Claimed By a Cold Alpha

Chapter Seven

They were still watching. Various degrees of obvious about it — some people had returned to their conversations but their attention was still second hand, watching me like a secondary frequency. A group near the fireplace made no pretense at all. Three men and a woman, all of them appraising with the bland aesthetic that looks like they’re making a decision.

The woman separated from the group.

“Sasha,” I thought, just as Damien confirmed it softly by my side.

She was tall and auburn-haired, with the particular confidence of someone who had never once questioned her place in a room. She stared at me the way I suspect she stared at most things. Like they were taking a measurement.

She stopped in front of me.

“Human,” she said. Not an insult exactly. Just a category being named.

“Yes,” I said.

“You know what he is.”

“Yes I do.”

“And you came here anyway.”

“Apparently.”

She glanced over me. I didn’t know if I was passing whatever test she was applying to me. Then she turned to Damien and the expression she gave him was intricate – complex enough that I put it in a little mental file for later – and then she gazed back at me.

“Why you,” she said. Not to me. To the air between us. As if it were a question to the universe more than a question to me.

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” I said honestly.

Something flickered in her eyes. Surprise, maybe. Like she had anticipated something aggressive or protective.

“Don’t make him soft,” she said softly. Beneath the edge of it, there was something real — something that didn’t feel like hostility but looked like it from far away. Something that cared more about a result than it cared about territory.

“I don’t think that’s possible.” I said. Equally quiet.

She gave me one last, long look.

Then she stepped back. Back with her group. And the bland appraisal in the room adjusted, not to warmth, not yet, but to something that had more give in it.

Rhen reappeared with a drink. I took it with a hand that was steadier than I had any right to.

Damien was standing so close beside me now that I could feel that very warmth that seemed to radiate off him—more than just human, I’d noticed. Like his body was running at some other temperature, like something in him was always a little bit more there than ordinary physics said he should be.

“You didn’t look away,” he whispered so only I could hear.

“You told me not to.”

“Some people can’t handle it regardless.”

I looked up at him. “I handle stuff. That’s most of what I do.”

He stared down at me and I think that the look he wore is the one I have the least grasp of — the one that flashed in and out of his gaze like something surfacing from a great depth, something that had been beneath for a long time and was just now deciding that coming up to the surface was safe.

It only lasted a moment.

Then a commotion from the back of the house — a door slamming open, boots on wood floor, and a young wolf I’d never seen before thundered past me in the kitchen, his jaw clenched and those piercing eyes carrying that distinct gleam which I later understand is a sign that a wolf is on the brink of shifting.

The room immediately hardened. That frequency change again, but more jagged now.

“East perimeter,” said the young wolf. Damien. “Three them. They crossed the line.”

The warmth beside me didn’t vanish, but rather restructured — Damien shifted from the man who had been standing close enough that I could feel his body heat to something else in the breath of an inhalation. The Alpha. The thing under the man that was older and bigger and worked on entirely different physics.

He looked at Rhen. Rhen was already moving.

Damien turned to me. His hand rose and faltered just before my arm. Not touching. Asking.

I nodded. His hand briefly clasped my elbow with a confident grip and guided me to an exit on to the room.

“Stay in here,” he said. “Don’t open the door for anyone except Rhen. Do you understand?”

“ ‘What’s happening…”

“The thing from the woods. It brought company.”

His eyes held mine. Steady. “I will come back for you. That is not a question.”

I believed him.

That was the part that really should have scared me… how right away and completely I believed him.

He was gone before I finished the thought.

I stood in the tight room that was a study — there were books, a desk, a window that looked out on the dark tree line, and I listened to the house organized to surround me with something I couldn’t see. I held my drink with both hands and thought about a man who burned at a hotter temperature than was ever truly human telling me I will come back for you like it was a law of physics.

The tree line beyond the window was dark, thick and still.

Something in it moved. I moved closer to the window.

Three figures at the edge of the trees — big, low, watching the house with a stillness that was intentional. Not random. Not transitory.

And then a fourth figure, coming out of the house towards the tree line rapidly and surely and with absolutely no hesitation. Grey-black coat. Pale eyes catching the light.

I put my hand on the cold glass, palm flat. "Come back," I thought, suddenly with a force that surprised me.

The grey-black wolf broke into the tree line and vanished behind the dark.

And I stood at the window and waited, and I learned something I had not anticipated learning in the den of a werewolf pack house on a Thursday night…

That “okay” wasn’t just the only word I had begun to wish I could take back.