The Alpha I Never Meant to Claim

Where His Hands Rested

I reached the door before Damon caught me.

Not roughly. One hand on the frame, his body between me and the courtyard. That was enough to make me stop, and I hated it enough to shove at his chest.

“Move.”

He absorbed the push without stepping back. Then his breath caught. I saw what I had done and dropped my hands.

“I’m sorry. I—”

“Where are you going?”

“To get her.”

“It’s three hours until first light.”

“Then I’ll be early.”

He looked at my bare feet. At the bandage soaking through on the left one. At the note crushed in my fist.

“And if you arrive now, alone and bleeding, what will you do?”

I couldn’t answer. I knew the north mill, the footbridge, the deep channel beneath it. I had gone there with June every summer to soak flax. She could swim, but not with her hands tied. Not in that water, swollen with autumn rain.

Damon reached for the note. I held on to it.

“She raised us,” I said. “After my mother died. She gave up her own cottage to live with us. She shouldn’t be there because of me.”

He lowered his hand. “She shouldn’t be there at all.”

Behind us, Iven drew the curtain around Finn’s bed. The scrape of the rings reminded me that my brother was listening, whether he pretended to sleep or not.

I leaned against the doorframe. My knees were shaking badly enough that I no longer wanted Damon to move. I wanted him to hold me up, which made everything worse.

“I’m taking two scouts downriver,” Holt said. “No crossing. We’ll watch the far bank.”

Damon nodded. “Find where they put their archers. Don’t engage unless they move her.”

Holt left at once.

The certainty of it steadied me a little. They were doing something. I didn’t have to run blindly into the trees to make something happen.

Mara brought a pair of soft boots and knelt to put them beside the bench.

“They’re my sister’s,” she said. “She’ll complain, but she complains about everything.”

I stared at them. Small, ordinary boots. An absurd gift on a night when my home had fallen apart.

“Thank you.”

“Wear them when Iven says you can.”

She smiled briefly and went to join the healer behind the curtain.

Damon took me up the steps to the long hall. I expected a chamber full of elders. Instead, the main room smelled of banked fires and wet wolf fur. A dozen people waited around the hearth. Nessa stood at the front, arms folded.

Every face turned when we entered.

I tightened my grip on the note. For a moment, I wished I had stayed beside Finn and let Damon explain me to his pack. Then Nessa looked at the mark, and I knew I couldn’t hide behind a curtain while he stood in front of them wearing what I had done.

“The boy shot you,” she said.

Damon stopped beside the hearth. “Yes.”

“And now his sister bears your scent into our hall.”

“She came with me.”

An older man near the fire rubbed his beard. “Garrick can make a claim under the treaty. We shelter one of his pack who attacked ours, and he calls it breach.”

“He can make it in daylight.”

“You’re taking her out before daylight,” Nessa said.

“Her aunt’s being held at the north mill.”

“Then they want you on the river road.”

“I know.”

Nessa’s nostrils flared. The whole room could probably smell his blood beneath the coat. I could. My wolf kept shifting uneasily, wanting him somewhere warm where no one asked him to prove he was still strong.

“My son was with Ada,” Nessa said. “You told me to wait. You said charging the boundary would get them killed.”

Damon didn’t look away. “I said that.”

“Now you’re walking to a mill because this woman bit you.”

The words hit harder because I understood them. Her son had been missing while I slept in my own bed, made breakfast, complained about Finn. I had arrived one night ago, and Damon was already making plans around my fear.

“He doesn’t have to,” I said.

Damon turned toward me.

I spoke to Nessa. “I’ll go. Your scouts can watch the bridge, and you can keep him here.”

“They don’t let you walk out afterward,” she said. “Have you understood that much?”

My throat tightened. “Yes.”

“Then stop offering to be brave and tell us something useful.”

I wanted to snap back. To tell her I wasn’t offering anything except the only thing I had. Instead, I looked at the spindle in my hand.

“June knows the mill. There’s a broken wheel on the east side. When the river’s high, the water goes under the shed. You can reach the building that way if you don’t mind getting wet.”

Nessa glanced at Damon.

“Deep?”

“To my waist in summer. I don’t know now.”

“That helps,” she said.

It wasn’t kindness, but it gave me somewhere to put my shame. I answered two more questions about the bank and the bridge. Damon asked the older man to hold the gates until he returned. Nessa went to check the south patrol rather than continuing the argument.

When the hall emptied, I sat down on the lowest step beside the hearth. I hadn’t meant to. My legs simply stopped holding me.

Damon crouched in front of me.

“You should have told me you were dizzy.”

“You should have told Iven you were still bleeding.”

His mouth moved, almost a smile. “We’re going to be very difficult company.”

He reached toward my ankle, waiting long enough that I could pull away. I didn’t. He lifted my foot onto his knee and unwrapped the bandage with hands much gentler than their size suggested.

I watched the bent dark head. The mark showed above his collar every time he turned. I should have been thinking about the mill. I was thinking about touching it.

“You can look,” he said.

My face heated. “At my foot?”

He looked up.

I forgot whatever I might have said next.

His fingers rested against my ankle. The fire warmed one side of my face; his gaze warmed the other. He was close enough to touch, and I realized I had spent most of the night wanting that without admitting it.

“Does it hurt?” I asked, looking at the bite.

“Less than the shoulder.”

“I meant when you’re away from me.”

He paused before answering. “I notice.”

“So do I.”

I said it quietly, but the admission filled the space between us. His thumb moved once against my ankle, then stopped.

“How much?”

“Enough that I knew you were at the healing-house door before I heard you.”

He lowered my foot carefully to the step. When he stood, I saw him steady himself against the railing.

“Sit down,” I said.

“I have a dressing upstairs.”

“Then take me with you. I can hold the cloth.”

He studied me for a moment. “You don't need to repay every kindness before morning.”

“I’m the one who tore your shoulder open.”

“That is a persuasive argument.”

I followed him up the stairs, grateful for the rail. His room stood at the end of a short passage, with a broad window overlooking the lower gates. There was a bed, a chest, a table covered in patrol maps, and a chair carrying enough discarded clothes to make him look less like an Alpha and more like Finn.

The familiar untidiness almost made me smile.

Damon caught the look. “Holt says I need someone to pick up after me.”

“Holt’s right.”

“You could at least wait until I stop bleeding to insult me.”

He took fresh linen from the chest, then tried to pull off his coat. I helped before he could ask. This time, when my hand brushed his wrist, neither of us moved away.

The shirt was worse. Blood had dried along the shoulder seam. He muttered something under his breath as he worked at the buttons with his good hand.

“Let me.”

I stood in front of him and unfastened them one by one.

It should have been simple. We had both been half naked in front of a healer. But there were no other voices now, no basin clattering, no Finn breathing beside us. Only the little sound of each button passing through the cloth and Damon watching my fingers.

When I reached the last one, I looked up.

His gaze was on my mouth.

I held the open edges of his shirt for a moment too long. Then I eased them off his shoulder and reached for the clean cloth.

The wound looked angry. I cleaned it carefully, biting the inside of my cheek when he flinched. He sat still, his hand braced against the bed beside my hip.

“I haven’t done this before,” I said.

“Cleaned a wound?”

“Had a mate.”

His fingers shifted against the blanket. “Neither have I.”

I glanced at him. “I thought—”

“What?”

“You’re an Alpha.”

“It’s an office. There isn’t a woman issued with it.”

I laughed before I could stop myself. It was small and shaky, but real. Damon looked at me as though the sound had surprised him too.

“I’m thirty-two,” he added. “I’ve managed to make a mess of my own life without waiting for a bond.”

“I’m twenty-six. Apparently that’s old enough to make a mess of yours.”

“Apparently.”

I finished the dressing. My fingers lingered at the edge of the linen, just below his collarbone.

“What happens if you don’t return the mark?”

The faint humor left his face. “We decide what to do with it when we’ve slept. There are ways to part.”

“Painful ones?”

He didn’t answer quickly enough.

I nodded. “Right.”

His hand closed around mine before I could draw it away.

“Rhea.”

I looked at him, wishing he wouldn’t say my name like that. Wishing he would say it again.

“I haven’t decided I want to part.”

My breath caught. “You haven’t decided you want me either.”

He stood, keeping my hand. Suddenly there was much less room between us.

“That,” he said, “has been very difficult to miss.”

I looked at the bite on his throat, then at his mouth. He loosened his grip, letting me take my hand back if I wanted. I put it against his chest instead.

“I’m frightened of what this means.”

“So am I.”

The admission startled me more than anything else he had said. His heart beat beneath my palm. Strong. Too fast to be calm.

I rose onto my toes and kissed him.

For a heartbeat he stayed still. Then his good arm came around me, drawing me close with a care that made my chest ache. His mouth was warm and firm. I had meant a brief kiss, a question I could take back. He answered it, and I forgot why I had thought brief would be enough.

My fingers curled in the open edge of his shirt. He bent his head, and the kiss deepened until I was holding him as tightly as he held me. There was hunger in it, but there was relief too—the terrible, surprising relief of wanting someone and finding him reaching for me.

When we finally parted, his forehead rested against mine.

“I’ve been trying not to do that since you held my sleeve,” he said.

I laughed softly, my breath unsteady. “I wish you’d told me.”

“I’m telling you now.”

He kissed me again, slower this time. I felt his smile against my mouth when I tightened my grip to keep him near. For a little while there was no gate, no accusation, no river. Just his hand against my back and the warmth of him through the thin space between us.

Then the spindle, tucked into my waistband, pressed against my hip.

June.

I drew back. Damon looked down at the little wooden handle and loosened his hold at once.

“We’ll get her,” he said.

I wanted to ask him to promise. I thought of Ada’s boy and didn’t.

He helped me into the chair, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and sat on the bed to pull on a clean shirt. I watched him until exhaustion made the room soften around the edges.

His hand found mine between the chair and the bed.

I slept with my fingers caught in his.

When Holt knocked, the sky was beginning to pale.

I woke at once. Damon was already standing, reaching for his coat.

“We found the archers,” Holt said. “Four on the far bank. Two behind the wheel shed.”

“June?”

“At the bridge. Alive.”

My knees went weak with relief.

Holt looked at me, then back at Damon.

“There’s something else. They’ve chained a wolf under the mill.”

“One of ours?”

Holt nodded.

“Nessa’s son.”