?"

I opened my mouth to reassure her, to tell her it was impossible, that his father would never, and found, to my horror, that I couldn't quite manage to complete that sentence with a full measure of certainty.

The silence stretched between us, damning in its implications, my hesitation seemingly answering her question with greater clarity than I could have managed with words. I watched some emotion coil down inside her, not the anger I'd seen in the restaurant this time, something quieter and far more devastating, a kind of grief settling in before either of us had even acknowledged the prospect that there was anything to grieve.

"I don't know," I admitted, forcing the words out eventually. "I want to tell you it's impossible. I want to tell you my father would never do anything like that. But I also didn't know that he'd been hiding an entire hidden faction from me for two weeks and that he'd constructed a legal shield that he never even cared to explain honestly. I'm starting to think that there's a version of my father I never actually let myself imagine, because imagining it meant admitting the man who raised me might not be the man I thought he was at all, and that's a harder thing to accept than almost anything else that's happened this week."

"So we need to ask him," Lena said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. "Tonight. Right now. Before I walk into that council chamber and have anyone claim anything about my life. I need to know the truth about my parents before I make a single other decision in this entire mess. I've spent my whole life not knowing things other people thought I couldn't handle. I'm done letting that happen without a fight, starting now, starting with your father."

I nodded, already turning back toward the house, my stomach twisted into something cold and unfeeling. Whatever answer waited behind that study door, I understood we were about to find out how far my father's version of protection actually extended and whether it had ever truly been about her safety at all or about something else entirely that neither of us had been allowed to see clearly until now. The porch light flashed once behind us as we walked, and neither of us looked back to see why, both of us already bracing for a conversation neither of us actually wanted to have but both of us knew could no longer be avoided, no matter how much easier it might have been to simply keep walking away from that house entirely.