Page 8 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

That’s the one door I don’t open. I’ve kept it shut in every place I’ve ever stood. I won’t lie about what’s behind it, and I won’t pretend the question wasn’t asked either.

“That’s not an answer you get from me today,” I say. “What you get is this. I mean your pack no harm. I never have.”

It isn’t enough. I don’t pretend it is but I let it sit exactly where it lands. The yard settles anyway, shoulder by shoulder, up and down the line. I gave Dane almost nothing, and they take it. Shoulders come down half an inch, up and down the line, on their own.

I move to bring the whole yard back into my sightline. Kari, Nova, and a third I’ve heard called Harper stand together near the front, well apart from where Nyxiana’s standing. Something in me responds to them before I understand why, the same quiet pull that’s tracked her signature for months, fainter here, but the same kind of thing. Each of them carries a mark I don’t have a name for, something old sitting under the skin at wrist and palm. My eyes go there first. Nyxiana’s attention moves off me and onto the three of them. Her head turns first, a small sharp movement. Her eyes go from one to the next and stop on Kari’s hand where she keeps it half closed.

Whatever she just found in them, she keeps. Her focus comes back to me a moment later, sharper than it left. I can’t tell what she’s after now any more than I could before. Fifty wolves have their attention on me and none of it touches anything. Hers is the one attention that does. From a distance, she’s closed half the space between us. I don’t think she noticed doing it either. I want to close what’s left of it more than I’ve wanted anything in longer than I can measure I don’t move off the step.

“You’re the one who’s been out there,” she says.

“I am.”

“For months.”

“Yes.”

“And you decided today was the day.” She tips her head, the same look she likely gives everyone. This one doesn’t slide off me. “Why?”

“I was tired of watching from a distance.”

Her mouth opens on something and closes on it instead. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I’m giving.”

Somewhere behind me, fifty wolves are still watching, still waiting on whatever Dane decides to do with me. I’ve lost every one of them. There’s just her and the ground between us - nothing else in this yard reaches me right now. She almost smiles, catches it before it fully arrives, something warmer than she usually lets show. I watch it go. I want it back the second it’s gone. She holds my look exactly as long as I hold hers. Neither of us gives the other anything else.

Dane’s voice pulls me back. “You’ll be watched,” he says. “You won’t be trusted. You’re useful, or you’re gone.”

“I expected that.”

I did. These are the terms I’ve lived under everywhere I’ve ever stayed. Useful, watched, never taken in. My hands stay open at my sides where I put them. I take it the same way I’ve taken worse. It’s done. The pack allows me here. It doesn’t take me in. Everyone loosens around me, wolves going back to whatever they were doing before I walked in, the hammer finding its rhythm again somewhere behind the lodge. I controlled every part of how that just went. I don’t control anything about her.

She’s still taking me in, standing the same way she was when I first turned to find her. I hold her look longer than the moment calls for. I don’t let myself count how long that is. She holds mine right back.

I came here to decide how every one of them sees me. I have no idea what she sees.

Chapter 6

Nyxiana

Wolves who circled Valen since he first walked in are turning back to their own morning, hands unclenching, voices dropping into the ordinary noise of a compound waking up: a gate latch somewhere behind the barn, a horse blowing air through its nose, someone’s laugh cut short and started again, the smell of turned earth and horse feed drifting up from the barns. I keep watching what nobody else in this crowd can see, the magic laced into Nova’s wrist, Harper’s, the faint mark on Kari’s right palm, straining toward Valen every time he moves. It’s done this since he walked in. Quiet, subdermal, mine alone to catch.

The sun cuts hard across the near half the yard and leaves the lodge side in cool shade. Past the porch, the cabin rows sit quiet in the morning light. Beyond them the bell tower catches the sun first. Dane stands near the porch steps with Nova at his shoulder. Harper and Ben are by the water trough, Kari beside them, laughing at something Ben says. Valen steps back from the knot of wolves that had gathered around him, unhurried. His path takes him past Kari at a distance of maybe six feet.

My own reading of him goes strange the second he moves, worse now than it’s ever been from a distance. Whatever lets me catch a signature isn’t working right on him. It gives me nothing clear. I’m still trying to place it when Kari’s hand flies to her chest.

Her right palm lights, a thin line of gold under the skin. Then it burns. She cries out, drops to one knee, then all the way down, her hand clutched against her body. Valen stands well clear of her. Six feet of open ground sit between them. She’s on the ground anyway.

Every wolf in earshot turns toward the sound. Ben is already moving, Harper faster, both of them dropping to Kari’s side before her knee finishes hitting dirt. Somebody shouts. Somebody else repeats it, louder. Wolves close into a ring around Valen, low and fast, the kind of movement a pack makes when it has already decided who did this. Rafe gets there before any of them. He’s between Valen and Kari almost before the space between them closes, back to his mate and whole body angled at the man he’s certain hurt her. His voice drops instead of rising, each word a little longer than it should be, vowels stretching the way they do when he’s close to losing the careful control he keeps on himself. “What did you do to her?”

“I didn’t touch her.”

He holds his ground, hands loose at his sides, looks at Rafe, steady, unreadable, waiting to see how far this goes before he has to decide what to do about it. For half a second something pale flickers at the edge of his eyes then it’s gone, too fast for anyone else in this yard to have caught it. I’m not about to mention it to anyone.

Torres is at Rafe’s shoulder in the next breath, his voice pitched to carry. “He never touched her. So, what did?” Around him three or four more wolves close in tighter, hands curling, ready to move on Valen the second Rafe gives the word. The muscle along Rafe’s collarbone ripples once, close to an actual shift he hasn’t chosen yet. He holds it exactly where it is.

Mateo stays at the edge of it, arms crossed, watching Kari, then Valen, then Kari again. “He was nowhere near her,” he says to no one in particular. Nobody answers him.