Blind Alpha, Four Bikers, and the Girl They All Want

NEVA POV --- The thing about loving a blind man is that you get very, very good at being invisible. Not metaphorically. Literally. I once stood in the kitchen for forty minutes while two packmates argued over who forgot to restock the tea — the tea *I* had restocked, the tea *I* was actively brewing — and neither of them looked at me once. I could have left. I could have walked out the door, flagged down a ride, started a new life somewhere with better lighting and people who acknowledged my existence. Instead, I poured the tea and went back upstairs. That pretty much explains everything about me, Neva Aris, twenty-two years old, professional invisible person, amateur disaster. --- The Alpha's bedroom smells like cedar and cold mornings. I've learned every corner of it in the dark — not because I'm creepy, although my sister Lera would argue otherwise, but because Caius Vrel cannot see and someone has to make sure he doesn't walk into the bedpost for the fourth time this week. The fourth time was my fault. I moved a chair. I had my reasons. I've been apologizing for it internally for six days. "You're doing the thing again," Caius says without turning around. He's sitting at the edge of his bed, facing the window he can't see through, his spine straight and his jaw set like he's daring the world to try him. He looks exactly like what he is — an Alpha, even blinded, even grounded, even stripped of every physical advantage his wolf gave him. Something in the way he holds himself just *refuses* to crumble. I find that annoying and devastating in equal measure. "What thing?" I ask, already knowing. "The quiet hovering thing. I can feel you thinking." "Everyone thinks." "Not like you do. You think in spirals." He turns his head slightly toward me, and his eyes — pale grey, beautiful, currently aimed somewhere slightly left of my face — almost find me. Almost. "You've been standing there for two minutes." Three. But I'm not correcting him. I cross the room and set the tea on the table beside him, exactly where I always put it — four inches from the lamp, handle angled right, because his hand always comes from the right. He reaches for it without hesitating and wraps his fingers around the cup, and that small competence makes his shoulders drop slightly. He hates needing help. He tolerates me because I figured out how to give it to him without making it look like help. That took me three weeks to master. I considered it a personal achievement. I told no one. "Chamomile again?" he asks. "You slept badly." A pause. "How do you know that?" "The bedpost had a new scuff on it this morning." His jaw tightens. There it is — a flicker of something raw before the Alpha mask clamps back down over his face like a visor snapping shut. I busy myself straightening the already-straight curtains so he doesn't have to deal with me watching him deal with that. "The doctor comes tomorrow," I say, because silence with Caius has a texture and right now it's the uncomfortable kind. "I know." "He says there's progress. The nerve damage is—" "Neva." I stop. "I know," he says again, softer this time. Not gentle exactly. More like *careful.* Like he's handling something he doesn't want to break. "You don't have to manage me." "I'm not managing you, I'm talking to you. There's a difference." "Is there." "Yes. Managing you would look like me pretending not to notice when you've been sitting in the same position for three hours because you're too proud to ask someone to help you find the door." A beat. "That was once," he says. "It was twice." Something happens to his mouth. Not quite a smile — more like his face makes a decision and then immediately regrets it. I've seen that expression maybe seven times in the four months I've been here. I've memorized every single one like they're a limited collection. I am so far gone it's practically a medical condition. "Sit down," he says. I don't move. "I have things to—" "There's nothing that urgently needs doing in this house that can't wait ten minutes." He says it with the absolute certainty of a man who has never once done laundry. "Sit down, Neva." I sit. Cross-legged on the floor near the window, which is my usual spot because it's close enough to be useful and far enough to not feel intrusive. He knows where I am. He always knows where I am. I've never figured out if that's a wolf thing or a him thing. He sips his tea. I watch the side of his face and pretend I'm watching the window. Outside, the Vrel pack lands spread grey and endless — cold forest, distant mountains, a sky the color of unfinished arguments. Beautiful in the way things are when you can't actually touch them. I grew up in a smaller pack, two territories south, the kind of place where everyone knew your name but only ever used it to give you more chores. When they sent me here to care for the injured Alpha, it was the most anyone had ever asked me to do. I think they expected me to fail. I think they expected *him* to send me home within a week. Four months later, here I still am. "You're doing it again," Caius says. "Thinking in spirals?" "Thinking in spirals." I pull my knees to my chest. "Can I ask you something?" "You're going to regardless." "When you get your sight back—" I start, and then stop, because the question is bigger on the outside than it was on the inside. He waits. He's oddly patient about things like this — questions left hanging, sentences unfinished. He says once that the dark teaches you to wait for the rest of things. "When you get your sight back," I try again, "what's the first thing you're going to do?" Silence. He turns the cup in his hands, once, twice. The cedar-and-cold-morning smell of the room settles around us. "Look at you," he says. I stop breathing. It's quiet enough that I can hear the forest outside the window — the low movement of the trees, the distant sound of the pack going about its evening. In here, it's just the two of us and that sentence sitting between us like something living. He says it like it's nothing. Like it's the obvious answer. Like *of course.* I say: "That's the most unsettling thing you've ever said to me." He says: "Good night, Neva." I take that as my dismissal, because if I stay another second I will do something catastrophically stupid, like say the thing I've been not saying for four months. I stand up. I pick up the empty cup. I walk to the door with every ounce of dignity I possess, which is not very much but I'm working with what I have. I'm in the doorway when he says, quiet and low, like it slipped out: "The tea was perfect." I leave before my face can betray me. --- I'm halfway down the hall when I hear it. I've heard it before — twice — and both times I told myself I imagined it. The way the brain fills in what the heart needs, manufacturing comfort from nothing. A trick. Wishful thinking dressed up as sound. But this is the third time. And this time, I'm standing close enough to the door that there is no imagining it. His voice, low and private in the way people are only private when they think they're alone. Saying a name. *Lera.* The cup in my hand is suddenly very cold. I stand there for three seconds — three full seconds of my life I will never get back — and then I walk downstairs and I wash the cup and I do not think about it. I do not think about it. I am absolutely thinking about it.