Claimed By a Cold Alpha

Chapter Four

Damien’s POV

I told myself I was doing this because she needed to know.

That was the only reason I sent out the text. The only reason I gave her the coordinates to the east ridge overlook, rather than just texting her what she needed to know and ending the conversation was.. Information could have been passed in a paragraph. For that you don’t need to be here. It didn’t require me to get to the Ridge twenty minutes early, to watch the last light go out over a sky I knew as well as any knew exactly which side her car wouldn’t be coming from.

Information was an excuse. I knew that. I used it anyway.

Rhen hadn’t said anything when I let him know. He had merely regarded me with those cautious dark eyes, and then looked purposefully away, which was in some way worse than anything he could have uttered.

“The eastern threat is still unidentified,” I informed him.

“She’s already been targeted once. Keeping her informed is a tactical choice.”

“Absolutely,” Rhen said, to the window.

“It is.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Right. Your silence said a lot.”

He had turned around at that moment, and for a brief second the hard neutral mask softened and something real looked out… the shadow behind the lieutenant, the friend who had seen me bring up three years of intentional separation as if suffering was the adult answer.

“Just…” he started.

“Don't.”

“Damien…”

“Rhen.”

He came to a stop. Nodded. Let me go.

Her headlights came into view at the bottom of the ridge road at the exact time she’d given. I noticed that… the exactness of it. Not five minutes late with an apology, not early and unsure. She had given a time and stuck to it, which told me something about how she moved through the world. Like someone who understood the value of other people’s time because hers had perpetually been stretched thin and she never had time to waste on anyone else.

I saw her get out of the car. She glanced up at the overlook and then at me, and even at a distance of thirty feet I could see her doing that thing she seems to do … the lightning-fast internal debate over what she feels and what she has decided to present to the world. She smiled faintly and settled for something composed and walked up the ridge path with the careful step of someone determined not to look like they were on unfamiliar ground even when they were.

She came to a stop a few feet from me.

Looked at the view—the valley below, the small town lights beginning to twinkle through the gloom of early darkness, the treeline extending like a dark sea in the east.

“You could have just texted me,” she said.

“I could have.”

She turned and looked at me then. “Why didn’t you?”

There were several answers to that. None of them were things I was prepared to say out loud yet.

“Because what I need to tell you is the kind of thing that requires you to be able to look at my face when I say it,” I said instead. “So you know I’m not making it up.”

There was a change in her look. The calm didn’t waver but something behind it tilted forward, that part of her I was starting to view as the real her. The one beneath all the I’m fines and the carefully self-sufficient.

“That’s either very honest,” she said carefully, or a very cultured dishonesty.

“Which do you prefer?”

She looked at me for a moment. The wind blew through her hair and she didn’t fix it , just let it go, and that littlest uncalculated thing triggered something in my chest that I absolutely refused to take a look at.

“You strike me as the type of person who decided a long time ago that lying is too much work,” she said. “So you just… don’t. Even if the truth is inconvenient.”

That sense of precision settled down somewhere soft and deep.

“Sit down,” I said, because the alternative was saying something I wasn’t ready for. I gestured to the flat rock on the ridge lip where I’d been sitting before she got there. She looked at it, then me, then she sat.

I sat beside her. Not close. But not with the wary distance of strangers, either — the shaped distance of two people who had gone beyond the point at which distance was simply honest.

I looked out at the tree line.

"What I’m going to tell you," I began, "is going to sound like one of those things it really isn’t."

“Like what?”

“Like I’m unstable.”

She made a small sound. Almost “not quite” a laugh. “Go ahead.”

I turned and looked her in the eye. This was the moment I had been calculating since the ridge road… how best to say this. I had rehearsed a dozen lines and discarded them all because there was no way to say this for it to land softly. There was only the truth told in the most matter-of-fact manner, and then there was her response to it.

“The people who live in this territory,” I told her, “and the people who have been moving through the eastern woods these past couple weeks… we are not exactly human.”

Silence.

The valley lights twinkled below. Somewhere in the far treeline something called once and went quiet.

Mara sat very still.

“Define not entirely,” she said. Very Carefully.

“Wolves,” I said. “We shift. Between human form and wolf form. It is real, it’s not some kind of condition or delusion, and the thing that was tracking your car this morning was one of them… not from my pack.”

More silence.