The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 40: WHAT MY FATHER WON’T SAY

COLE

My father did not speak until the side door had sealed shut behind us both.

A narrow, stone-walled passage stretched before us, lit poorly by a lone bulb that had obviously been installed at some point in the last few decades, unlike the torches outside, which had been lit hours ago. The air was thick with the smell of dust and old paperwork. My father's back was to me as he stood behind me, his hands clasped loosely together behind his back, using the same posture he always did prior to a difficult conversation we were both about to have.

"You did well tonight," he said finally.

"That's not why you pulled me out of my own claiming ceremony."

He turned then, whatever softness had been in his features during the ceremony now absent entirely in favor of the hardened lines that had made their home in his face during every council meeting I'd ever been forced to attend as a child and pretended to understand what the adults in the room were debating.

"Elder Vane came to me before the ceremony," he said simply, his voice low but firm. "He wanted to know why Aiden Holt had shown up in my halls."

I stiffened despite myself, though tried not to let it show. "Aiden's a friend of Lena's. He has every right to be here."

"That's not what Vane wanted to know, Cole, and you know it." My father's voice remained even, but there was an undercurrent of something sharp running through it that was not usually there. "He wanted to know why a man who has supposedly been dead for twenty-two years was standing in my halls, watching my council table as if looking to find someone."

It took me a moment to formulate a response to his question. If I gave him a completely false one, it wouldn't make things any easier.

"How much do you know," I asked at last, "about what happened twenty-two years ago?"

"Enough to know that it wasn't what the others have always said it was."

There was a flicker of something behind his eyes that vanished far too quickly to do anything but frustrate and confuse me at the same time. "Be careful what you dig into, son. Some graves are meant to stay sealed."

"That's a good way to say you know what they are."

My father held my gaze for a long moment, longer than I thought he ever had in the past few years and made me think he actually would tell me before shaking his head in the same way he always did when a conversation was going in a direction he never meant to go. "You have a mate now. A bond that binds you to this pack and that girl and all the traditions that come with both. Focus on one, let the older ones worry about the other."

"Older ones that apparently involve someone at that table tonight."

He said nothing about his accusation, instead choosing to walk away from me, but left me lingering in the hall for a few minutes longer than I thought was necessary. I ran over what little conversation we had had in my head, searching for something I may have missed. Not much, in fact.

My father had always been good at saying just enough to give the impression that he knew exactly as much as he wanted to and no more.

I found Lena waiting for me in a quiet corner of the hall, Astra at her side as they spoke in hushed tones before their conversation ceased immediately upon seeing me.

"Well?" she asked.

"He knows Aiden's here. Vane told him." I sat down on the bench across from us both. "He wouldn't say much else. But when I asked if it was true that someone at that table had something to do with whatever happened twenty-two years ago, he didn't correct me."

Astra's gaze darkened a fraction. "That's not nothing."

"It's not enough either," I said. "He cut it off quick enough after that. Told me to focus on the bond and let the old men worry about the old business."

"Sounds like something a guilty old man would say," Astra muttered.

Lena leaned forward, her voice barely above a whisper. "Okafor kept watching me the entire ceremony. Aiden won't say why, not here. And now your father has effectively confirmed someone at that table has something to do with whatever Aiden's been looking for for twenty years."

"We've got a lot pointing to one table for a number of reasons, I don't like it," I said after a pause. "Especially so soon after the initial incident."

Noah showed up a moment later, Marcus trailing behind him with his laptop bag still around his shoulder, looking completely ill-suited to the celebratory mood of the evening. "You three lot look like you're planning a funeral, not a claiming."

"We might be doing both," Astra said without looking up. "We don't know yet."

"Then what happened that set it off?"

Lena gave him the bare bones of the story, the tension of it all only ebbing enough to keep her voice under control by the time she reached the end. By the time she stopped talking, Noah's jaw was taut with the same sort of tension he'd always displayed to me as a younger man. I'm used to seeing that look and seeing it more often than not, and if that wasn't a sign of something wrong, nothing was.

"So, so we've got two strange elders, one reluctant father and one man who has apparently decided to keep his secrets for no good reason," Noah said, his tone dark. "That's a lot of somebody knows, something for no answers."

"Welcome to the last two weeks of my life," Lena said with a sigh, and for once her weariness was so obvious, I found myself reaching for her hand without much thought to what I was doing, needing the contact just as much as she did.

"We aren't going to get any answers out of anyone in this room tonight," I said, my gaze landing on Noah again. "Not here. But we'll need to talk to Aiden. In earnest. And in private. Tomorrow, if he can manage it."

"He can," Lena said flatly. "He wants this over just as bad as we do. Perhaps more."

Across the room, I caught sight of my father again, engaged in quiet conversation with Elder Vane, both keeping their gazes firmly fixed on anything but us. And if whatever it was they were saying to each other had nothing to do with old business at all, I was willing to believe they wouldn't have given it a second thought otherwise.