Alpha Mute Bride

Chapter 4: Invisible

Selene was awake before the mountain was.

She had always been an early riser. It was a habit built from years of necessity rather than preference. In Crescent Moon Pack, the early morning was the only part of the day that belonged entirely to her. Before the pack woke up and the house filled with noise and the particular weight of being somewhere you were tolerated but not wanted, there was a window of maybe two hours where she could move through the world without anyone making her feel the precise dimensions of her own smallness.

She dressed quietly in the grey pre dawn light. Dark trousers, a simple cream top, her hair pulled back. She picked up her notebook and her pen and her cardigan from the chair by the window and she slipped out of her room into the corridor before six o clock.

The pack house was not entirely asleep. She passed one wolf coming off what looked like a night patrol shift, who glanced at her with mild surprise and then looked away. She passed the kitchen, where she could hear movement and the distant sound of something being set on a stovetop. She did not go in. She followed the corridor to the back of the house and found a door that opened onto a stone pathway that curved around the east side of the building.

She followed it.

The morning air was sharp with pine and cold in the particular way that mountain mornings were cold, a clean cold that had none of the damp grey misery of cold at lower elevations. She breathed it in and felt something in her chest loosen slightly. She had not realized how tightly everything had been held since the moment Creed had handed her that letter.

The stone pathway curved past an outbuilding and then past a low stone wall and then opened onto something she had not expected.

A garden.

Or what had been a garden, once. It was walled on three sides by old stone, the fourth side open to a view of the valley below and the mountains beyond. Inside the walls it was wild in the way that things got wild when they had been left to their own devices for long enough. Overgrown hedges pushing against the stone. A tree in the far corner that had grown at an angle as if it had spent years leaning into a wind that no longer blew that direction. Weeds filling the spaces between what might once have been flower beds. A stone bench against the near wall, solid and old and covered in a thin layer of moss.

It was completely abandoned.

Selene stood at the entrance to it and looked at it for a long moment.

Then she walked in and sat down on the mossy bench and opened her notebook and looked at the valley below and felt, for the first time since arriving, that she might be able to breathe here.

She stayed until the light changed.

She wrote a little. Observed more. Watched a hawk work the updrafts above the valley, efficient and unhurried. Counted the layers of mountain ridge visible in the distance. Noted that the garden had good soil under the weeds, dark and rich, the kind that would grow things well if anyone bothered to ask it to.

Nobody came.

At ten minutes to seven she walked back inside and found the dining room.

Breakfast was different from dinner. Less formal. Wolves came and went rather than sitting together, filling plates from a long sideboard and eating quickly before leaving for whatever the morning required of them. Selene filled a plate with bread and eggs and fruit and sat at the far end of the table and ate and watched.

Nobody sat near her.

It was not hostile, precisely. Nobody moved away from her or made a show of avoiding her. It was more that she existed in a category that the pack had not yet decided how to handle, and until they decided, the instinct was to leave a buffer of empty chairs around the uncertainty and get on with the morning.

She understood it. She did not like it, but she understood it.

Rhys came in at ten past seven, filled a plate with what appeared to be everything available on the sideboard, and sat down directly across from her without hesitation.

"Morning," he said.

She wrote in her notebook and turned it to face him.

Good morning.

He ate a forkful of eggs. "Sleep alright?"

Well enough.

"Mountain takes some adjusting to. The altitude. Some people get headaches the first week." He looked at her with the same frank assessing gaze he had used in the courtyard. "You grew up at lower elevation?"

Yes. Crescent Moon territory is mostly valley.

"You will adjust." He said it the way people said things that were true and simple and did not require any dressing up. She appreciated it. "Do you need anything for your room? Petra mentioned you did not request anything yesterday."

The room is fine. I found the garden.

Rhys paused mid chew. "Which garden?"

The walled one. East side of the house, past the low stone wall.

Something moved across his expression. Brief but visible.

"That garden has not been used in about four years," he said. He put his fork down. "It was the Luna's garden. Damien's mother. When she died he closed it off." He looked at her steadily. "I am not sure how he will feel about you being in there."

Selene looked at him. Wrote slowly.

I did not know. I will stay out if it is a problem.

Rhys picked his fork back up. "I did not say it was a problem. I said I was not sure how he would feel." He ate for a moment. "There is a difference."

She wrote that down in her notebook after he left. Not as a response, just as a thing worth keeping.

There is a difference between a problem and an uncertainty. Rhys Vance is precise with language. That is worth noting.

She finished her breakfast alone.

The morning passed slowly.

She had nothing structured to do, which was its own particular discomfort. At Crescent Moon there had always been tasks. The kitchen, the cleaning, the small necessary labors that filled the hours and gave the day a shape even if none of it had been chosen freely. Here there was nothing assigned to her, which should have felt like freedom and instead felt like standing in a doorway not knowing which direction you were supposed to walk.

She explored.

She did it carefully, mapping the pack house the way she mapped everything, methodically and quietly. The main floor with its large common rooms and the dining room and the kitchen she finally looked into properly, where a broad woman with grey streaked hair was working at a long counter and did not startle when Selene appeared in the doorway, only looked up and nodded once and went back to what she was doing.

Selene wrote in her notebook and held it up.

Can I come in?

The woman looked at the notebook. Looked at Selene. Then she pulled out the stool on the near side of the counter and set a mug on it without a word.

Selene came in and sat on the stool.

The woman poured tea into the mug and set a plate of small plain biscuits next to it and went back to her work. She did not try to make conversation. She did not stare. She moved around her kitchen with the absolute authority of someone who had been doing this specific thing in this specific place for a very long time and found it entirely sufficient.

Selene drank her tea and watched her work and felt the knot in her chest loosen another fraction.

She wrote on a small page and slid it across the counter.

I am Selene. What is your name?

The woman glanced at it. "Greta," she said. She did not stop chopping.

Selene wrote again.

The food last night was very good.

Greta made a sound that might have been acknowledgment or might have been dismissal or might have been both. But something around her eyes shifted slightly, and she set a second biscuit on the plate without being asked.

Selene ate it.

She left the kitchen twenty minutes later feeling fractionally more settled than she had when she entered it.

The afternoon was harder.

She went back to her room and read for a while and then sat at the desk and wrote letters she would not send, which was something she did when the silence inside her got louder than usual. Letters to Nora. Letters to a version of her mother she had constructed from old records and one photograph she had found in Creed's files years ago, a woman with silver white hair and grey eyes who looked like what Selene might look like in twenty years if the world was kind to her.

She wrote and then she stopped writing and looked out the window at the courtyard below.

She saw Damien twice that afternoon.

The first time he was crossing the courtyard with two senior pack members, talking, his face carrying the particular focused expression of a man working through a serious problem. He did not look up at the window.

The second time he was alone. Standing at the edge of the courtyard looking out at the tree line. Still. He stood that way for almost three full minutes and then turned and went back inside.

She wondered what he was thinking about.

She wondered if he had thought about her at all since breakfast. Since the two questions about the drive and the room. Since he had told her breakfast was at seven and walked out.

Probably not.

She was a variable in an arrangement. Variables did not require thinking about unless they became inconvenient.

She was good at not being inconvenient.

At four in the afternoon there was a knock at her door. She opened it to find Zara Cole standing in the corridor with the energy of someone who had been physically restraining themselves from knocking for at least an hour and had finally given up.

She was nineteen, clearly, in the way that nineteen sometimes looked, all forward motion and unfiltered curiosity. Dark hair like her brother but the similarity ended there. Where Damien's face was closed and controlled, Zara's was entirely open, everything she was thinking moving across it in real time.

"Hi," she said. "I am Zara. Damien's sister. I was going to wait longer before coming to introduce myself but I am genuinely terrible at waiting so here I am." She looked at the notebook in Selene's hand. "Can I come in? You can write at me and I will talk enough for both of us, I already do that with most people anyway."

Selene looked at her.

Then she stepped back from the door and opened it wider.

Zara came in like weather.

She sat on the end of the bed, looked around the room with interested eyes, spotted the notebook on the desk and the cardigan on the chair and the small herb Selene had taken a cutting from Crescent Moon's garden and set in a glass of water on the windowsill, and then looked back at Selene with an expression that was suddenly more serious than anything that had come before it.

"Nobody welcomed you when you arrived yesterday," she said. It was not an apology exactly, more an acknowledgment of a fact. "That was not alright. I want you to know that."

Selene sat in the desk chair and opened her notebook.

You are welcoming me now, she wrote. She turned it to face Zara.

Zara read it. Something in her face settled.

"Yes," she said. "I am."

She stayed for two hours.

She talked, as promised, enough for both of them. About the pack, about the territory, about the mountain in winter which she described as both brutal and extraordinary and said Selene would understand what she meant by February. She talked about the pack members Selene should know and the ones she should be cautious of and the ones who were simply difficult but ultimately harmless. She did not talk about Damien directly but she talked around him the way people talked around something they were being careful with, and Selene noted the shape of the space she left there.

She signed once, near the end of the visit, a simple gesture she seemed to have looked up recently because her hands were slightly uncertain with it.

Are you okay?

Selene signed back without hesitation, the same system she and Nora had built together over years, and Zara watched her hands with intense concentration.

"I did not get all of that," Zara said. "But I will learn. I am going to learn." She said it the way she seemed to say most things, as a statement of intent that she had already committed to fully.

Selene wrote in her notebook and showed her.

I know you will.

After Zara left, the room was quieter than it had been before she arrived, in the way that rooms got quiet after someone warm had been in them.

Selene sat at the desk.

She thought about the day. Rhys at breakfast. Greta in the kitchen. Zara on the end of the bed with her honest eyes and her signed question.

She thought about the pack and the empty chairs at breakfast and the wolves who moved around her like water around an unfamiliar object.

She thought about the garden with its mossy bench and its rich dark soil and its four years of being left alone.

She opened her notebook.

Day two begins tomorrow,she wrote. Today I found three things. A garden nobody is using. A woman in a kitchen who does not need words to be decent. A girl who says she will learn.

She paused.

That is enough for one day.

She closed the notebook and went to wash up before dinner.

Outside, the mountain held its position against the darkening sky, the same way it had yesterday and the day before and the four years before that, patient and enormous and entirely indifferent to the small difficult business of belonging somewhere new.

Selene was getting used to the mountain.

She thought, cautiously, that she might eventually get used to this too.