The Alpha's forbidden luna

Chapter 5

They put her in a room on the third floor, not a cell exactly — there was a bed, a window, a bathroom sink — but the door locked from the outside, and the window, when Marlowe checked it, looked down forty feet onto stone.

She sat on the edge of the bed with her wet coat still on, both arms wrapped around herself, and tried to make her brain work the way it was supposed to work in a crisis, cataloging exits, cataloging threats, cataloging anything at all besides the raw, humming pull in her chest that hadn't eased once since the clearing.

Mate.

Verity's voice rose up in her memory, unbidden, from a hundred fragmented warnings over nine years, and if a bond ever finds you, run. Don't trust it. Don't trust what it makes you feel. It had never made sense before, an abstract danger, a rule with no context, the kind of warning Verity gave about a dozen things Marlowe had never expected to actually encounter.

Now it made a horrible kind of sense. Because sitting alone in a locked room in the heart of enemy territory, Marlowe's whole body was still leaning toward a door three floors down like it had a will independent of her own, aching for a man whose enforcers had chased her people through the dark an hour ago.

She hated it. She hated it with a ferocity that surprised her, and underneath the hatred, buried somewhere she didn't want to look at too closely, something else entirely — something that felt disturbingly like relief, like recognition, like coming home to a place she'd never actually been.

The door opened without a knock sometime later, and Marlowe's whole body went rigid before she registered who it was.

Not the Alpha. A woman — dark-haired, sharp-eyed, moving with the coiled economy of someone who'd spent a lot of time learning exactly how dangerous she was. She set a tray down on the small table by the window without being asked, then leaned against the door frame with her arms crossed, studying Marlowe with an expression that gave away nothing at all.

"The boy's ankle is fractured, not broken," the woman said. "He'll heal fine. Faster than a human would."

"Thank you." Marlowe made herself say it, made herself keep her voice steady. "Who are you?"

"Ophelia. Cal's beta." A pause, deliberate, weighted. "You want to tell me what happened out there tonight?"

"I got caught," Marlowe said. "That's what happened."

"That's not what I'm asking about, and you know it." Ophelia's eyes narrowed, and for the first time, something like real hostility crept into her expression. "I've known Cal for nine years. I've never seen him look at anyone the way he looked at you tonight. Never. Not once."

Marlowe's chest tightened around the truth she wasn't ready to say out loud to a stranger, especially not this stranger, whose whole posture radiated the specific, protective suspicion of someone guarding something precious.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said instead, which was a lie so obvious it barely qualified as one.

Ophelia studied her for another long moment, something calculating moving behind her eyes, and then pushed off the door frame. "For your sake, I hope that's true. Because if it's not — if you're some kind of plant, some kind of setup — I will find out. And I promise you, whatever debt you think you owe your rogue friends, it will look like nothing compared to what happens if you've come here to hurt him."

She left without waiting for a response, the door locking again behind her, and Marlowe sat alone in the sudden silence with her pulse hammering and the pendant still warm against her chest, thinking that Ophelia's threat should have frightened her far more than it actually had.

Cal came an hour after that, alone, no guards this time, and something in Marlowe's traitorous chest lifted at the sight of him despite every rational instinct telling her it shouldn't.

He'd changed out of the rain-soaked half-shift into dry clothes, dark shirt, hair still damp, and he stood in the doorway for a long moment without coming in, like he was steeling himself for something.

"The boy's healer says he'll be fine," he said finally.

"Ophelia has already told me."

"Right." He looked, briefly, like a man who'd rehearsed several different opening lines and abandoned all of them at once. "I should have led with that."

Something in his awkwardness cracked a small, unwilling opening in Marlowe's guard, and she hated that too. "Why did you stop them," she said. "Your enforcers? Out there."

Cal's jaw worked. He stepped into the room, finally, closing the door most of the way behind him, though he stayed near it, like he didn't fully trust himself closer than that.

"You know why," he said quietly.

"Say it anyway."

He looked at her, silver eyes dark in the lamplight, and Marlowe watched something in him fight itself for a long moment before he answered.

"Mate bond," he said, low, like the word cost him something to spend. "I felt it the second our eyes met. I assume you felt it too."

Hearing it out loud made it real in a way that terrified her far more than the abstract, humming pull in her chest had. "I don't want this," she said, and heard her own voice shake.

"Neither do I." Something raw and honest crossed his face, gone almost as fast as it appeared. "I've spent my whole life making sure this exact thing could never happen to me."

"Then let me go." The words came out fast, desperate. "Pretend you never saw me. I'll disappear. I'm good at disappearing."

Cal was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone rougher, quieter, edged with something that sounded almost like grief.

"I can't," he said. "I've tried to think of a way to make that true for the last hour, and I can't do it. You're not walking out of this packed house. I don't know what that means yet, or what I'm supposed to do about it, but I know that much."

Marlowe stared at him, feeling the bond in her chest pull taut at his words despite everything in her that wanted to fight it, and understood — with the same cold, absolute certainty as the moment their eyes first met — that whatever life she'd built for herself in Hollow Creek was already, irrevocably, gone.