The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 26: THE PATRIARCH

COLE

I expected my father to oppose me at every turn. I expected him to rail against the delay, against the deadline, against the ceremony, against my unwillingness to coerce Lena into agreeing to this charade willingly. I did not expect him to ask to speak with her in private, and the fact that he'd done so unsettled something deep in my gut as I drove to his house that night.

He greeted us at the door himself, which was not surprising in and of itself but was made so by the fact that my father did not greet us at all. Guests at his home were expected to stand in his study until he summoned them, and the sight of him in the front foyer, standing beneath the soft glow of the porch light, his hands clasped loosely at his back, was enough to make my stomach knot itself into a tight, unhappy ball. "Lena," he said, and there was something in his carefully measured tone that had me wincing even before he'd finished speaking. "Thank you for coming. I know you have little reason to believe anything my family says, and I mean to change that, one honest conversation at a time, beginning with tonight."

She sent a glance my way, her brows drawing together in that way they did whenever she was hesitant or uncertain, and I gave her a single, sharp nod. I would not have let her walk into that house alone if there'd been any other way.

"Alone," he replied to whatever unspoken question I'd been about to ask, and I forced myself to step back, to let her walk into the house and his study with him, trusting, however grudgingly, that whatever lessons Astra had been drilling into her over the past few days would be enough to keep her safe, even if something did go wrong.

I paced the length of the hallway outside his study for what felt like an hour, though in reality was only twenty minutes, straining my ears against the heavy wood door, catching only mumbles of half-heard conversation in reply. Noah eventually found me that way, sliding into the hallway chair I'd claimed for the waiting, and said nothing at all as he sat, simply waiting, just as I did. "You think he's telling her the truth?"

"I don't know what my father's idea of the truth is at this point," I muttered, running a hand through my hair in frustration. "Everyone has their own version of events, don't they? Damien's version, Marcus's version, Thorne's version of what happened.

whatever little there is that he knows, anyway. I don't know that there isn't a single fact in this entire situation that hasn't been twisted to fit someone's agenda."

"Except you," Noah said simply. "And what you know, or don't know, about what's happened. That's remained pretty consistent, I think, throughout all of this."

I didn't have an answer for him, not really, because he was right, and because saying that out loud, acknowledging that, and admitting that this was something that had been consistently true was something I wasn't prepared to do. Not yet.

The door to the study finally opened almost an hour later, and Lena stumbled out looking ashen, her tears long since dried, but the remnants of their saltiness still clinging to the edges of her cheeks, a look of such raw, unrestrained emotion in her eyes that it took every ounce of my resolve not to cross the hall and pull her into my arms, in front of whomever my father had thought fit to eavesdrop on their conversation.

"Lena..."

"I'm alright," she said, though the way her voice shook, the way her shoulders had a kind of tight, hunched tension to them, said otherwise. "I need some air. Can we just go outside for a minute?"

I managed to get her to the back porch, the cool night air wrapping around us both as she stood there, silent, staring out at the darkened yard. "Your father knew my mother," she said suddenly, her voice barely more than a whisper, directed at the trees rather than me. "He didn't just know about her bloodline. He knew her. They were friends before the m******e, before any of it. Before the packs were at war. Apparently their territory borders had been pretty close to one another long ago, and it seems he tried to warn her that the fighting was coming, that he thought it would spread to their packs as well. That he'd helped her disappear before the m******e, before Ridgeview found her, that he'd taken care of the necessary paperwork to make her official transfer into the human world so no one would be able to track her down, find her, or hurt her."

I blinked at her, the words settling heavily in my chest as I processed them, not only because they'd been coming from my father, of which I was aware, but because a part of me had been completely blindsided by them. "I didn't know any of that happened."

"There's more," she said quietly, turning to look at me then, her eyes searching mine. Something in her expression, in the raw vulnerability there, made my heart stop, made me ache in a way I wasn't prepared for. "He said that the reason he wanted me to be claimed publicly, in front of the council, as your mate, under Silverclaw protection, was because there was a pack law clause he'd unearthed, an old one, that protected mates of pack alphas from being used as pawns in territory disputes between packs, so long as the claiming had taken place in the presence of the council and under the alpha's protection. That he thought it was the best way to keep me safe, to keep me from being used, period, and that the ceremony wasn't really about leverage the way he'd made it seem. It was more about protection, really."

I stared at her for a long moment, my thoughts whirling, processing every word, every syllable she'd just said. "Did he tell you why he didn't just tell me that, why he pretended it was for leverage, when he clearly knew he needed to convince me?"

"He said," she hesitated, and if not for the fact that I knew what his family had done to her, what his father and his brother and even his grandfather had done to her, I might have thought she was showing some modicum of kindness towards my father in that moment. He said he thought you'd have argued with him about the strategy, but you would have argued less about protecting me if you'd known it was necessary. That the reason he'd told you what he did was because he wanted you to think it was in your best interests to convince me to agree to it, because he didn't think there was much time, and he didn't think you'd be willing to have a conversation about protecting me if he made it about you."

"He said, and this is going to sound horribly self-serving coming from me, I know, but he said that he's spent thirty years learning that it's fear, not love, that makes people do the things they do, even if the people doing them are lying to themselves about it all the while."