Chapter Five— What the walls heard
790 Words
Lena's Pov
"Did you hear what happened before the ceremony last night?"
I didn't look up from the pot I was scrubbing. The two women had come in from the cold store five minutes ago and hadn't stopped talking since. I didn't know their names. They didn't know mine.
That was the thing about being invisible. People said everything around you.
I had always considered it one of the few perks of the job. Free information.
"What do you mean before?" the second one said.
"I was delivering linens to the preparation rooms." The first one lowered her voice. Not low enough. "I heard the Beta talking to the Alpha outside the door."
"About what?"
"The light." A pause. "It was arranged. Old Alpha Marcus paid Elder Mara's assistant to fix it on Victoria."
The second one gasped. "You're serious."
"Dead serious. The Moon Goddess didn't choose her. Someone chose her for her."
My hands slowed in the water.
"Lena," Kira said.
"I heard," I told her.
"Klein kept saying the Alpha already had a fated mate," the first one continued. "That the bond had revealed itself two months ago."
"Who is she?" the second one whispered. "Who's the real mate?"
"That's the thing, he never said a name but the Alpha described her." She dropped her voice even lower. "Said she was nobody. Works in the pack house. Rough hands. Smells like grease and dish soap." A pause. "Said she was not his type. Said even her own father couldn't find a reason to stay for her."
Silence.
"That's awful," the second one said quietly.
"I know." The first one picked up her crate. "I just want to know who she is. Poor woman doesn't even know."
They walked back to the cold store.
The door swung shut.
I stood at the sink.
My hands were still in the dirty water.
I looked down at them slowly.
Red. Rough. Calloused. Smelling like grease and dish soap.
"Oh," Kira said softly.
"Yes," I said quietly. "Oh."
I pulled my hands out of the water. Dried them on my apron. Picked up the next pot.
So the Moon Goddess hadn't passed me over, the light had been bought. The bond had been real — both times, the meeting room and the ceremony, exactly the way Kira had said. Exactly the way I had refused to believe.
And Damien Stone had stood in a room with his Beta and described his fated mate to justify ignoring her.
Described me.
I thought about that for a moment. Rolled it around.
"He said even your father couldn't find a reason to stay." Kira said.
I was quiet for a moment.
"Well," I said. "He's not wrong about that one."
Kira made a sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite not one either.
The kitchen door swung open again. Two more workers came in laughing about something, moving to their stations, completely unaware that the world had just rearranged itself in the corner by the sink.
I watched them.
Then I looked back at my pot.
The anger should have arrived by now. Hot and immediate and righteous. The kind of anger that made you want to throw something or say something or make someone feel a fraction of what they had made you feel.
It hadn't arrived.
What had arrived instead was something I didn't have a proper word for yet. Something quiet and cold and very, very clear. Like a fog lifting. Like finally seeing the shape of something that had been there all along.
He had known.
From the moment he looked back at his papers in that meeting room, he had known. And he had spent two months arranging and paying and planning to make sure nobody found out.
Which meant somewhere underneath all that arrogance was a man who was afraid of a kitchen girl with rough hands and twelve silver coins.
I almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
"What are you thinking?" Kira asked.
I scrubbed steadily. "I'm thinking that walls have very good hearing in this pack house."
That's it? Kira said. That's all you have to say?
"I'm also thinking," I said, "that he described me like I was something he scraped off his boot." I set the clean pot aside. "To his own Beta. In a corridor." I reached for the next pot. "That's a very bold choice for a man whose deepest secret I now know."
Kira was quiet for a moment.
"What are you going to do with it?"
I smiled to myself.
"Right now?" I said. "Finish these pots, collect my coins, go home to my mother." I scrubbed steadily. "Everything else can wait."
For how long?
"Until I'm ready," I said simply.
- Writer
