Page 53 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“While I was reading that passage your signature answered it. It came up under the page brighter and louder than I’ve ever read it off you. It kept rising the whole time my eyes were on that line. That’s how I knew for certain. Before that I knew there was more to you than not being wolf. I just didn’t know what.”

He’s had one hand on the doorframe since he arrived and hasn’t put a boot over the step.

“I’m telling you what the page says,” I say. “Not a softer version of it. There’s nothing worse underneath and I’m not softening any of it for you.”

Nothing about him is moving except his hand on the doorframe, holding the rest of it still is costing him.

“Made,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Made for what.”

Underneath every word of this my body is still tracking his. Where he’s standing, how far off, what his breathing is doing, what it does when I speak. The exact point he’d be at if I took a step forward.

“To hold the seal in place,” I say. “The one that keeps the divided world from coming back together. You’re what stands under it. And when it cracks, you’re what closes it. That’s the function. That’s all it said about what you were made for.”

I make myself finish.

“A man built for a purpose. Not one who got handed a life and picked what to do with it.”

He takes that standing up.

“So, there was never anything wrong with me.” His voice comes out differently, slower, and older than the one he uses on everyone else. The words in an order nobody has used in a long time, he’s using it on me the way a man uses it on a stranger. “I wasn’t made to shift. There was nothing there to fail at, and I failed at it for a lifetime.”

“Yes.”

I keep my hands still at my sides while everything he’s ever believed about himself comes apart four feet in front of me. I know what he needs right now. It’s in his hands. I’m not the person who gets to give it to him tonight, so I don’t move and he stops asking about himself.

“How long?”

“Two different things,” I say. “Don’t let me blur them. That you weren’t a wolf, I’ve had since the first time I saw you at the perimeter - months. That you were made by the founders to hold their seal, I have had since I read it in that room in Doria, with you standing at my shoulder.”

“Doria.”

“Doria, for that part. Months for the other.”

“Months.”

“Months.”

He looks at the floor of my porch and then back up at me.

“On the balcony,” he says. “You gave me all of it. The world, the war, what they were afraid of, what they did about it. All of it yet you left out the part where it was about me.”

“Yes.”

“Say why.”

I could tell him I was afraid. That’s true, would land softly, he’d have somewhere to put it, because a man can forgive fear. I could tell him I was going to tell him, eventually, when the timing was better. That one is a lie and would be the second thing I took from him tonight. I don’t give him either.

“Because I watched what believing you were a wolf let you live through,” I say. “You built a whole life on that. Every place that ever turned you out, every pack that made you earn your place, you took all of it standing on the one story you had about yourself.” His eyes don’t leave my face.

“Taking that out from under you before you could hold what came after it wasn’t mine to do.”

“That wasn’t your call to make.”

“No. I made it anyway. Every day, for months. I knew what I was doing every one of them.”