Bound To The Alpha Of Darkness

CH.2— I Cannot Stop Myself

CHAPTER TWO

Seraphine's Point Of View

Immediately. Efficiently. With the practised speed of someone who has spent three centuries becoming very skilled at not feeling the things that would complicate her life irreparably.

"Call the senior council," I say. My voice is exactly as it should be. I genuinely do not know how. "I want Morrow's full report within the hour. And I want updated patrol rotations on every neutral crossing by morning. If he knows about the eastern route he may know about the others."

"Already in motion," Lysa says, falling back into step. "Seraphine."

Something in her tone makes me glance sideways.

"He did not kill anyone," she says. Quietly. As though she is not entirely sure what to do with that fact and is handing it to me to see if I do. "Twelve wolves. His Essence. He put them down and left them breathing."

I hold her gaze for a moment.

"He wanted them to deliver a message," I say.

"Yes. That is one explanation."

I do not ask her what the other explanations are. I already know. And I am not ready, not in this corridor, not after this night, not with that inconvenient quiet thing still trying to surface from wherever I buried it thirty seconds ago, to examine any of them out loud.

"Council room. One hour."

She nods.

I walk away from her toward my private chambers and I keep my spine straight and my step measured and my expression exactly as it should be, composed, certain, in control, and I do not allow myself to think about twelve wolves in the frost or a darkness that pressed them flat without effort or a man who came alone to a border in the middle of the night and chose, for reasons I cannot explain, to leave everyone alive.

And to crouch down.

In the frost.

For a wolf who could not even lift his head.

The door to my chambers closes behind me.

I lock it.

I have not locked this door in a hundred years and I do not entirely know why I am doing it now except that what I need the next sixty seconds to do requires absolute privacy and I am not certain my expression alone can guarantee it.

I lean my back against the door.

I close my eyes.

The performance slips. Not a crash, I am too disciplined for that. Just a quiet release, the way something held too tightly lets go when the hand finally loosens, and I let it happen because there is no one in this room to see it and I cannot carry it any further tonight.

My heart is doing something it has not done in three centuries.

Not racing. Something else. Something more specific. My pulse has changed quality, heavier, deeper, pointed in a direction it did not have ten minutes ago. I press my fingers to the centre of my chest and feel the strangeness of it under my fingertips. Like something has been switched on that I did not know was there.

I open my eyes.

I look at my own hands.

The same hands that healed Cael an hour ago. The same hands that have led three hundred wolves through a century of war. The same hands that have not trembled at anything.

They are not trembling now.

But they are not entirely steady either.

I lower them to my sides.

He crouched.

The thought arrives uninvited. I do not have the energy to dismiss it again. I am alone in my chambers and the door is locked and the performance has slipped and I let myself, for one moment, sit with what I have been refusing to sit with since Lysa said the words in the corridor.

The most feared alpha in the shifter realm.

Twelve wolves in the frost.

The night entirely his.

And he crouched.

To deliver a message that could have been delivered standing. To put himself at eye level with a wolf who could not lift his head. To choose a gesture that had no operational reason for existing.

There is no version of Dravon Mors I have constructed across one hundred and fourteen years of war in which that man crouches.

And yet.

He did.

I press my palm flat against my chest where the strange new pulse is doing its strange new thing, and I stand against the door, and I let myself be a wolf rather than an alpha for just a moment.

A wolf who has just learned that her enemy of a century is something other than what she believed him to be.

A wolf whose body has registered this information before her mind finished processing it.

A wolf who is going to walk out of this room in fifty minutes and stand in front of seven senior advisors and lead her pack as though nothing has shifted underneath her feet.

I push off the door.

I splash cold water on my face.

I look at myself in the small silver mirror above the basin. The pale gold of my eyes catching the torchlight. The composed line of my mouth. The face of the Alpha of Light that three hundred wolves trust completely and have never had reason to doubt.

I have always been steady.

I will be steady tonight.

I dry my face.

I straighten my collar.

I unlock the door.

I walk to the council room and the meeting begins exactly fifty minutes after Lysa told me twelve wolves came home breathing and not a single person in that room, not even Lysa who watches me with the quiet attention of someone who has noticed something she is not yet going to ask about, sees that anything has changed.

The performance is back.

It will hold.

It always holds.

But somewhere underneath it, in the dark, in the frost, a man who should not have crouched is crouching.

And I am thinking about it.

And I cannot make myself stop.