The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 16: WHAT ASTRA DIDN'T SAY

COLE

She didn't show up the next day, which was perfectly normal, since she had never had any reason to before, but I still found myself wasting precious minutes looking up and down the bleachers between drills anyway, hoping, just hoping that she might appear.

Noah was the one who caught me doing it during a water break.

"You're doing it again."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're doing the exact same thing that you always do. You're staring at empty seats like they're going to fill up if you concentrate hard enough. He shoved a water bottle into my hands, giving me a shake of his head. "C'mon, man, give her the day. You blew the one chance she gave you, so let her be mad about it before you try doing anything else."

He was right, which sucked, and I spent the entire practice mentally berating myself instead of paying attention to the drills, my mind wandering to a certain set of four drawers in a certain girl's dorm room that I had no business thinking about.

It was my dad who found me afterwards, waiting in my truck in the parking lot, his expression carefully schooled as he regarded me.

"Twenty-two days," he said instead of asking how my practice was. "There's twenty-two days before the council meets, Cole. I've heard whispers. About a girl. Human, or something like it. Ridgeview's already taken up talking about it at their council meetings. Which means our enemies know things about your personal life that you barely even know yourself. His eyes were dark, disappointment cutting into his jaw like it always did when he was disappointed in me, specifically, which was always. "Is it true?"

I could have lied. I'd technically already been lying for a month, if you counted it really, since he had guessed at it, already. But some part of me remembered the way she had looked at me in that restaurant, the way her trust in me had quickly turned to something else, something calculating, and I didn't really want to lie about it anyway, not now. Not when this was already the thing that had gotten me into this situation in the first place.

"Yes," I said simply, after a moment's pause. "It's true."

My father's expression didn't change. If anything, it hardened, as it always did when he had some kind of advantage to take in a situation. "Well, good," he said shortly after. "See that she comes to the house this week. If she's your mate, it would do us all well for the council to see you formally claim her before Ridgeview has the opportunity to take advantage of the loophole in the situation." He was already walking away, as he always was, two steps ahead, three, actually, the whole of his life, before he stopped and said the next thing. The words sent icy tendrils of something unpleasant snaking down my spine. And made me grateful, if only in that moment, that I had not lied about the entire situation. "If her bloodline is as impressive as Ridgeview is making it out to be, that is not a disadvantage, Cole. In a situation like this, with the council so fickle about choosing the future alpha, that is an advantage. Don't waste it being sentimental."

"She's not a bloody advantage." I snapped, before immediately regretting it, because of the way his eyes narrowed at me when he stopped walking entirely, turning around to fully face me.

"Everyone is a chess piece, Cole. And that's not something that should surprise you, coming from me. It's all a matter of who is moving the board, and who is on it." He paused, regarding me with something almost like empathy beneath the carefully constructed mask. Something I had rarely seen from him in my entire, miserable life. "All I'm saying is that I'm not telling you to stop caring about her. I'm saying that caring and strategy are not mutually exclusive, and the sooner you learn to utilize both, the safer she'll be." He paused once more, this time before getting into his car. As if he were debating whether or not he should say something else, perhaps, but in the end, he didn't. He simply said, in a very quiet voice, "Ridgeview isn't sentimental about what they want. If you insist on being the only one at this table who is, you will lose. Both the throne, and her." With that he drove off, leaving me standing alone in the parking lot outside my father's house, the weight of his words settling over me like something heavy and wet and miserable. And I sat there, because I had been doing that a lot lately, in this place specifically, in this house that had supposedly been my home, regarding that one word, that one piece of information. And realizing with a sort of awful clarity that I hadn't just been lying to Lena, that I hadn't just broken her trust in me in some nebulous, emotional sense that I might be able to work my way back from. No, I had lied to her in the most concrete, specific sense possible. I had lied to her, and more importantly, she had believed me. I stared at the last text I had received from her in my phone as I sat there, wondering just how I was supposed to explain to her that the deadline for all of this had gotten exponentially much closer, that the next promise my father was going to make me break was one I didn't know if I could, because it had absolutely nothing to do with my future or the safety of my pack. It had everything to do with the woman who had somehow wormed her way into my chest and made herself at home there. I was about to be forced to break a much bigger promise, and it had little to do with me, and far more to do with her.

I sat in my truck for a long while after that, seeing nothing in particular, running through calculations in my head that had nothing to do with the pack, which was not a thing I had been doing lately. I had eleven days to convince this girl, this incredible, wonderful, terrible girl that had just wasted my life, that a formal claiming wasn't the incredibly bad idea it sounded like. Which was eleven days, I realized, with a sort of dull, sickening horror, to figure out who had given Damien that treaty before either of us had even realized it was missing. And then, somehow, to figure out where to start with the entire, miserable process. I drove slowly on my way home, in no particular hurry to get back to that house, to that pack, to that life, the road stretching endlessly before me, the quiet of it doing little to dull the noise inside my head, my father's words still somehow circling around that one word, leverage, like a dark, unpleasant thing that I somehow hadn't managed to pull out yet, no matter how many times I had tried to talk myself out of listening to them, or out of the fact that, in this instance, I most assuredly did not want him to know what he was talking about.