Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Gray
The Magnolia Club hasn’t changed since I was twelve, dragged here in a blazer two sizes too big to learn which fork went with the salad course.
The same dark paneling, the same oil portraits of men who built fortunes on other people’s backs and called it legacy, and the same weight coming down off every square inch of the place.
My father is already seated when I arrive, centered at his usual table with a clear line to the door. He taught me to do that.
“Gray.” He doesn’t stand or offer his hand, just gestures at the chair across from him like I’m an associate arriving for a quarterly review.
“Harrison.”
His jaw tightens at the first name, which is the only thing I’m going to get out of this lunch.
I sit and take the menu from a server who has known my family for three decades and has the sense to vanish.
The crowd is thin for a Monday, mostly older members doing deals over crab cakes and bourbon, and nobody is paying attention to us.
That’s deliberate. My father doesn’t have public confrontations.
He has private conversations that leave no witnesses.
“I’m glad you came.” He unfolds his napkin. “I was concerned you might let emotion override good judgment.”
“I’m here to listen. That’s all I promised.”
“Fair enough.” He signals the server and orders for both of us without asking. Filet, medium rare, asparagus, the same thing he’s ordered me since I was old enough to chew. “I’ve had time to reflect on Saturday.”
“You mean when you tried to drag Reese away from her own team.”
“I mean when you made a spectacle of yourself in front of half the rowing community.” His voice stays pleasant. Anyone watching would think we were comparing golf handicaps. “Do you have any idea what people are saying?”
“I don’t care what people are saying.”
“You should.” He leans back and studies me the way he studies quarterly reports. “The Lockwood name carries weight in this state and in this sport. You’ve spent twenty-two years building a reputation and you’re prepared to throw it away for a girl you met in February.”
“She’s not just a girl.”
“No, she’s an Omega who has managed to entangle herself with an entire crew of Alphas. Quite the accomplishment.” He lets that sit. “Tell me, does she keep you on a rotation, or is it more of a free-for-all?”
My hands curl under the table. “Watch your mouth.”
“I’m asking what any reasonable person would ask.” He spreads his hands. “A woman arrives, hides her designation, gets herself onto an all-male team, and inside a season she has half of them fighting over her. You don’t find that suspicious?”
“She didn’t manipulate anyone.”
“Didn’t she.” He pulls out his phone, scrolls to something, and sets it on the table between us. “I’ve been doing some research. Your Miss Callahan has a history.”
The screen shows a photo I’ve never seen. Reese, younger, hair longer, wrapped around an Alpha in a Westlake rowing jacket. They’re kissing like nobody else exists.
“Davis Carrington. Stroke seat for Westlake’s men’s team,” my father says. “They dated for several months before she transferred, and by all accounts it ended badly.”
“That’s her past. It has nothing to do with us.”
“Doesn’t it.” He swipes to another photo. Reese at some society event, posed between her parents, her smile tight and her eyes gone somewhere else. “The Callahans are old money. Good family, despite the daughter’s unfortunate designation. They’ve been cooperative about sharing their concerns.”
“You’ve been talking to her parents.”
“Margot and I have mutual acquaintances. She reached out after Saturday, very worried about her daughter falling prey to predatory influences.” He savors the phrase on the way out.
“Reese is a legal adult. Her parents can’t control her.”
“No, but they can cut off her funding, which I understand they’re considering.” He retrieves the phone and tucks it back into his jacket. “A young woman with no resources, dependent on the goodwill of the men she’s attached herself to. That’s a vulnerable position, Gray.”
“She isn’t dependent on anyone.”
“Not yet. But how long before she works out what she’s given up? Her family. Her future. Her name.” He shakes his head, and he’s enjoying himself. “Girls like her run eventually. When the reality arrives and the fairy tale wears through, they disappear. It’s what Sophia did.”
I put my water down before my hand can betray me.
“Don’t.”
“I’m trying to protect you from making the same mistake twice.
” His voice softens into something that would pass for concern in a room with worse lighting.
“You were devastated when Sophia left. I watched you come apart over a woman who chose comfort over conviction, and now you’re arranging the identical heartbreak for yourself. ”
“Reese isn’t Sophia.”
“Isn’t she. A pretty Omega who made you feel chosen, who let you believe you had something real, and then vanished the moment it cost her anything.
” He leans forward. “Sophia lasted three months before she ran to Quinton Whitmore. And here he is again, circling your new Omega. How long do you give it this time?”
“It won’t work.”
“We’ll see.” He smiles, and it’s the one I’ve watched him use in boardrooms before he ends somebody’s career.
“I have friends at the athletic board. On the university council. In the media.” He counts them off.
“One phone call and there’s a feature story about the scandal at Sable Ridge.
The Omega who seduced an entire team. The coaches who looked the other way. The administration that allowed it.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“It doesn’t matter what happened. It matters what the story says.
” He takes a measured sip of water. “How do you think Miss Callahan handles being the center of a media circus? Her face on every sports blog, her designation dissected by commentators, her family’s shame made public.
Do you think she stays and fights, or do you think she does what Sophia did? ”
The worst part is that I don’t know.
I want to believe she’s stronger than Sophia was, more committed, more willing to stand in weather.
But I’ve seen the way she flinches when her mother calls, and I’ve watched the armor come up every time anybody mentions her family.
She’s already carrying more than she’ll admit to, and I don’t know where the limit is.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to come home.” He’s almost gentle now. “End this before it costs you your future. The team will survive. They’ll find another stroke and another captain. But you only get one name, Gray. One family.”
“The pack is my family.”
“The pack is a biological accident. A hormonal response to an Omega in heat.” He waves it off. “It isn’t real, son. It’s chemistry wearing the costume of connection, and in a year or two the bond fades and you’re left holding a ruined reputation.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I.” He sits back and crosses his arms. “Then prove it. If this pack of yours is as strong as you claim, it should survive a little scrutiny. A few uncomfortable questions. Some attention.”
“That’s not scrutiny. That’s sabotage.”
“It’s a test.” His eyes don’t move. “One I suspect your Miss Callahan fails. And when she runs the way Sophia ran, I expect you home and back in your place in this family. No more rebellion, no more pack nonsense. A Lockwood, doing what Lockwoods do.”
The server arrives with our food, and I look at the plate without any interest in it.
“I’m not going to abandon them.”
“I’m not asking you to abandon anyone. I’m asking you to be realistic.
” He cuts into his steak and chews before he goes on.
“The story runs in two weeks unless I make a call. That gives you time to extricate yourself. End things with the girl, step back from the pack, and return to who you’re supposed to be. ”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll assume you’ve made your choice and I’ll make mine.” He signals for the check. “Think carefully. This isn’t a bluff, it’s a promise.”
He pays and leaves without looking back, and I sit alone in the Magnolia Club surrounded by the ghosts of my bloodline, working out how to protect my pack from the man who raised me.
It’s after nine when I get back to the house. I spent the afternoon driving with no destination and it didn’t help.
The living room is dark, but the kitchen light is on. Reese is slumped over the island with her head on her arms, surrounded by textbooks and notecards. Her laptop has gone to sleep and there’s a half-finished mug of cold coffee by her elbow.
She looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with studying. There are shadows under her eyes and her shoulders haven’t come down even in sleep, and I wonder whether she’s been eating, or whether she’s been carrying Saturday around alone while the rest of us pretend the week is going fine.
The right move is to wake her and send her up to bed. Keep my distance, the way I’ve been doing since the lake.
I stand there watching her breathe.
My father thinks she’ll run. He’s decided she’s Sophia with a different haircut, ready to bolt at the first real trouble, and he has never once seen her work.
He doesn’t know what’s underneath. He hasn’t watched her command a boat full of Alphas without raising her voice, or stared down her own mother on a dock and pick us anyway.
She chose this life knowing the price of it. What I can’t work out is whether any part of that was me.
I’ve knotted her. I’ve held her through aftershocks that left both of us shaking, watched her come apart in my arms and put herself back together harder than before. I have never once told her what she is to me, because saying it out loud makes it real, and real things can be taken.
Sophia taught me that.
Reese stirs and mumbles. Her hand goes out across the counter, searching.
I move before I can talk myself out of it, sliding one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and lifting her against me. She’s lighter than she was a week ago and I’m going to say something to Zane about it in the morning.
She doesn’t wake. She turns her face into my shoulder and sighs, and her scent comes up around me, vanilla and citrus and the low note underneath that belongs to nobody else. Mine, the animal part of me says. Pack. Protect.
I carry her upstairs and skip the third step, which creaks.
The house is quiet, everyone either asleep or deliberately elsewhere.
Her room is at the end of the hall. I nudge the door open with my foot, cross to the bed, and lay her down on sheets that smell like her, and she curls onto her side and pulls the pillow in against her.
Every instinct I have says to leave.
I pull the blanket up over her shoulders and tuck it in without waking her, and I take longer doing it than it needs.
“Gray?” Her voice is thick, barely surfaced.
“Go back to sleep.”
“Mmm.” Her hand finds mine on the blanket and holds on until her grip goes slack. “Stay?”
One word, and it takes the floor out from under me.
“I can’t.”
Not because I don’t want to. Because I want it too much, and if I get into that bed I won’t stop myself from marking her, from making her mine in a way that can’t be undone. She deserves better than a claim made in the dark while she’s half asleep and can’t consent to what she’s agreeing to.
She deserves it said out loud, by somebody brave enough to say it. I’m not there yet, and I’m running out of time to get there.
“Tomorrow,” I tell her, though she’s already gone under again.
I press my mouth to her forehead and let myself breathe her in once more. Then I close the door behind me and go downstairs to work out how to burn my father’s world down before he can burn ours.