Page 40 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

It opens fast. He wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t lying down. He was standing near that door with the whole night in front of him.

He’s still dressed. Collar open, sleeves shoved back off his forearms, archive dust in his hair where he’s run his hand through it. His shoulders take up most of the doorway. He has one hand high on the doorframe and he leaves it there.

He waits.

I’ve walked into every room of my life with the first sentence already picked. I walk into this one with nothing.

He steps back and lets me through. The door shuts behind me.

His room is the twin of mine. Pale stone, heavy bed against the far wall, a door standing open onto a balcony over the valley. The only light comes up off the streets below. It crosses the ceiling in opal and gold and green.

He doesn’t ask me why I’m here.

Any other man would. He’s been the one nobody asks his whole life. He won’t do it to somebody else.

That’s worse than being asked.

So I talk first.

“On the balcony,” I say. “You put a step between us before I could. You decided what that meant.”

“I decided you’d changed your mind.”

“I hadn’t.”

He takes that without any expression at all. It doesn’t go anywhere near his face.

“You could have said so at the rail.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t.” He isn’t accusing me of it. He’s putting it where it goes. “So I filled it in with what I had.”

“With what every other room has handed you.”

“It’s a good record,” he says. “Nine times out of ten it’s right.”

I read everyone. I don’t aim it and I can’t switch it off. It started before I could walk. Every room I have ever walked into hands me all of it whether I want it or not. Standing in front of this man I get his heat, his height, the dust in his hair. Nothing else. He’s a wall with a light behind it.

So I tell him that, because it’s the only true thing I have that I can give him.

“I read everyone,” I say. “Four hundred fae in that hall the first night, all of them at once, every one of them wanting a thing off me. I read the guard on the stair tonight without turning my head. I read the woman who left the breakfast outside my door before I was awake. I read Lachlan through two floors of stone the night we came in.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

I shrug. “It’s my life.”

I take hold of the back of the chair by the window.

“I’ve never got at you. Not once. Not from a hundred yards, not from here. Standing in this room, nothing is coming at me. You’re the only person who has ever done that.”

He takes a breath and lets it out. His hand comes off the doorframe.

“You read me when I had my hand on that stone.”

“The map answers to you. That’s why the reading ran through you.”

It’s the answer I gave him coming down off that ridge, word for word. It stops the same distance short of the question.