Chapter 210 TELL THEM OR DON'T

AMARIS

I do not sleep.

I lie in my bed at eleven at night with the curtains open, because closing them felt like too much commitment to the idea of rest, and I stare at the ceiling and hold the same argument I have been holding since I walked out of that bathroom this afternoon and closed the door on the two lines like they might follow me.

Nia was in the kitchen when I came out. She made me toast I did not eat and tea I did not drink and she asked me nothing, and I stood at the counter holding the warm mug for its warmth and gave her nothing back, because there was nothing to say yet. She took the untouched toast away at some point without comment. That woman deserves a monument. I will commission one when I am no longer having a nervous breakdown on a schedule.

The argument goes like this.

Tell them.

All three of them, at once, same room. Rip the plaster off. Stand at the head of the table, deliver the half sentence, and let the room do whatever the room is going to do while I deal with the aftermath from a standing position, which is my preferred position for aftermaths, having had practice.

My mind reviews this proposal and rejects it in under a second. Putting Corvin and Ryker and Rowan in one room with this information is not a plan. It is a detonation with seating. And the person standing closest to the blast radius, as ever, would be me, holding the pin and smiling.

Fine. Separately, then.

In what order.

And that is the wall the argument drives into every single lap, because the order is not neutral. The order talks. Whoever hears it first is the one I went to first, and in this particular house, with these particular men, going to someone first is a sentence in a language all three of them speak fluently. And here is the part I keep walking up to and then walking away from, the way you circle a hot stove: I have a preference about the order. It is already in me, fully formed. I just have not let myself read it yet, because reading it means knowing something about my own heart that I am not prepared to know at eleven at night with a positive test wrapped in tissue at the bottom of my bathroom bin like contraband.

I turn onto my side. The pillow is wrong.

I turn onto my other side. The pillow is wrong in a new direction.

I lie on my back again and the ceiling resumes its shift.

I run the Ryker version.

I build the scene properly, because if I am going to torture myself I will do it with production values. His room, probably, or the wall he likes. I sit him down. I say the thing. And then I try to render his face and the projection fails, every time, static where the reaction should be, because Ryker’s face has never once done what I predicted in any situation I have ever put him in. I have watched that man receive a siege report and a breakfast tray with the same expression. He is the only person I know who processes catastrophe and toast identically. I have no data for this. There is no rehearsal for Ryker. There is only the live performance.

I run the Rowan version.

This one renders in terrible high definition. Rowan sits. Rowan hears it. And then Rowan thinks, because Rowan always thinks before he speaks, and the thinking takes longer when the thing is bigger, and this is the biggest thing I have ever handed another human being, so the silence would be geological. I put myself in the chair across from him inside my own head and I sit in that imagined silence, watching his jaw, watching his hands, waiting for the machine to finish, and even the imaginary version of it uses up something in my chest. I do not know if I have the nerve for the real one. I am a brave woman about most things. Rowan’s silences are not most things.

I run the Corvin version.

I get approximately four seconds in before I stop, because the Corvin version has layers under its layers. The husband layer. The Alpha layer. The heir he once demanded across a dining table like an invoice, and the man who carried me a breakfast tray with military corners, and the arithmetic he would run behind those eyes about six weeks and three men, and I cannot get to the bottom of a single one of those layers at this hour on this little sleep, so I close the whole file and back out of the room of my own head with my hands up.

I sit up.

I put my feet on the floor. The boards are cold. The pack house is quiet around me in that deep settled way it goes after midnight, everyone’s doors closed on their own separate secrets, of which this building now contains a museum-quality collection, and mine is the newest acquisition.

And sitting there in the dark, feet on the cold floor, I think about my mother again.

The way I have been thinking about her since the bathroom tiles. A woman with nothing. No choices, no allies, no good options, a pack that made its opinions known and a belly that made hers. I try to imagine her lying awake agonizing over the diplomatic sequencing of an announcement, and the image will not form, because I do not think she had the luxury of order. I think she did not get to choose who to tell first or how or when. I think she survived the next minute, and then the minute after that one, and she stacked the survived minutes up like stones until they made a road, and the road led to me.

I can do that.

I can survive the next minute.

The next minute is just this. The bedroom. The dark. My feet on the floor. The house breathing around me. Survived.

The minute after that, the same.

I sit there for a long time, doing nothing but that, stacking minutes, and somewhere around one in the morning, without ceremony, a decision surfaces out of the stack, whole and already finished, the way decisions do when you finally stop supervising them.

Ryker first.

I do not examine it. That is the one rule. I have changed my mind seven times tonight and I do not have the resources for an eighth, so the decision gets to walk past security unquestioned. Ryker first. In the morning. Ryker first, and then whatever happens after that happens after that, and I will meet it standing, the way I have met every other thing this house has thrown at me since the day I arrived with one suitcase and no wolf.

I lie back down.

I pull the blanket up and close my eyes.

I do not sleep. But I stop arguing with myself, and the ceiling and I call it a truce, and that is as close to rest as I am going to get tonight.