32. Ember
EMBER
He comes in the way he does everything, like the room was always going to let him.
No gun. That's the first thing. Malek Marlowe walks into the cabin with his hands open and visible at his sides, unhurried, a tall spare man in a good coat with gray at his temples and my eyes set in his face, and he doesn't need a weapon because the weapon was never the point with him.
The point was always that you knew, in your body, before he said a word, that he had already decided how this would end.
And the smell of him hits me and the floor tilts.
Cedar. Cedar and bergamot, the oil in his hair, on his hands, the scent that lived in every worst room of my childhood, and six years of distance fold up like paper and I am eleven and eighteen and small again, and for one horrible second my body wants to do what it was trained to do in the presence of that scent, which is go still and wait to be told.
I don't. I plant my feet in the present. I am not eleven. There is a stitched man on the table behind me and four alphas in this room who chose me and a knife taped under the table where my father's own rule told me to put it, and I am not eleven.
The pack moves. I feel them start to close around me, Cass shifting to put himself between me and the door, Knox going low and wide, Rhys's hand drifting. And I lift one hand, just slightly, and they stop.
Because this is mine.
"Hold," I say, low, to them, not taking my eyes off my father. "He's mine. All of you. Hold."
They hold. That's its own kind of love, four alphas with every instinct screaming at them to put their bodies between me and the most dangerous man any of us has ever met, and they hold because I told them to, because they understand what they'd take from me if they didn't.
Malek watches the whole thing. The way they moved. The way they stopped when I raised my hand. Something flickers behind his eyes, and it isn't fear, my father has never been afraid of anything, it's assessment, a man pricing what he's looking at.
"Well," he says. His voice. God, his voice, the same flat patient instrument that read me my failures across a thousand dinner tables.
"You built a pack. I'll admit I didn't see that.
I had you marked as a thing that died alone in the snow, which is what I was told, which I paid good money to be told.
" His gaze moves over the four of them and back to me.
"And instead you've been up a mountain assembling a little court.
Four alphas dancing on your hand. You always did learn the shape of power faster than you let on.
That's mine in you. Whatever else you tell yourself, that part's mine. "
"Nothing in me is yours."
"Everything in you is mine." He says it without heat, a man stating arithmetic.
"I made you. Every useful thing you are, I put there.
The hands that just killed three of my men on that ridge, the mind that placed you on the high ground, the nerve that's letting you stand there and talk to me instead of soiling yourself the way most people do.
I built that. You're the best thing I ever made, and you ran off into the woods and wasted six years proving it to a pack of mountain strays instead of to the family that could have given you the world. "
"You sold me." My voice doesn't shake. I'm distantly amazed it doesn't shake. "I was eighteen. You signed me over to Ardric Easton in a contract. You priced me. The best thing you ever made and you put me on a shelf with a number on it."
"I placed you advantageously." No flicker.
No shame. There's nothing in him to feel it with; I understand that now, fully, finally, standing in front of him.
The thing I spent six years afraid of is just a man who was hollowed out somewhere before I was born and filled back up with appetite and rules.
"It was a good match. The Eastons had timber and shipping lanes I wanted and you were the price of the alliance and it was an honor, the kind of placement most omegas would kill for.
You repaid it by humiliating me. Do you understand that's what you did?
Not hurt me. Humiliate me. The great Malek Marlowe, whose own daughter slipped his leash and made him a man who couldn't hold his own house. "
There it is. The whole of it. Not love, never love, not even the wounded pride of a father. Humiliation. I cost him face, and he has driven up a mountain over the bodies of his own men to collect on it.
"So that's why you came yourself," I say.
"I came myself because some things you don't delegate." He takes a step toward me, hands still open, still visible, still certain the room will let him. "Come home, Ember. That's the offer, and it's more than you've earned. Come home and I can still make something of the mess you've made. Or."
"Or."
"Or I should have killed you the day you were born.
" He says it gently. That's the worst part.
He says it the way you'd note a regret about a business decision, mild, reflective, a man who has clearly turned the thought over many times and found it sound.
"I looked at you in the bassinet and I saw what you'd be, and I had a feeling, the once, that I should end it there.
I didn't. Sentiment, I suppose, the only time it ever got the better of me.
I should have killed you the day you were born and saved us both the trouble of today. "
The bassinet. And there it is, the third thing I kept of my mother, surfacing where I least want it: the shape of her standing in front of his study door with me behind her.
Twenty years I've carried that fragment without understanding it.
I understand it now, all at once, in this kitchen.
I know exactly what she was standing between.
And something in me goes very calm. Calmer than the ridge. Calmer than I've ever been.
"You couldn't have," I tell him.
"I assure you I could have."
"Maybe then." I hold his eyes, my eyes, the eyes he gave me.
"Not now. Not today. Because somewhere between that bassinet and this kitchen, you taught me the rule.
The first rule. The one before all the others.
You said it to me so many times it's the floor under everything else you put in me.
" My hand finds the edge of the table behind me, the underside, the tape.
"Always build a way out. You taught me that.
You taught me to never be in a room without one. "
I pull the knife from under the table.