Page 17 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“I was seven. You told me armor doesn’t actually attack people.”

For a while I’m just a cousin at a loud table, giving as good as I get.

The ease of it works on me. I came in braced for a hard errand on a dangerous trail. Here it’s family and a warm hall and too much food. The dread I carried in eases. By the second cup of wine the trail feels small and far away. I let it stay there.

The hall is full of signatures I’ve known my entire life, my uncle’s, my aunt’s, every cousin’s, each as familiar to me as a voice. Valen is the only blank in the room. The blank sits easy with me anyway. That should bother me more than it does.

When the meal winds down, I draw Niko aside and tell him as much as I can: I’m following a trail tied to the marks that surfaced on the pack’s women, and it points here, to whatever the family’s kept the longest.

“The library’s yours,” he says. “The vaults too, whatever you need. I’ll have someone let you in at first light.”

“That’s all you need to hear?”

“You’re family. That’s enough for me.”

The night goes long and easy, old stories, cousins talking over each other until nobody can follow whose story it started as. Valen has settled near the hearth, nowhere near a door, out of old habit more than caution now. Sometime in the evening I look for him across the hall. He’s already looking at me. The heat in his eyes is open, unmistakable, aimed at me, nothing held back from it for once. He looks away fast, his face closing as he turns back to the room. I catch it anyway. It’s the first thing he’s ever let me see.

Late in the night he crosses to me and sits down on the bench beside me, a little apart from the noise. His arm is almost touching mine. His hands rest loose on his knees, not braced on anything, not looking for a way out. The heat of him pours along my side. My body sways toward it. I don’t pull back this time.

I want him. I have never let myself want anyone this much. Tonight, I stop.

The fires burn down. The hall empties by degrees, cousins peeling off one at a time. He stays because I’m still here.

I’ve watched him hold himself tight in every room since he came to Ash Hollow. Tonight, he doesn’t. I want to cross the space between us and put my hands on him while he’s still this open.

They give us rooms in the family wing, his door across the hall from mine. I lie in bed in my uncle’s house, in my mother’s realm, warm and full and welcomed. None of it quiets the desire still running under my skin. I know exactly which door is his. I can still feel the heat of him along my side, phantom and real at once. I imagine crossing the hall and pushing that door open, finding him already awake, like some part of him has been waiting for me too. His hands would do more than sit loose on his knees this time. Staying in this bed instead takes more out of me than I want to admit.

Ash Hollow is home, and safe. There I’m part of what keeps it that way, always reading, always holding. Tonight, my uncle’s guards stand the watch. For one night I’m the one being kept.

The family’s oldest rooms open at first light. Tomorrow looks simple from here. I fall asleep aching for him. It’s still the easiest sleep I’ve had in longer than I can remember.

Chapter 12

Valen

I’m awake before the fortress is, dressed while the corridor outside is still dark. The bed they gave me is the softest thing I’ve slept on in years. I slept, deep and dreamless. I turn that over while I lace my boots. I sleep light in strange places. I’ve done that in strange places longer than I can remember. One night under this roof and my body let go without asking me first.

Some part of me spent last night wanting to cross the hall too. I want more mornings like this one, under this roof, with her down the corridor instead of down a trail. That’s new.

I keep circling back to yesterday. I watched her walk into a hall full of people who love her without having to earn a single one. I watched what that did to her face, something I hadn’t seen before. Her uncle took her in both hands like she’d never left. Her cousins pulled her into a table too loud for me to follow half of it. She laughed the kind of laugh I don’t think she lets herself use anywhere else. I sat at the edge and watched. For once nothing in the room needed watching.

Footsteps come down the corridor, light and unhurried. I know whose they are before the knock. I’m already moving to the door. She’s there, hair braided back, the gold in her eyes brighter for a night’s rest. She holds the look a beat longer than a good morning needs and doesn’t say anything about it.

I still think about what she told me on that walk in. She doesn’t hand people the truth about her feeding. She handed it to me. I don’t know what to do with being the one she chose for that. I’ve been turning it over since.

I step out into the corridor to join her instead of making her wait in the doorway. Her scent follows us both down the hall.

A steward meets us with iron keys the size of his hand. Two guards walk us down through the sleeping fortress. I count the turns out of habit. The steward makes a joke about the age of the doors. She laughs. I turn to catch the tail of it and lose my count.

The vaults sit deep in the fortress, behind doors so heavy the steward puts his shoulder into each one to swing it open. Chests and shelves and long cases run back into the dark, dust thick over most of it, the air full of cold stone and old oil. The things in here are older than the stone around them. I take stock out of habit. One way in. Clean lines. Nothing worth a guard. Then I make myself ease off it. Two days in this realm and nothing has needed guarding yet.

There’s nothing in here for me to track. No scent, no ground sign, nothing my years in the field are any use for.

“How do you want to run it?” I ask her.

“I’ve never had to look for something without knowing what it is either,” she says. It’s a small thing to admit. I keep it anyway.

“Then we’ll do it in quarters,” I say. “Corner to corner. Nothing handled twice.”