Page 100 of The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate
I nodded. I was young. I did not understand what it meant to pay it in full.
I understand now.
I signed the deployment order. I shook Terrance’s hand on the gravel three days before the ambush and asked him how his back was, an old training injury. He told me it was holding up fine, sir. I clapped his shoulder. I told him to be careful. I sent him out.
He didn’t come back.
The chair creaks once when I shift my weight. Somewhere down a corridor, a clock chimes the half hour. I have not wept since I was eight years old, in my father’s hospital room the night before he died. I learned then that an alpha does not weep. The lesson stuck.
This is the tax. I pay it.
The door to my office opens quietly.
I do not look up. I know her step before she has fully crossed the threshold. The bond brightens slightly in my chest, a quiet pulse of her. The door closes behind her with the same care she opened it with.
She does not speak.
She comes around the side of the desk, her bare feet making almost no sound on the rug. She rotates my chair a quarter turn so that I am facing her. Then, she’s lowering herself to the floor in front of my chair and settling between my knees, her arms resting at my waist. Her cheek finds my thigh. Her dress is soft against my hand when I drop it onto her shoulder.
I leave it there.
She does not say anything. She does not try to coax me to talk. She does not tell me it’s not my fault. She simply sits at my feet with her head in my lap, her breathing finding a slow, steady rhythm under my hand, and she stays.
My fingers move to her hair. The pin has slipped slightly, and a loose strand has come down at her nape. I tuck it behind her ear without thinking. She makes a soft, contented sound against my thigh that goes through me like warmth into cold ground.
I close my eyes.
The grief is still there. It has not lifted. But there is something else now, too—under my hand, against my leg, something alive and breathing and patient, and the weight of it does not crush me as the weight of the office alone was beginning to.
I do not know how long we stay there. The light from the window is long gone. The room settles into a deeper darkness. Somewhere far off, a door closes, and the house goes quieter still. My hand is in her hair, she is pressed against my legs, and the bond between us hums low and evenly, asking nothing of either of us.
After a long time, my hand on the back of her head moves, a small pressure, a question.
She comes up, rising off the floor and into my lap without a word. I draw her in, both arms circling her, and she relaxes across my thighs, tucking her legs up against the arm of the chair. One of her hands finds the back of my neck; the other comes up to my shoulder. I press my face into the curve where her throat meets her shoulder, and I breathe her in. Jasmine. Citrus. Her warm, clean skin under all of it. The part of my chest that has been held tight all day loosens by a single degree.
Her hand strokes the back of my head. The pad of her thumb moves at the base of my skull where the tension lives, and my breath escapes me in a long, ragged exhale against her throat that I would not have allowed any other living person to hear. She does not flinch. She does not stop. Her thumb keeps moving. Her other hand has slid up into my hair, and she holds my head against her like I am hers to hold.
“I sent them out there,” I murmur against her skin. I did not mean to speak.
Her hand does not pause. “I know.”
“Fifteen wolves.”
“I know.”
“Terrance’s mother held my hand and thanked me.”
“Lucas.”
I do not lift my head.
“Stop.”
Her thumb keeps moving at the base of my skull. Her other hand stays in my hair. She does not soften it. She does not explain it. She does not give me a way out of it. Just “stop.”
My eyes close. “Sienna.”
Her fingers trace along my hairline.
