Page 41 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

He doesn’t ask again.

He could. He’s owed it twice now. He lets me keep it instead. I take that off him the same as I’ve taken everything else.

“Nobody has ever knocked on my door,” he says.

“Packs came to your treeline.”

“To tell me where the line was.” His mouth moves, not quite a smile. “When they wanted work, they sent a man out to fetch me. That isn’t a knock.”

He crosses the floor. He stops close enough that I have to look up to keep his eyes.

The white goes through them and out again, fast enough that anyone not watching for it would lose it.

He has no idea it happens. He never has. It’s another thing I say nothing about.

He looks down at my hand where it’s gripping the chair back.

“You didn’t come here to ask me for anything.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You’ve been carrying it since the archive.” There’s no heat in it anywhere. “You’ll give it to me when you give it to me.”

The floor goes out from under me. None of it shows.

I could hand it over standing right here. Four sentences and he’d have all of it.

“Not tonight,” I say.

“All right.”

That’s all of it. He doesn’t ask me when.

He reaches out and takes my left wrist off the chair back. He turns it over. His thumb comes down across the inside.

The star goes warm.

My pulse jumps under his fingers and there’s nowhere to put it. He looks at my wrist. There’s nothing on my skin for him to see.

He doesn’t know what he’s holding. I do.

Three healers in two realms have looked at this mark and called it a birthmark. My mother used to put her mouth to it when I was small. Nobody has ever been able to tell me one useful thing about it.

It has never once done this for anybody.

He also has three fingers across the softest part of a hungry woman’s arm and no idea about that either. His heartbeat comes up through his thumb into my skin, slow, hard, closer than it has been since that rock in the North Range. My fangs come down against my bottom lip and stay there.

I keep my mouth shut. My arm stays where he put it.

Up on that rock in the North Range I had my palm over his heart and a bead of his blood an inch off my mouth. I came down off my toes and put a step of rock between us instead. That took everything I had that day.

There’s no rock under us tonight. Nobody is watching either of us. He’s the one who reached out.

I still don’t move.

It isn’t restraint. I’ve always had restraint; I know what that feels like from the inside. This is a straight choice between two things. His blood is the smaller of them.

“You run cool,” he says.