The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Chapter 7

Wren

There was a blanket over me that hadn’t been there when I went under, and a pillow beneath my head, and no Kaz.

Gray light through a gap in the curtains. Rain still going, softer now, the tired kind that has been at it since dark. My dress was over the back of a chair, stiff and ruined, and I was in a man’s undershirt that came to the middle of my thighs, and I had absolutely no memory of putting it on.

I lay there and let the whole thing come back to me in order, and when it had finished arriving I got up, because there was nothing else to do with myself.

The door opened while I was standing in the middle of the room holding my own dress.

He had a paper bag in each hand and rain on his shoulders. He set them on the counter without making an occasion of it.

“There’s a shop by the marina. Go and get warm, and eat something. The road’s open. I’ll take you back when you’re ready.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know.”

He had paid for a room at the Wexford as well, and paid for it before he ever picked up a phone to call my work. I did the arithmetic while I stood there holding a paper bag. A room at that place, the bag on the counter, the folded bills going into the hand of a man in kitchen whites, and a mechanic’s wage in a city like this one.

It did not come out. Nowhere near it.

I told myself he had saved for something and spent it on this instead, because it was the only answer that let me carry the bag into the bathroom, and I carried it in.

He said it like a man confirming a part number, and my chest went sideways at how little effort it had cost him, and I had to turn to the bag so he wouldn’t catch my face doing whatever it was doing.

Inside was toothpaste, a brush, deodorant, a comb. Underneath that, folded, a pair of shorts and a knit top with the tags still on.

I held the shorts up.

“They’ll be small,” he said, from the counter. “I guessed.”

“Off what?”

A pause you could have parked a car in.

“Off Mari.”

Her name went through the room and sat down in it, and neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Of course you did,” I said.

***

I stood in that shower until the water started to go cool.

I don’t know what I was looking for in there. Some seam in myself that had come apart. I braced both hands on the tile and went at it again, the same as you go at a coat pocket you have already emptied six times.

He chose me. He drove out to the bindery for a book he didn’t need. He sat through my aunt’s Christmases. He married a woman with UNRANKED on her registry paper in front of his whole House and never once let anybody make a joke about it in his hearing.

And then a hand under a glass that didn’t need to look.

I got out. I dried off. I put the clothes on.

The shorts stopped about four inches above my knee and the top was cut for a woman with a good deal less in the chest than I have, and the sound I made at the mirror was dry and short and not quite a laugh. I looked very provocative.

Fine. I was going straight home. It hardly mattered.

***

He was at the counter with his shirt off and his back to me, and there was a strip of gauze in his hand with blood on it.

I stopped in the bathroom doorway.

I did not mean to look. I have been a careful woman my whole life and I stood there for a solid three seconds before my brain caught up with my eyes.

He was built how a man gets when the work itself is the exercise, which it was. That was not what stopped me.

He had scars.

I need to be clear about what that means, because it took me a moment and a half to catch up to it myself. We do not scar. A Delta puts his hand through a saw and inside a few days there is nothing left to look at. Adrien opened his palm to the bone on a broken glass at our own sink and it had closed before I got back with the towel. I have always been the only person in any room who keeps her injuries, because Hollows heal like humans do, slowly and badly and with a receipt.

Kaz Rhodes had scars.

Eleven. I counted without deciding to.

A white line under his collarbone. Two along the ribs, thin and neat. Something starred and ugly low on his back that I had no word for. One that ran the length of his forearm and had been closed in a hurry by somebody who did not care what it looked like afterward. And a puckered coin below his right shoulder blade with its match at the front, and I have read enough medical texts to know precisely what makes a hole like that and goes all the way through a man.

There is one thing on this earth that leaves a mark on us. Silver goes in and the body cannot push it back out. What it opens stays open a long while, and when it finally closes it closes wrong, and it keeps the record forever.

Somebody had put silver into that man eleven separate times.

And he fixes engines for a living, and his wife rolls her eyes at his cheap coat.

He knew I was there. He must have known for the whole three seconds, because he pulled his shirt down over it without any hurry, and when he turned around his face had nothing on it.

“Don’t,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

I sat down at the little table where he had put out coffee and pastries in a paper box, and I ate one without tasting a bite of it.

***

“What do you think they’re doing right now?”

It came out of me before I decided to say it. He looked up from his cup.

“Sleeping,” he said. “It rained all night and there’s nowhere to go and neither of them has to be anywhere. They’ll be asleep.”

The picture of it put a nail through me. Not the garden. Not her hand. The two of them warm in a bed two hundred yards from where I was sitting in another woman’s size, having had the worst night of my life on a hotel floor.

“I was good to him,” I said.

“I know.”

“I was good to her too.” My fingers had gone white on the cup. “Do you know what I did for her? When her father died I slept on her floor for a month. I did the calls. I did the flowers. I wrote the thank-you cards because she couldn’t hold a pen. And she has been…” I couldn’t finish it. “While I was doing that, she was already…”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“She was.”

I put the cup down before I broke it.

“I want him to feel this,” I said. “Not sorry. Sorry is nothing, sorry is a card. I want it sitting in his chest in the small hours, for months on end. And I can’t do that from where I’m standing. There’s nothing I can take from him that he hasn’t already handed to someone else.”

Kaz sat very still.

“So don’t do it from where you’re standing,” he said.

I looked up.

He said it evenly, no more weight on it than a route read off a page. “You want him on the floor. Fine. There is exactly one thing in the world he thinks is his that he has never once had to fight for.”

My heart started going before the rest of me understood.

“Say what you mean.”

“You’ve already worked it out, Wren.”

“Then put it in words, because if it comes out of my mouth first I will never get it back in.”

He put his cup down. He stood up. And he crossed that room slower than any man has ever crossed a room, and stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin to keep his eyes.

“Us,” he said. “You want to break him? Then he should find you with another man. He should find us.”