CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS ALPHA KING

chapter two

Chapter Two: No Name

He didn't leave. That was the first strange thing.

Every instinct in him should've had him gone already, back into the trees, away from a pack wolf who'd wandered too far onto the wrong side of the mountain. Instead he stood there at the edge of the clearing with blood drying stiff on his shirt, watching me the way you'd watch something you weren't sure was safe to touch.

"You're hurt," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.

"Not mine." He said it flat, like it answered everything.

"Whose, then?"

He didn't answer that. He looked at me a long moment, jaw tight, and I watched him decide something and then decide against it.

"You need to go back the way you came," he said instead. "Before whatever's tracking me finds you standing next to me."

"Someone's tracking you?"

"Elara." My name in his mouth stopped me cold. I hadn't told him my name.

"How do you know that?"

Something like a wince crossed his face. "Word travels. Silver Hollow's future Luna, humiliated at her own claiming ceremony. Word travels fast when it's that kind of story."

Heat rose up my neck that had nothing to do with the mating pull. "Get out of my head."

"I'm not in your head. I'm just standing downwind of half the territory, and half the territory's talking about you tonight." He said it without much sympathy, which somehow helped more than sympathy would have.

I should've hated him for saying it out loud. Instead something in my chest loosened, just slightly, at hearing someone say it plain instead of pretending not to know.

My legs picked that moment to give out.

He crossed the distance before I hit the ground, one arm catching me around the waist, and the second his skin touched mine the heat inside me went from bad to unbearable. I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize. He went rigid against me, breath catching hard in his throat.

"Damn it," he muttered, mostly to himself.

"What's happening to me?"

"You know what's happening." His voice had gone low and rough in a different way now. "You're not stupid. You felt it start the second I got close."

"I don't even know your name."

"Doesn't matter what you know. Matters what your wolf knows, and she already picked." He still hadn't let go of my waist. His hand was shaking, just slightly, against my side. "This is a mistake."

"Then let go of me."

He didn't.

We stood like that a while, me held up against him, both of us breathing too hard, the heat between us climbing instead of easing the way it should have if this were nothing. I could feel his heartbeat going fast under my palm where it had landed flat on his chest, could feel the tension running through every part of him like he was fighting something with both hands.

"Tell me your name," I said again, quieter.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because the second you know it, this stops being something you can walk away from clean." He finally looked down at me, and up close his eyes weren't just pale, they were a color I didn't have a word for, gray shot through with something gold near the center. "And you should walk away from me. Tonight. Right now, before the sun's up."

"You keep saying that like you believe it."

"I do believe it."

"Then why are you still holding on to me?"

He didn't have an answer for that. Or he had one and wasn't going to say it.

The wind shifted and I caught the smell of him properly for the first time, pine and copper and something underneath that my wolf reacted to like she'd been starving for it my whole life without knowing. I felt myself lean into him before I decided to.

"I have somewhere," he said, voice rougher now. "Not far. You shouldn't be out in the open like this. Not tonight, with what's out here."

"What's out here?"

"Things that would smell exactly what you're going through right now and come looking." His jaw tightened. "I'd rather that not happen while I'm standing next to you."

I should've asked more questions. Should've asked who was tracking him, whose blood that was, why a stranger covered in violence was the only thing in the world my body wanted right now more than air. Instead I let him lead me through the trees, one hand wrapped loose around my wrist like he was ready to let go the second I asked him to, and I didn't ask him to.

The place he took me wasn't much. A hollowed overhang of rock half a mile up, a fire he built fast and quiet with hands that clearly knew what they were doing, a single blanket he'd apparently had stashed there before tonight for reasons I didn't ask about. He sat across the fire from me at first, putting distance between us on purpose, arms braced on his knees like he needed something to hold onto.

"This doesn't have to happen," he said, staring into the flames instead of at me. "Whatever your wolf's telling you right now. You can walk out of here in the morning and never see me again, and in a few weeks it'll fade enough to live with."

"Does it fade for you too?"

He didn't answer that either. Which was an answer.

"You don't even know me," I said.

"I know enough." He looked up finally, and whatever he'd been holding back in his face slipped for just a second. "I know you stood in the middle of that clearing tonight and didn't fall apart even when you had every right to. I know you didn't run from me even when I told you to."

"Maybe I should've."

"Maybe." He almost smiled. It didn't quite make it all the way there. "It's a little late for maybe."

The fire popped between us. Somewhere out past the treeline something moved through the brush and went still again, and neither of us looked toward it, because whatever the danger out there was, it wasn't as loud right now as the thing sitting between the two of us at the fire.

"I'm not going to ask your name again," I said.

"Good."

"I'm going to stay anyway."

He was quiet a long moment, watching me across the flames like he was doing the math on how much this was going to cost him later. Then he stood, crossed to my side of the fire, and knelt in front of me the way I'd watched Caleb kneel for someone else only hours before, except this felt nothing like that had.

"Last chance to change your mind," he said, close enough now that I could feel the heat coming off him, real heat, not just the ache underneath my skin.

"I already told you I'm not leaving."

He touched my face like he thought I might disappear if he did it too fast. I turned into his hand instead, and that was the last conversation either of us had that didn't happen without words.

The fire burned low sometime after that. Neither of us fed it.

I woke once in the dark with his arm heavy across me and his face gone soft in a way it hadn't been once since he'd stepped out of the trees, all the guardedness stripped off him while he slept, and I lay there a long time just watching him breathe, memorizing the scar through his eyebrow, the shape of his mouth, the smell of him that my wolf had latched onto and wasn't going to let go of easily.

He still hadn't told me his name.

I still hadn't asked what he'd meant about things tracking him, or whose blood had dried into his shirt, or why a man clearly running from something had stopped in a clearing to save a stranger instead of disappearing the way sense would've told him to.

Outside, the sky had started going gray at the edges.

I had a choice to make before he woke up, and some part of me already knew which one I was going to pick, even as the rest of me hated myself a little for it.