CLAIMED BY MY SWORN ENEMY ALPHA

Chapter 7: Morning After

I woke before dawn in a bed that was not mine, in a room that was not mine, with a man's arm draped loosely over my waist as though we had done this every night of our lives instead of exactly once.

For a moment I let myself lie still and just breathe, cataloging the details the way Garrick had trained me to catalog anything unfamiliar. Stone walls, darker than Silverwood's pale limestone. A window facing east instead of south. The particular quality of the silence outside, forest instead of farmland, and underneath all of it, the low, steady sound of Damian breathing behind me, closer than I had any business allowing him to be.

I moved his arm carefully and sat up, testing my leg. It ached, but held. The mark at my shoulder ached too, in a way that had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with the memory of his mouth against my skin the night before, gentle and careful in a way I had not expected from a man capable of snapping another wolf's neck in half a second.

I hated that I had let him. I hated more that some traitorous part of me had wanted him to.

"You're awake."

His voice came low and rough with sleep, and I turned to find him watching me with an expression I could not fully read, somewhere between wariness and something warmer he did not seem to want me to see. He sat up slowly, giving my leg room, careful in a way that felt instinctive rather than performed.

"I need my own room," I said.

"You need to stay where Kade can keep track of you, or neither of us sleeps properly. I tried explaining that to my mother last night. She was not particularly sympathetic."

"I'm not asking your mother's permission. I'm asking yours."

Something flickered across his face, tired and honest. "I would give it to you if I thought it would actually help. It will not. The bond does not care about propriety, Aria. If you are on the other side of this pack house, I will feel it, and so will you, and neither of us will get a moment's peace until we are back in the same room again."

I wanted to argue. I did not have the strength for it, not this early, not with the ache in my leg and the strange new hollowness under my ribs that I recognized, with mounting horror, as the shape of missing him even now, even sitting three feet away.

A knock came at the door before I could decide what to say next. A young woman entered at Damian's call, dark-haired, quick-eyed, carrying a tray with more caution than the task strictly required.

"This is Nessa," Damian said. "She will attend you when I cannot. Nessa, this is Aria."

Nessa's curtsy was correct, and her expression was not, a careful neutrality that did not fully hide the wariness underneath it. I recognized it immediately, the same look I had gotten from half the pack house the night before. Politeness performed for the alpha's benefit, resentment held just beneath the surface for everyone else.

"My lady," she said, in a tone that made the title sound like an accusation.

"Aria is fine."

"Of course." She set the tray down and left with more speed than the task required, and I watched her go with the distinct sense that I had just met the first of what would likely be many people in this pack house who wished I had never arrived at all.

"She'll come around," Damian said, though he did not sound entirely convinced of it himself.

"Will your mother?"

"Eventually. Possibly. I genuinely do not know." He said it plainly, without the diplomatic softening I expected from an alpha, and something about the honesty of it caught me off guard more than a reassuring lie would have.

We ate in silence for a while, the tension between us a physical thing I could feel in the small distance across the table, in the way his eyes found mine more often than either of us acknowledged, in the way my own pulse kept doing something unsteady every time it happened. I told myself it was the bond. I told myself it would fade, given time, given distance, given anything at all that might let me feel like myself again instead of some stranger tethered against her will to a man who had ended half my childhood's worth of nightmares about his family and started an entirely new set overnight.

"There is a pack hearing this afternoon," he said eventually. "Trade disputes, mostly. Nothing urgent. I would like you there."

"Why."

"Because the longer they see you only in whispers and rumors, the worse this gets. If they see you as a person instead of a symbol of everything they have been taught to hate, some of them, eventually, might come around."

"Some of them. Eventually. You seem very confident for a man who just told me he genuinely does not know if his own mother will accept this."

The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, but close enough that something in my chest responded to it before I could stop it.

"I am confident in very little right now, Aria. I am simply choosing to try."

I did not have a good answer for that either, so I finished the food I did not particularly want and told myself, again, that whatever this feeling in my chest was, it would fade with time.

I did not entirely believe myself. I was starting to suspect I never would again.