Page 11 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

She leaves it there and walks toward the lodge without telling me why she did it. I let her go without pushing further. I still want her, still don’t have an answer for why she stood between me and the rest of this yard. Neither one goes away.

A wolf near the porch mutters something to the one beside him, low, meant to carry. I catch enough of it to know what it’s about. Her, standing that close to me. The watch on me tightens another notch. I let it. I turn from the treeline. It’s one step behind me now instead of one step ahead. For the first time in longer than I can remember I’m not going to use it. I walk toward the horse pasture, toward the work Dane’s given me, in front of every wolf still watching to see whether I’ll break. I don’t break.

Every rule I’ve ever lived by says this is exactly backward. Wanting nothing is how a man survives somewhere he isn’t wanted. Wanting her, to be trusted, to be the one who stays instead of the one who’s asked to leave. It should be sending me straight into those trees right now. It’s doing the opposite. I don’t have an explanation ready for that, not one that holds up against everything I’ve learned to expect by now. I’m on Dane’s terms now, suspected, watched, carrying two things I can’t set down. I can’t read her, and standing closer hasn’t changed it. The fact of her, six feet away yesterday and closer than that today, still somewhere in my body like she never actually left.

The exit is right there behind me. It’s always right there. I don’t take it.

Chapter 8

Nyxiana

The lodge common room smells like woodsmoke, and the herbs Lyanna keeps by the hearth, cool morning light coming in through the windows behind me. Harper sits closest, her wrist bared on the table between us. Nova and Kari sit past her, close enough to touch. Lyanna stands at Kari’s shoulder already, her healer’s kit open on the bench beside her, though there’s nothing in it that treats what we’re actually here to look at. Three marks, three women I’d bleed for. I still don’t know what Faelan built into their skin.

“I want to read them properly.” I say it to the whole room. “All three, together. It’s the only way I get past guessing.”

Dane stands near the hearth, one shoulder set against the stone. “And you need him for that.”

He means Valen, standing just inside the door where I put him. Rafe hasn’t stopped watching him since he walked in.

“The marks only move when he’s near.” I keep my tone plain. “I need them moving to read them.”

“He’s the reason Kari ended up on the ground yesterday.” Rafe doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. “Now you want him standing over her again.”

“I’m not asking anyone to trust him.” I hold Dane’s eyes, not Rafe’s. “I’m asking for enough distance to work and not enough to lose the read.”

“Get on with it.” Kari has one arm crossed over her chest the other is resting, hand turned palm up, on her knee where the mark sits. “I’d rather know what’s living in my hand than sit here being protected from finding out.”

Lyanna keeps two fingers at Kari’s pulse point the whole time, watching for anything that looks like the flare that dropped her before. “She’s steady,” she says, once, to no one in particular, more for the room’s nerves than mine.

Dane looks at Valen a long moment, then nods once. “Close enough to work. No closer.”

“Walk towards me. Slowly.” I keep my eyes on Harper’s wrist, not on him. “I want to see where the marks start answering you.”

Valen crosses the room at an even pace. I watch for the first sign of a reaction. “There.” I stop him six careful feet out, right as the marks answer. Harper’s wrist warms under my hand. Nova’s hand twitches against her own knee. Kari sucks a breath through her teeth. Lyanna presses her palm steadier against Kari’s skin, watching for any sign of the burn flaring again. Nothing burns. Nobody goes down. I look at Valen next, to see whether he’s steady enough for this to work.

My own read of him gives me nothing so I take him in the only way I have left: the stillness in his hands, one resting against his own thigh. He hasn’t moved since I stopped him, feet planted exactly where I called out the distance. It’s the same stillness I watched him carry through the yard yesterday, when the whole pack turned on him at once. His eyes stay fixed on Harper’s wrist, not on me, gray and steady, giving away nothing at all. That stillness gives me plenty, even while my own instruments are giving me nothing usable.

I could stand here and keep looking at him. It’s the thing I want to do most right now. I make myself stop and turn to the marks instead. I take Harper’s wrist in both hands. My sleeve slides back off mine and the star I was born with shows on the inside of my left wrist, a shade paler than the skin around it. For one moment my own sense reaches for her mark and gets exactly what it always give me - nothing I can hold. Silver-white knotwork sliding out from under me. It has never held still long enough to be anything but damage, now that it’s finally moving, its worse.

Valen’s presence changes that. The knotwork stops.

It sits there, whole, held in one place instead of sliding away from me the second I try to look directly at it. I’ve studied this mark a dozen times since the network came down and never gotten past the same shifting nothing. Now it holds. My sense sinks into the first line of it slowly, deeper than ever before, half expecting it to slip the way it always has. It doesn’t. I don’t understand why yet. I only know that with him this close, it’s the first time I can actually study what Faelan built instead of chasing it across the surface of her skin.

Harper’s mark isn’t just a mark anymore. A line runs from it, faint, continuing past her wrist into something my mind wants to call absence and isn’t quite. I reach for Nova’s mark next, then Kari’s. The same lines run through both, where they should stop at three separate wounds, they don’t. They pick up from each other instead, one design instead of three.

“It’s not damage.” I say it out loud before I’ve fully worked out what I’m looking at. “It’s one thing. A map. A trail.”

Harper leans forward. “A trail to what?”

I follow it from the start on Harper’s wrist, out along the line as far as it runs clean. The first stretch carries a signature I already know, the way I’d know a voice across a crowded room long before I could place the face that owned it.

“Drakoria.” The word feels right the second it’s out of my mouth. “It starts at Drakoria.”

Dane straightens off the hearth. “Starts.”

Kari’s mouth twists into something with no humor in it at all. “Wonderful. My hand’s a road sign now.”

“Not yours.” I glance at her, at Nova. “Yours are still dark. Only Harper’s is clear.”