The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 42: QUIET HOURS

COLE

Lena fell asleep on my couch before noon, still in yesterday's clothes, one hand curled loosely around a mug of tea that has long since gone cold.

I did not wake her. She had earned the rest, and so had I but the sleep was not coming easy for me like it seemed to be coming for her. Instead, I sat on the floor by the couch, back against the cushions close enough to hear the steady rhythm of her breathing, and let myself watch her for a while. Newly claimed. Newly mine, in whatever way the word actually meant when the ceremony and torches were stripped away and got down to the plain fact of it.

It meant this. Her safe, asleep and trusting me enough to let her guard down completely in my apartment while half the council might be hunting for reasons to tear us apart. It meant wanting to be the kind of mate who deserved that trust.

My phone buzzed against the coffee table, low, and I caught it before the sound could wake her.

Damien. Can we talk? Alone. Not about the council. About my father.

I frowned at the screen for a moment before typing back. Now?

If you can.

I glanced at Lena, still deeply asleep, and eased myself up off the floor as careful as I could be. I left a note on the counter in case she woke before I got back, grabbed my keys and met Damien twenty minutes later at the edge of the woods that separated Silverclaw land from neutral ground, a spot we used to meet at as kids before everything between our families became complicated.

He had looked worse than he had at the ceremony, if that was possible. Hollow about the eyes, as if he hadn't slept either.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"My father knows I've been asking questions." Damien kept his voice low even out here where there shouldn't have been anyone to overhear. "He cornered me this morning. Told me to stop. Told me that some things are better left buried, that digging up the past only gets people killed."

"That's more or less what my father told me too."

Damien's jaw tightened. "Doesn't that bother you? Both our fathers, using almost the exact same words, on the same night right after Aiden Holt shows his face for the first time in twenty-two years?"

It did bother me. It bothered me more than I wanted to admit out loud, standing in the same woods where Damien and I used to build forts before we had learned enough about our families to hate each other properly.

"What do you want to do about it?" I asked.

"I want to know what my father actually knows. Not what he's telling me. What he's hiding." Damien met my eyes, something raw and determined under the exhaustion. "I can't ask Lena to trust me. Not after everything. But I need someone to know what I'm doing in case it goes wrong. In case I disappear the way people apparently used to disappear around here."

"Damien."

"I mean it, Cole. If something happens to me, I need someone who will actually go looking."

The weight of the request sat heavy somewhere in my chest. Whatever stood between us in history, whatever choices he had made that I hadn't yet forgave, he was asking me to be the person who would notice if he went missing. It was not nothing.

"I'll notice," I said. "But you're not doing this alone. Talk to Noah. He's already digging on Okafor. Might as well combine whatever you two turn up instead of working separately and getting caught twice as fast."

Something like relief crossed Damien's face, quick and unguarded. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. Thank me if we all live through this."

That got a short, humorless laugh out of him, the first thing close to a genuine reaction I had seen from him in weeks. We stood there for another minute, the woods quiet around us, neither of us too ready to be the one who walked away first.

By the time I got back to the apartment, Lena was awake, sitting up on the couch with her knees pulled to her chest, the note I had left her still in her hand.

"Where'd you go?" she asked, not accusing but tired.

"Damien. He's scared and wants to help, and I think we should let him." I sat down beside her, and she leaned in to me automatically, like her body had already learned the shape of where I was supposed to be.

"That's a lot for someone who spent months on the other side of this."

"Change sides when they finally see what they're standing next to."

She was quiet a moment, her head against my shoulder, and I felt the tension in her loosen, degree by degree, in the way it always did when we had one of these moments that was not about elders or councils or twenty-two year old secrets.

“I’m glad you’re mine,” she said finally, quiet enough that I almost missed it.

“I’m glad you’re mine too,” I said, and meant it more than any words I had spoken in that stone hall last night, and for a while, just a while, we let the rest of it wait outside the door.