Seduced By My God-Father

THE RETURN: The pack lands smelled exactly the same. Pine and earth and something wild underneath it all something that called to a part of me I had spent four years trying to bury under coffee shop shifts and college textbooks and the comfortable numbness of a city that never asked me what I was. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the bus window and watched Silverwood pass by in fragments. The old stone gate. The trail that wound into the forest like a scar on the hillside. The cluster of cabins near the eastern ridge where the younger wolves lived before they were mated. Home. Except it hadn't felt like home since the night they lowered my parents into the ground and Alpha Roger stormclaw stood at the graveside with his jaw set like iron and told me, in that quiet voice that left no room for argument, that I was going away to school. I was seventeen then. I was twenty-one now, and nobody had asked me if I wanted to come back. The letter had simply arrived three weeks ago, slipped under my apartment door with no postage, no return address. Just four lines written in black ink so dark it looked carved into the paper. Your place is here, Sera. Your time away has ended. Come home. One letter. No explanation. No please. And yet here I was, bag between my feet, heart doing something embarrassing against my ribs as the bus groaned to a stop at the edge of town. I told myself it was anxiety. I was good at telling myself things. The doors wheezed open and the air hit me first clean and sharp and thick with the scent of the pack, dozens of wolves layered into one familiar signature that my body recognised before my mind caught up. Something low in my stomach stirred. My skin felt suddenly too tight. Easy, I thought. You are not seventeen anymore. You do not cry at bus stops. I grabbed my bag and stepped down. Mia was waiting for me on the pavement, and she looked exactly the same as she always had small and bright-eyed with her red hair pulled sideways and a grin that she wore like a weapon. "You actually came," she said. "Did you think I wouldn't?" "Honestly?" She took my bag before I could argue. "A little bit yes." She hugged me hard enough to make my spine crack, and I laughed despite myself, and for about thirty seconds the knot in my chest loosened. Then she said, "He's expecting you at the main house," and the knot came back, tighter than before. I kept my voice even. "Of course he is." Mia glanced at me sideways as we walked. She had always been able to read me too well the downside of growing up together, of sharing every secret from childhood scraped knees to the whispered confessions of girls becoming something more than girls. "He's different," she said quietly. "Different how?" She was quiet for too long. "You'll see." That was not comforting. The main house sat at the centre of the pack lands the way a heartbeat sits at the centre of a chest, everything else arranged around it, oriented toward it, dependent on it. It was large and old and built from dark timber that had gone silver with age. Roger's grandfather had built it. His father had expanded it. Roger had stripped it back to something simpler, starker, when he took the alpha title at twenty-four. I knew all of this the way I knew the layout of my own palm. I had grown up half inside these walls. I stopped at the bottom of the front steps. Mia stopped beside me. "I'll wait out here," she offered. "Coward," I said. "Absolutely," she agreed cheerfully. I went up the steps alone. The door opened before I could knock. He was standing in the entrance hall with one hand still on the door handle, and the first thing I noticed was that Mia had not been wrong. He was different. He had always been tall but he seemed taller now, broader through the shoulders, and the boy I had carried in my memory,stern but not unkind, serious but capable of warmth,had been replaced by something harder. The lines of his face had settled into something severe. His dark hair was shorter than I remembered. His eyes, that particular shade of grey that always reminded me of winter sky just before snow, moved over me with an expression I couldn't read. He had been my father's best friend. My Godfather. The man who made sure my school fees were paid and my apartment was safe and that I never, not once in four years, went without. He had also, in some unexamined corner of my heart that I kept firmly locked, been something I refused to name. "Sera" he said. Just my name. Nothing else. "Alpha," I said back, because some part of me needed the distance of the title right now. "Come inside," he said, and stepped back. I crossed the threshold. The door closed behind me, and I had the sudden irrational feeling of someone who had just stepped into deep water that the surface was already above my head, that the current was stronger than I had accounted for, that I had made a calculation error somewhere I couldn't yet identify. He led me to the study without asking if I wanted tea or rest or any of the small courtesies that normal reunions involved. He moved like the house was an extension of his body and sat behind his desk with his hands folded and looked at me across the space between us. "You look well," he said. "You look like you haven't slept," I said. A pause. "Sit down, Sera." "I've been sitting for six hours." "Then you should be comfortable with it." But there was something, just barely at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one. I sat. He looked at me for a long moment in that way he had always had, like he was reading something written underneath the surface of things. It used to make me feel known. Right now it made me feel exposed. "The pack needs you here," he said finally. "You said that in the letter. You didn't say why." "There are things happening." He chose each word with care. "Things I'll explain when the time is right." "That's not an answer, Roger." The use of his name,not the title, his actual name, shifted something in the room. His eyes moved to mine and stayed there. "No," he said. "It isn't." We looked at each other across the desk and the years and everything that lived in the silence between people who have known each other too long and too incompletely, and I felt it then for the first time. That pull. Faint and warm and wrong in ways I couldn't entirely articulate, a low hum somewhere behind my sternum, like a frequency my body was picking up that my brain hadn't been built to process. I stood up abruptly. "I'll take my old room." "It's ready for you." Of course it was. He knew I would come. He had always known, I suspected, exactly what I would do before I did it. I picked up my bag. "Sera." I stopped. "I'm glad you're back," he said quietly. I didn't turn around, because I didn't trust what my face was doing. "Goodnight, Roger," I said, and walked out. In the hallway I pressed my back against the wall and breathed. The pull was still there. That was going to be a problem.