Page 42 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“I always have.”

His hand is hot. That heat goes up my arm, through my chest, low into my stomach. I stand in his room and let it.

I’ve had men. Never one I couldn’t see the whole way through before he put a hand on me. I knew what they wanted before they knew it. It made all of it small.

I have no idea what this one does next. Standing here not knowing is worse than any of it and I’m not going anywhere.

His grip changes. It settles, the way a hand settles when it has decided to stay.

“You should sleep,” he says.

“I won’t.”

He lets go of my wrist. He sits down on the bed with his forearms on his knees and his hands hanging between them.

“Sit, Nyxiana. There is quiet enough in this room for the both of us.”

The word order is old. It isn’t how he speaks. It isn’t how anybody has spoken in a very long time. Underneath it there’s a formality that belongs to a place I couldn’t put a name to.

He doesn’t hear himself do it.

I’ve spent months trying to get a clean read off this man. Tonight he hands me a sentence nobody living uses. He doesn’t know he’s done it.

I sit down.

Not on the chair. On the bed, an arm’s length from him, back against the post, feet on the stone. He stays where he is.

The talk goes small after that. He wants to know why fae bread tastes the way it does. I have no idea and I say so. He asks how far the road runs east of this valley. I don’t know that either. I’ve been the one in the room with the answer my entire adult life. Tonight I’ve got nothing for him at all. He tells me about a border he walked in Norway a hundred years ago where the snow came in sideways for nine days.

“Did anybody come out to you?”

“The farmer’s wife brought bread twice.” He takes a moment with it. “She left it on a stone and went back inside.”

Below us a door shuts. A woman laughs. The valley takes it and gives back nothing.

Every instinct I have says get up and go back down that corridor to my own room and sit with what I read until morning.

The star on my wrist is still warm.

I should go.

I stay.

At some point he puts his back against the wall behind the bed. At some point I put my head down. He doesn’t reach for me. I don’t move away from him.

Every word I said to him tonight was true. I’ve never lied to this man and I didn’t start in his room in the middle of the night.

I also told him the inside of him is closed off to me. I let him take that as all of him. I said nothing about the part that isn’t closed.

The light goes on crossing the ceiling. His breathing evens out beside me and doesn’t change again.

I’m asleep before I’ve worked out one word of what I’ll say to him in the morning.

Chapter 26

Nyxiana

Iwake up in his bed with the valley already bright outside the balcony door.