Chapter 4
THE TAVERN
TYRELL
I heard footsteps behind me. Three sets. All too familiar.
I turned as my brothers came into view, their rhythms unmistakable even before the light fell on them.
“Really?”
“Yes,” Carter said.
“How did you even—”
“You texted Destiny,” Darius said evenly. “Destiny texted Sage. Luna moved the Alpha. The information chain in this pack is short.”
Marcus was pulling his hoodie on, looking like a man dragged away from something he hadn’t finished.
Marcus shook his head. "We were right there. My very pregnant mate was finally comfortable on my lap, and the night was going exactly as I intended." He looked at us evenly.
"Then Destiny." He paused. "Sage read the message.
Her expression shifted, and she looked at me and said, 'Get Ty.
Right now.' Marcus shrugged. "No explanation.
No discussion." He let out a slow breath.
"I've learned not to argue with my pregnant mate, especially when she's looking at me like she already knows something I don't."
“To be fair,” Carter added, “Ty looked as if he were about to step into the river.”
“I was going to the tavern.”
“The tavern is north,” Carter said. “You were heading south.”
I acknowledged that internally and kept moving.
“Let’s go. I need a damn drink,” Marcus said.
***
The memory hit me hard—Carter’s eighteenth birthday.
Beta.
Pops had seen it when he was nine years old and warned us all.
Carter had walked out of the presentation circle, looking like a man who had just been told exactly who he was and was at peace with it.
We went to the tavern that night because that was what you did.
The Monroe table sat in the back-left corner. Marcus sat at its head. Darius, on Marcus's right, held a dark drink, watching with calm focus. Carter, to my left, held his first proper tavern drink, visible to all.
I sat across from Marcus, feeling something in my chest rise with the moment.
Completion, maybe. The four of us gathered at full rank for the first time, Pops’ boys fully stepping into their designations.
We were laughing about something when the door opened.
Six of them.
I clocked them before they fully cleared the threshold. Not a pack, but shifters from a neighboring territory. They were coordinated without training, a specific configuration of men who had talked a good game but didn’t fully understand the players.
They were eyeing Marcus.
Not casual. Not the way you look at someone you recognize. The way you look at something you came to address.
Marcus had already seen them. Of course he had. He lifted his drink, took a measured sip, then set it down with the ease of an Alpha who knew he had the room.
Under the table, without looking, he set his hand flat on the surface once.
Our signal. Pops had built the signals when we were boys; Elder Henry had sharpened them, and ten years of training had made them reflexive. One flat hand on any surface meant eyes up, stay loose, wait for me.
Carter stopped mid-sentence.
Darius went still.
I set my drink down.
The six men crossed the tavern. The one in front was Alpha-presenting, a big dude in his mid-thirties, with his ego showing before he even opened his mouth. He stopped at the edge of our table and looked at Marcus.
"Been hearing a lot of talk about the Mystic Warriors," he said. "We came to see who was really running things here, and from the look of this table, that Alpha seat is open."
You could hear a pin drop; the tavern was that quiet.
Marcus looked up at him. Dead in the eye.
"It doesn't," Marcus said.
The man smiled.
"Six Alphas," he said. "Four of you. And one of you presented Beta today." He let that hang. "Just running the numbers."
Carter tilted his head slightly to the right.
Darius cracked his knuckles.
Marcus set his glass down. Stood up.
We came out from behind the table the way Elder Henry had drilled us — not scrambling, not reactive, with the unhurried precision of four trained warriors.
The circle formation was instinct. Marcus at the front, me to his right, Darius to his left, Carter at the back, covering the angle — the same positions we had run in the training yard a thousand times, assigned by rank and by the specific shape each of us brought to the formation.
What people outside the pack didn't know was that the Monroe brothers had been trained to fight as a unit since childhood. We didn't need to talk or signal in a fight.
We only needed to know where the others were, and we always did.
The six men came fast. They had planned it that way — to overwhelm us with the numerical advantage they believed they had. What they had not prepared for was that we stayed ready.
Marcus took the Alpha in front without hesitation — not the way you take someone apart to prove a point, but the way you take a problem apart because it must be solved. Clean. Efficient.
Two approached from the left. I let the first make his move, then diverted the second into the space the first left. Within about four seconds, the challenge shifted from two to one.
Darius materialized on my right without being asked — he had already handled his — and we were moving before the next one was fully in range.
Carter didn't fight like most Betas. He fought as Pops trained him, embracing his nature. His style wasn't aggressive; he moved sideways, covered angles, and appeared where enemies might strike from behind, cutting them off.
Twice, I sensed a change behind me, turned to see Carter handling the situation and moving to the next spot.
Another Alpha was quickly approaching Marcus from his blind spot, committed and counting on Marcus being occupied with the Alpha in front of him. Carter stepped into the gap, put the man down efficiently, and looked up.
His eyes met mine across the space between us.
And he grinned. “One-hit-a-quitter, my boy.”
The laugh that erupted from me was unexpected.
"You good over there?" Carter called across the room, ducking a swing with the casual ease of a man who had already seen it coming.
"I'm excellent," I said, redirecting my current problem into the wall. "Having a great time."
"Darius looked like he was going to take notes," Carter said.
"I did not take notes," Darius said flatly from somewhere to my left. A brief pause. "I retained information."
Carter absolutely lost it.
Even Marcus, while completely drilling the lightweight in front of him, made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was in the ballpark.
The four of us stood over the six on the ground, two completely knocked out and the other four damn near close.
“Get them out of here,” Marcus said to the Gammas standing in formation at the door.
“Yes, Alpha.” They said in unison.
The mess was cleaned up quickly.
There was a clap that came from the right.
Elder Henry was at the bar. He smiled briefly, then raised his glass toward us.
We went back to our table.
Carter sat down, looked at the three of us, and said, with complete sincerity: "Best birthday I've ever had."
Darius looked at him. "You've had eighteen birthdays."
"This is still the best one."
"That's not a high bar."
"Darius. Let me have it."
"You can have it. I'm simply providing context."
Marcus leaned back in his chair, relaxed after defending his Alpha role against six challengers, now hearing his two youngest brothers debate birthday rankings. His expression was the most relaxed I’d seen all year.
He looked at me.
"Pops would've been proud," he said. Quiet. Just for the table.
"Yeah," I said. "He would've."
We stayed at that table until last call, and nobody bothered us for the rest of the night.
That was the night we earned a seat at our Pops’ table.
I looked at my brothers beside me as I tried to carry the thing in my chest. The tavern wasn’t going to fix it. But I had walked into worse rooms than this one.
And I had never walked into any of them alone.
"Let’s go get that drink," I said.
We walked to the tavern.
***
Carter racked the pool balls without being asked. Darius got the drinks. Marcus sat across from me and did what he does, staring and calling it patience.
I played a game and said nothing that mattered.
Second game, Carter scratched on the eight ball. In the quiet after, I heard myself say:
"It's been a year."
No one rushed to respond. They never did.
I hesitated for a moment, took the shot, and watched it miss by an inch. I gently set the cue down and continued.
“The sex is—” I stopped, dragging a hand across my jaw before starting again. “She is—none of that is the issue. That’s the furthest thing from it. I need that understood first.”
“Understood,” Darius said evenly, with Carter nodding beside him.
Marcus didn’t move, didn’t interrupt.
"She is holding back," I said. “It's as if she built a door around her heart, refusing to let me in. I show up, giving her no reason not to trust me.” I paused. "I know her past and what it cost her to get here. I don't resent any of it. I just—
"Feel it," Marcus said.
"Yeah."
Marcus leaned back slightly, letting it settle before responding. “It’s not soft, Ty. She’s your mate. Whether she means to or not, she carries a piece of you, and when she shuts that off, you feel the weight of it. That’s not weakness.”
He held my gaze.
“That’s the bond trying to finish what it started.”
Carter leaned on his cue and said, "She's crazy about you, though. Like — everybody knows it. That's not even a topic for discussion."
"Carter’s right," Darius said. That was not a phrase Darius used lightly. Carter looked briefly delighted. "She talks about you in training. Real talk. She wants to make you proud. That’s not someone with a closed heart. That’s someone who doesn’t yet know it’s safe to open it."
I let that sit.
"So what do I do?" I said. Not really a question. More like the sound someone makes when they already know the answer and are tired of hearing it.
Marcus didn’t hesitate. “You keep doing what you’ve been doing.”
"Especially when it's hard," Carter added.
I nodded once, picked the cue back up, and let the rhythm of the game carry us forward. We didn’t need to say anything else. We rarely did.