Page 64 of Merciless Vow
Fenrir Blackwood had always known the right moment. I did not know how. It was one of the things I had stopped trying to understand about my father and simply accepted.
"Open the door, son."
I looked at the elevator panel. If I crossed to the door, she could move. Not out of the elevator, but further into theapartment, further from reach. The guest room was at the other end of the hall. What if she climbed out the window?
"Open the door, Vidar."
I got up and did what my father told me to. From the other side of the door, he looked at me without surprise, without commentary on my appearance, with the total, uncomplicated attention of a man who had made peace with his children being exactly who they were. He was in a loose pair of jeans and a cotton shirt. He held a container in his hands.
I thought about Adolphus Vane. About what the park had looked like when Elias was done with the man. About Dante Lupetto's sons saying they'd handle their sire. About what it meant to have a father who drove into the city before eight in the morning because he'd sensed his son needed something.
"Dad." It came out smaller than I intended.
Fenrir stepped forward, across the threshold. He put an arm around me, the container tucked into one elbow, his other arm around my back. I stood in my own doorway in yesterday's clothes and let my father hold me. He was still larger than me in the way fathers are; not physically, but in some other dimension that had nothing to do with mass.
"Easy," he said, low and even. "Easy, Vidar."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't a language for what was going on in my head. I stood there until the tightness in my chest moved somewhere more manageable, and then I stepped back.
My father came inside. I closed the door. He set the container on the kitchen counter and looked around the penthouse. His eyes found the couch. The undisturbed state that could be seen inside my open bedroom door. The full coffee cup on the counter.
"Sit," he said.
We sat at the kitchen island. I fidgeted. It was too far from the front door.
Fenrir opened the container. The smell of chicken and ginger and the deep warmth of my mother's broth wafted out. It was the smell of every childhood illness, every hard week, every moment in my life when the world had been too loud and home had been the only remedy.
"How did you cope?" I asked.
Dad looked up at me, a brow raised.
"After the betrayal. After—" I stopped. Tried again. "You trusted someone with everything. He used it against you. How did you—" I pressed my hand flat on the counter. "How did you let anyone in again after that?"
Fenrir picked up a spoon and turned it in his fingers. "A man betrays you for one of two reasons. Either he never valued what you had together, or he stopped valuing it when something he wanted more came along. Either way, the failure is his. A man who would rather have solitary power than belong to a pack?" He shook his head. "That's a poverty of the soul. I feel sorry for those men. They spend their whole lives taking, and they never understand what they missed."
"I'm going to lose her, Dad." The words came out of somewhere I hadn't accessed before. "If she leaves… I think I'll go crazy."
"You're not crazy, son. Your mother had you tested."
"I've given her everything. Money, clothes, the best home, a new car. I even gave her access to the business. It's not enough. I don't understand what else there is."
Fenrir smiled. It was a small smile, gentle in a way that managed not to be condescending, which was a skill I had never fully learned. "The best women don't want any of that."
I waited, then I had to prompt him when he looked at me as though I knew the answer. I didn't. "Well?"
"Money, property, power; those are easy things togive. A man gives those because he has them, not because they cost himanything." He looked at me with those steady, dark eyes. "The best women want the one thing that actually costs. The one thing you've been protecting since you were in the womb."
Fenrir put his big hand on my chest, over my heart. It beat sluggishly. Dull. Like something that had been running on reduced capacity for so long it had forgotten what full felt like.
"Is that what this is?" I asked. "Is this… am I in love with her?"
"Probably," my father said.
I sat with that. It should have been a revelation. It felt, instead, like a thing I had known for a while and been refusing to file under its correct heading. Because I didn't know what to do with it? I didn't know how to quantify it. How to assess it. How to control it.
"What am I supposed to do?" I asked.
Fenrir picked up the container of soup and set it in front of me. "You can start with this. Your mother made it this morning. The rest is yours to figure out, Vidar. I can't do that part for you."
