Page 43 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

I’m still in what I had on last night. So is he. Our boots are by the bed. There’s nowhere in this realm I have to be for another hour, and I haven’t woken up in another person’s bed in longer than I can put a number to.

His arm is across me above the waist. It went there somewhere in the night. He’s warm the whole way down my back and I lie there and let that go on longer than I need to.

I fed badly in Vampiria and I’ve been on the short end of it through four realms since. A sleeping man with his pulse an inch off my ear is the worst place in this castle for me to be lying. I don’t get up.

“You’re quiet this morning,” he says.

I put my hand over his arm and leave it there.

The light off the valley has moved a good way up the wall by the time either of us speaks again.

Then he gets up and dresses. I watch him from the bed. His hair is pushed up on one side where he slept on it and he leaves it that way.

“I’m going to walk the grounds,” he says. He sits on the edge of the mattress to get his boots on. “Myself. Not with an escort.”

“They’ve given us everything since we walked in.”

“That’s what I don’t like about it.”

He looks back at me once from the door with his hand still on it, then pulls it shut behind him.

The room goes quiet. I lie there a moment before I get up. His shirt is over the back of the chair. I put it on and go out to the balcony for the air.

There’s a man at the rail with his back to me.

I go still in the doorway.

I know the signature before he turns around. It’s the same one I’ve read for years off wreckage he left behind him, off the marks on three women I would die for, off ward stones with his work laid down in the foundation, off every ugly thing that’s happened to this pack since the first time he came for it. In all of that it was never attached to a face.

He turns around.

He came here to talk, not to fight. That’s the first thing and he’s made sure of it. His hands are empty and he keeps them where I can see them.

The second thing is that he’s beautiful, I wasn’t ready for it. Most fae are. This is the kind people turn around in the street for. Dark hair pushed back off a high forehead, gray coming in at one temple and nowhere else. High cheekbones, a long jaw, a mouth that looks like it’s enjoying something. Tall and lean, in a plain dark coat with nothing under it to hide a weapon in. His face settled somewhere in its forties a long time ago and stayed there.

Nothing about him looks like what he’s done.

He’s standing at the rail of another man’s guest quarters as though somebody put it at his disposal.

I stay exactly where I am.

Under the signature I already know, there’s another one running beneath it, older and rotten through, decades of his own work layered down over the top of whatever he started as.

“Say what you came to say,” I tell him. “Then get off this balcony.”

“I came to talk.” He doesn’t move off the rail. “Not to fight you. You of all people know the difference between the two, so let’s not pretend it is.”

“You have until I decide otherwise.” He stays where he is.

“The third one is in the Purification Chambers,” he says.

I don’t answer that.

“You have two. The third one you were never going to find, because it isn’t in an archive and it isn’t in anybody’s history. It’s in the Chambers, under a floor I walked on for a long time before you were born.”

“Why would you hand me that?”

“Because I need them together as much as you do.” He watches the valley while he says it. “Not for your reasons. That’s all you’re getting from me on it.”