Chapter Sixteen - Jealousy
1815 Words
The gathering was Victor's idea.
Nothing formal just the inner circle, the townhouse, music kept low enough that conversation didn't have to compete with it. Victor had called it a "quarter tradition" and Luna had learned by now that when the pack used words like tradition, they meant something older and heavier than the word usually carried. But this one, at least, came with good food and Margaret's warm smile at the door, and Luna had decided weeks ago that Margaret's warm smile was worth showing up for.
"You look lovely," Margaret said, taking her coat.
"Thank you." Luna smoothed the front of her dress deep burgundy, simple cut, hers from before any of this. "You say that every time."
"I mean it every time." Margaret said it the way she said most things, like it was just true and she saw no reason to dress it up. "Come in. The food's already going."
Luna filed that in the warm column and moved inside.
The townhouse was fuller than she'd expected. Familiar faces scattered across the room Caleb near the fireplace already holding a glass and looking entirely too pleased with himself, Priya in yellow laughing at something near the window, Marco and Dario in their usual corner conducting what appeared to be a very serious debate. A few faces she hadn't placed names to yet. And underneath all of it, that quality she'd catalogued across every single pack gathering — the collective stillness, the room breathing like one thing loosely arranged into twelve. Everyone moving just slightly too smoothly. Everyone aware of everyone else without seeming to look.
She was used to it by now. She'd stopped flinching at it weeks ago.
Damien was already deep in conversation with Victor near the far wall. He spotted her the moment she crossed the threshold she'd stopped being surprised by that too. His eyes found her, moved over her once in that brief and thorough way, and returned to Victor without any visible interruption.
She got herself a drink and found a comfortable spot near the bookshelf.
"You're the one who argued contract clauses with Damien Wolfe and actually won."
Luna turned.
He was young younger than most of the people in this room, which wasn't easy to quantify given how strangely everyone here seemed to sit outside normal age. Sandy blond hair, open face, the kind of easy grin that arrived a half second before the rest of him caught up. She read him in the first few seconds the way she read everyone: harmless. Genuinely so. No careful measurement in his eyes, no agenda she could detect running underneath the surface of the smile.
"Luna," she said.
"Ryan." He extended a hand. "Cole. I'm — relatively recent addition to the inner circle. I've heard a lot about you."
"Good things, I hope."
"Mostly intimidating things." The grin widened. "Which I decided to just go ahead and interpret as good."
Luna almost smiled. "Smart of you."
He was easy to talk to. That was her honest assessment, arrived at quickly and without much fanfare. No layers she had to navigate, no double meaning running underneath the words. He asked about the diner and actually listened to the answer. He laughed at the right moments not performer's laughter, just genuine. He talked about how long he'd been with the pack the same way someone talked about a job they actually liked. Normal. Uncomplicated. She hadn't had a conversation with that particular texture since the last time she'd sat with Rosa before a shift.
"Do you dance?" he asked, nodding toward the far end of the room where a handful of people had drifted into something slow and easy.
Luna glanced over. "Sometimes."
"Would sometimes happen to apply to right now?"
She looked at him. Young, friendly, one hundred percent non-threatening. A question with exactly one layer to it.
"Sure," she said.
She felt the shift before she saw it.
Not a sound. Not a movement she could point to. More like a change in the atmosphere of the room pressure, attention, something recalibrating somewhere behind her. Luna had spent enough time in this world now to know the difference between a room just existing and a room reacting to something.
Ryan was talking she'd genuinely lost the thread of it something about Caleb, something about a decision that had apparently been spectacularly poor. He was relaxed, not standing too close, the kind of dance partner who made things easy. She appreciated that.
But she turned her head slightly anyway.
Damien was still standing with Victor. Still holding his glass. Still, by every technical measurement, present in a conversation.
He was not listening to that conversation.
His eyes were on the dancefloor. Specifically on a fixed point that happened to contain Luna and the person she was currently dancing with. His expression wasn't alarm. It wasn't the strategic assessment she'd watched him apply to Gerald in that meeting, or the cold patience he turned on people who pushed him at work. It was something quieter and, somehow, more interesting than either of those.
Just still. The way things went still right before they decided to move.
"and I told him, I said, there is absolutely no way that ends well, but does he listen"
"Mm," Luna said.
"You'd agree, right? Like obviously?"
"Completely," she said, with total confidence, having retained approximately none of the story.
Because across the room, Damien had set his glass down.
Victor was still talking. Damien's jaw had done that thing the slight set she'd catalogued, the almost imperceptible tightening she'd previously only seen directed at boardroom problems and at Gerald, specifically, during the pack meeting when he'd placed himself between her and the table without seeming to notice he'd done it.
Ryan Cole was twenty-four years old, harmless by every available measure, and had asked her to dance at a quiet gathering with low music and good food.
Damien Wolfe looked like a man in the middle of discovering a problem he hadn't known he had.
Luna added it to the collection.
Interesting, she thought. Very, very interesting.
Caleb materialized at her elbow approximately seven minutes after she'd stepped off the dancefloor, which was either coincidence or the best timing she'd ever witnessed.
"Great dancing," he said pleasantly, looking at nothing in particular.
"Thank you."
"Ryan's a good guy. Really. One of the genuinely friendlier ones in the inner circle." He took a slow sip of his drink. "Very open, very warm. Just a good person all around."
Luna looked at him sideways. "Is there a destination for this?"
"I'm just making conversation," Caleb said, in the tone of a man who was absolutely not just making conversation. "Genuinely. Just talking."
She followed the direction of his gaze, which had drifted entirely casually toward the far wall.
Damien was back in conversation with Victor.
He was also standing a noticeable distance closer to the dancefloor than he had been forty minutes ago. She was fairly certain he hadn't moved consciously. She was absolutely certain Victor hadn't noticed, which meant she was probably the only person in the room paying enough attention to clock it.
She added that to the collection too. Filed it carefully between he always knows where I am in a room and he moved between me and the table without realizing.
"More drinks?" Caleb offered, with deeply unconvincing innocence.
"Yes," Luna said. "Definitely."
He found her in the kitchen an hour later.
She'd known he would. The kitchen was their territory. The one place in every building they both ended up eventually, neutral ground that had accumulated more honest conversation than anywhere else. She'd stopped questioning it.
Luna was refilling her water glass. She didn't turn around when she heard him come in.
"Enjoying yourself?" His voice was level. Completely, deliberately level the tone of a man asking a normal question about a normal evening.
"Yes, actually." She turned. "Ryan Cole introduced himself earlier. He's nice."
Something moved across his face. Small, quick, and gone before she could take it fully apart.
"He's young," Damien said.
Luna tilted her head. "Twenty-four. That's not much of a gap."
"He's a junior member."
"I know." She kept her voice easy, just factual. "You told me to build connections with the pack. I'm building connections."
A pause. "I did say that."
"So." She set her glass down and looked at him with all the patience she'd ever owned. "Is there a problem?"
He looked at her. That particular quality of attention he never quite managed to turn off — the kind that stopped pretending not to pay attention and just paid it.
"No," he said.
"Good."
She picked up her glass, crossed the kitchen, and walked past him close enough that the sleeve of his jacket nearly brushed her arm. She felt him go very still as she passed.
She didn't look back.
But she knew with the same quiet certainty that had carried her through everything in the past several weeks — that he stayed in that kitchen longer than he had any reason to.
Fascinating, she thought, stepping back into the warmth of the party. Absolutely fascinating.
Mine.
His wolf said it plainly, the way it said most things. No preamble. No apology.
She danced with him.
Damien stood at the kitchen counter with both hands flat on the surface and did not move.
He was looking at her.
I know.
The whole time. He kept—
I was standing right there. I know what he was doing.
And you moved closer.
That landed. Damien said nothing.
You didn't even notice until you were already closer. You just went. Like it was the obvious thing.
He'd run a company since he was twenty-two years old. Had carried pack law and made decisions that cost people things they couldn't recover from. Had never once, in six years, stood alone in a kitchen because he couldn't make himself walk back into a room.
She said he was nice, the wolf continued, quieter now. Just observational. Almost gentle, which was somehow worse.
I heard her.
She's never called you nice.
Damien picked up his glass.
Set it back down.
There was nothing to say to that. No argument that held any weight. He turned it over anyway, looked at it from a few different angles, and arrived at the same place every time.
She had never called him nice. Not once in all the weeks of kitchens and balconies and almost-moments and careful distance.
Ryan Cole had introduced himself forty minutes ago.
His wolf didn't say anything else. It didn't need to.
Damien stayed in the kitchen for two full minutes before he trusted himself to go back out there and behave like a man who didn't have a problem.
He wasn't entirely sure he succeeded.
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