Page 3 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

She turns to me. I’ve been quiet most of the hour, and Harper never misses that kind of thing. “Nyxiana. You’re the tiebreaker.”

And I’m in it. All the way in, warm, present and ready to ruin Scarlett’s afternoon on principle. Then Scarlett makes her case, with all four books. She goes down the set in order, holding each one up, naming the man it belongs to. Gavin, book one. Rainer, book two. Bowen, book three. Bancroft, book four. My stomach drops. These are my great-uncles. This book is five flames. Inside my head I have my hands over my ears. No. Not this. La la la. I caught none of it. I’m taking none of it with me.

Outside, I lift my tea. “I couldn’t say.”

“You’ve read them,” Harper says.

“I’ve held them.”

“Nyxiana.”

“They’re very well written,” I say, and drink.

“Ha!” Scarlett points her mug at me. “That’s not a no.”

“Look at her,” Kari says. “Little Miss Prim.”

“Next stop, a nunnery.”

Lyanna watches me over the rim of her mug for exactly as long as it takes me to decide I don’t care what she’s putting together. They keep at it. I give them nothing.

Across the lodge, at the men’s end of all this, my brother catches my eye. Kaspian’s up visiting with Scarlett for a few days. He doesn’t live at Ash Hollow. Someone’s pulled him into a bet he has no stake in. He’s the one person here I don’t have to read. He’s simply there. Has been since before I had words for it. Known. Easy. Requiring nothing of me at all. The look lasts a breath. Then someone at that end says his name. He’s back in the bet. I’m back at the table.

I let a hundred small unknowns go every day without a second thought. This one won’t go. One person I can’t see into, in a world I can otherwise read down to the bone. An enemy with a face is a problem I can plan against, count. I can put myself between it and the people I love.

The not-knowing is the part I can’t stand.

The argument eases off into lighter talk. Someone refills the pot, the smell of it comes down the rail, better than the coffee is going to be. Scarlett has moved on to defending a scene nobody asked her about.

I’m half in, half out at the edge of the trees. I sit, smile, say the right small things and then set my mug on the rail.

“I need air.”

Scarlett waves me off mid-sentence. To them it’s a woman stretching her legs.

It isn’t. I walk to the end of the porch, put my hands on the rail, turn my attention to the treeline, as hard as I’d turn it on anything coming up the road at us. I let them watch me leave the warmth to do it. So, I admit, at least to myself, that he’s already got under my guard. That I’ve circled him like a problem I can’t put down.

I don’t go back to the table. I stay at the rail, the women laugh behind me, the trees are in front of me and my hands stay where they are on the wood. I reach for the man inside the nature one more time, with nothing held back at all. Nothing gives.

Fine. I’m going to read him. If it takes me the rest of the summer, I am going to read him.

“Chapter eleven should come with a warning label,” Kari says behind me. Harper shrieks. Lyanna’s laugh comes up underneath it, low and delighted. The lodge windows have gone gold. Every person standing in that light is someone I would burn realms for. I’ve never said it. I don’t intend to. None of them know what’s standing at the treeline. I do. They get to relax on the porch because I haven’t said anything.

They’re braced for another build. Another thing to find and tear down, the same as the last four times. An enemy that comes up the road where we can watch it coming. I put that against the man in the shade. He trips no alarm, makes no move. What’s in him is older than anything we’re arming against.

They don’t match. So, I stay at the edge of the porch. For them, the afternoon is still easy. For me, it’s over. I ended it myself knowing every one of us, until I walked to this rail, is braced for the wrong thing.

Chapter 2

Nyxiana

The healing center smells like crushed herbs and warm resin. Lyanna’s shelves hold herbs her father sent her from the fae realm. The rest of she’s picked up since, treating dragons, fae and anyone else who ends up on her table. The dragon-forged instruments sit in a neat row on the table by the window. The ward stones set into the doorframe hum low, throwing a soft violet light across the room, never quite reaching the corners. Yesterday’s warmth is still in the air, nobody’s in a hurry yet. Ash Hollow has been easier since the network came down two months ago.

Harper’s on the table for one of Lyanna’s routine checks. I’ve come by on an errand that’s really just an excuse to be near people I like. I’ve nowhere I need to be this morning. For once, there’s nothing I need to read. I let myself have that. I like watching the two of them do this. They’ve known each other long enough to have a whole shorthand built of old jokes. I don’t have to read either of them to know they’d do anything for each other.

“You’re going to tell me I’m fine,” Harper says. “You tell me every time.”

“Because you are, every time.”