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Sterling’s anger smoldered. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“So stop sitting there and asking me for help.” Garrett pointed at him.
“I’m asking for information so I can protect all of us,” Sterling snapped.
“I don’t need your help.”
Sterling kicked his deckchair away. The plastic and metal clattered, and he slammed his palms down on the glass in front of his father. “Then let me explain this another way.”
Garrett raised one brow, thoroughly unintimidated. “I don’t respond to threats, physical or otherwise.”
Sterling’s spine arched as every muscle in his body seemed to coil to strike, and his fingernails scratched across the glass. The ocean wind carried the scent of fury, and under that, something sharper: betrayal. He swung his attention to his mother, and spit out each word like a stone. “Why didn’t you say you knew Rodero?”
The words seemed to make the ocean pause for just a moment.
Cerys clutched the edge of the table. “I don’t know Rodero.”
Sterling’s shoulders drew tight, as if he were bristling, and his lips curled back as he spoke. “You are lying.”
I did not move. Garrett did not move.
Sterling ground onwards. “You knew who Winter was. I told you she was Rodero’s daughter. Why didn’t you tell me werewolf paternity tests are not done? Why didn’t you tell me I am the only one? That my registration was mired in controversy? That you knew how to find Rodero in Montana a decade after the fact or that my biological father still disputes I am his, and that—”
Cerys jumped to her feet. “You aren’t his! You are mine! You were never his!”
Sterling swung his attention to his father. “I spoke to you twice. You didn’t tell me about this.” Contempt curled around his voice like smoke.
“This what?” Garrett growled.
“That my mother already had dealings with Winter’s father and now suddenly Winter is my mate? If I’d known my ties to Rodero, a scandal, the Elder Council, I’d have played my hand differently. Instead, I got blindsided and exposed. My pack thinks I am a liar and it is in shambles. My mate is in danger. I understand Mom’s reaction, but you? You promised me. So do not sit there and tell me about how I am supposed to uninvolve myself and how unimpressed you are. I am not impressed. The only thing I ever asked you for and you couldn’t manage it!”
Cerys sank back into her seat, beautiful face a mask of grief and some old, badly-healed wound I couldn’t comprehend. I didn’t care how much she hated me, or hated what I represented: my heart broke for her.
Sterling’s fingers crunched through the table as he snarled at his father. “I did not come here to have this fight, but if you want to act like I am the one who failed, we are having it. You are going to give me what I want, because you didn’t give me what I was promised. It was the only thing I ever asked you to promise me: that if I ever needed to know the truth, you’d tell me. I trusted that. I believed in that. I put my faith in that. I trusted the safety of my mate and my pack to that, and you failed, so I am here for payment. This is not a negotiation. This is debt collection.”
Sterling released the edge of the table, then slowly folded back into his chair like a dragon returning to a throne of coins and trinkets. Moonlight shone off the hazel of his irises, and the salt ocean scent mingled with his fury. I slid my hand along his. He twitched all over, then shifted his grip to seize my fingers and brought my hand to his lips. He kissed my knuckles lightly, eyes hard and sharp, but his grip tight.
Garrett rested his elbows on the table and laced his fingers together. He watched Sterling for a moment before he spoke. “I’m the one who told your mother to say nothing. She wanted to have this conversation with you when you first told me about Winter.”
“Oh?” Sterling prodded like he drove his own father to the gallows with a switch.
Garrett faced confessing to his son directly and honestly. “I figured I’d take you aside at a better time when things were calmer between you two. Rodero’s been a non-factor in your life for twenty years. I didn’t think there was any urgency.”
“He’s been in my life all along, hasn’t he,” Sterling growled. “Mom knew how to find him.”
Garrett shook his head. “Yes, we did, but we didn’t contact him directly. The doctors that saved your life check in every once in a while to see how you’re faring. They took an interest in your survival, so I made a phone call when you wanted to form SnowFang.”
Wait, what? I glanced at Sterling, then at Garrett. “So which pack did the SnowFang application funnel through?”
“Didn’t,” Garrett said. “Went straight to Rodero, but we got the information from a contact in FrostFangare.”
The FrostFangare were the oldest Elder pack there was, with a documented history going back well over a thousand years, and according to them, they were the original pack from which all other packs were descended. The claim was, of course, disputed.
How had the Mortcombes got mixed up with the FrostFangare? And what doctors were they talking about? And saving Sterling’s life? It must have had something to do with Sterling’s silver scar, which had been shelved as a for when we have a quiet moment to discuss how someone used silver on you time.
I was going to need a corkboard and some index cards to keep track of all this.
Still, Cerys had managed (somehow) to get to my father regarding Sterling, and with a couple of billion dollars behind her, should I have really been surprised she’d managed to drag her silver-wounded son to the FrostFangare and howl at them until they’d agreed to save him?
