Broken But Not Forgotten

CHAPTER 3

The formal dinner started at seven.

I had been on my feet since before four in the morning and my broken rib was reminding me of that fact with every breath, but the kitchen didn't care about that. Neither did the clock. I had a dinner to get on the table.

The caterers my father had hired handled the main courses. My job was everything around it, the bread service, the appetisers, the drinks, the clearing, the desserts. I moved in and out of the dining room in a steady circuit, head down, fast, invisible as I could make myself.

The room was full.

Three packs worth of Alphas, Betas, senior warriors, and their mates packed around the long table my father had extended for the occasion. Candles. The good china. My mother at the far end in a dark green dress that matched her eyes, holding court with the kind of effortless social ease that I used to try to understand and had eventually just accepted I would never have.

I watched the table as I moved. You learn a lot about people when you watch without being watched back.

Alpha Damon sat near the head of the table, two seats from my father. He wasn't performing, that was the thing that struck me. Everyone else at the table was performing. Making themselves larger, more charming, more impressive. Damon just sat there and ate, and when he spoke it was short and direct, and somehow that made every head at the table lean in rather than lean back.

Lena was across from him in the red dress she had been planning since yesterday. She was stunning. Genuinely, objectively stunning. She laughed at the right moments and touched her hair at the right moments and found reasons to lean slightly forward in a way that was not accidental.

Damon was polite to her.

Polite the way you are polite to weather. Present, acknowledged, and entirely unaffected.

I noticed his Beta noticing this and trying not to smile.

I came around the table with the bread basket, working my way from the far end toward the head. Pack members helped themselves without looking at me, which was how it was supposed to work. I was furniture. Functional furniture.

I reached Damon's end of the table.

I set the bread basket down between him and the Alpha to his right. As I straightened, I caught the edge of his gaze, not directed at me, or not obviously, just a slight shift in his peripheral awareness, like he always knew where I was in the room without making a point of it.

My wolf pulsed, warm and insistent.

Stop that, I told her.

She didn't.

"Is there something wrong with the bread?" Lena's voice was sweet and sharp at the same time, aimed directly at me.

I looked at the basket. "No. Is there something you need?"

"I need you to not breathe on the food." She smiled at it, like it was a joke. Like the Alpha sitting across from her wasn't watching her with those flat, measuring eyes.

"Lena." The voice came from Beta Theo, who was seated two spots down. His tone was easy and conversational, but there was a note underneath it. "Tell me what you thought of the trade proposal from the Northern Summit last year. I've heard Crimson Ridge had some strong opinions."

It was a redirect. Clean and deliberate. Lena pivoted to it because she had to, because refusing to engage would make her look petty, and she was too smart for that.

I moved on around the table.

I was at the far end, refilling a water glass, when I heard my father's voice shift. The specific shift, from socialised Alpha to something quieter and more dangerous, that I had learned to track the same way you track weather. That particular tone meant something had tilted.

I finished the refill and made my way back toward the kitchen, but I was listening.

"Your pack has expanded considerably in the last three years," my father was saying. Not hostile. Careful.

"We've been fortunate," Damon said.

"Fortunate," my father repeated, in the tone that meant he didn't believe the word. "The Iron Crest pack has annexed two border territories and absorbed an entire small pack. That's strategy, not fortune."

"Fair point," Damon said.

"Some Alphas are concerned by it."

The table had gone slightly quieter in the way that it goes quiet when people are pretending they aren't listening.

"Some Alphas are concerned by anything that grows stronger than them," Damon said. Still calm. Still flat. "That's their business."

My father smiled. "And the unmated Alpha concern? Is that your business, or the council's?"

Silence.

Damon set down his fork. Quietly. "I wasn't aware that was on the agenda."

"It's always on the agenda," my father said. "An unstable Alpha is a concern for every neighboring pack." He smiled again. "We say these things as friends, Damon."

I had reached the kitchen doorway. I stopped just inside it, out of sight, pressing my back to the wall.

My heart was going too fast and I didn't know why.

"Noted," Damon said, and the word was a closed door.

Someone changed the subject. The table exhaled and rearranged itself into easier conversation.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and tried to slow my breathing.

My wolf was doing the humming thing again. Low and constant and certain in a way that I desperately, desperately did not want to examine.

Dessert almost made it to the table without incident.

I was carrying the first of the dessert plates, dark chocolate tart with a raspberry compote, the caterer's work, not mine, when Lena stepped backward from her chair directly into my path.

I had a half second.

I managed to keep four of the five plates. The fifth went sideways, catching the edge of the tablecloth, and the dessert landed in a dark smear across the linen.

The table went quiet.

"Clumsy pig," Lena said. Not loudly. Almost fondly, the way someone says something they've said so many times it's lost all its edge. "Look at what you've done."

"I apologise," I said. I was already crouching to pick up the plate.

"Don't bother." She looked down at me on the floor, and her eyes were doing something complicated, she was aware of the room, aware of Damon watching, and she was making a calculation. I could see it. "You know what, just go clean the kitchen. You're obviously out of your depth up here with real company."

I picked up the plate. Stood up. Met her eyes, just for a second, just before I dropped my gaze, but for that second I looked directly at her.

Her expression flickered.

"Of course," I said. Quiet and even. "I'll send the remaining plates out shortly."

I walked back to the kitchen.

I didn't let my hands shake until the door swung shut behind me.

And then I put the plates down on the counter and pressed both palms flat against the cool surface and breathed through the fire in my chest.

You're fine. You're fine. One more night and they'll be gone and you'll be fine.

But my wolf wasn't agreeing with me. She was pacing, back and forth, back and forth, and the feeling she was sending up wasn't fear.

It was something that felt like the moment before a very large change.

I picked up the remaining plates and went back out to the table.

Later, I was washing up in the empty kitchen when I heard footsteps.

Not my father. Not my mother. Not Lena. I knew all of their footsteps by heart.

These were different. Even. Unhurried. The footsteps of someone who was not looking for confrontation but had no anxiety about finding it.

I didn't turn around.

"You're still working," Damon said, from somewhere behind me.

"It doesn't stop because the guests go to bed."

A pause. "How long have you been doing this?"

"All my life."

"That's not an answer."

"It is, actually." I kept washing. "Alpha, whatever your name is, I mean this respectfully, you don't need to do this. You stepped in last night and I am genuinely grateful. But you don't owe me conversation and I don't expect it."

"Damon," he said.

I stopped washing.

"My name. It's Damon. You've been calling me Alpha, which is a title, not a name."

I turned around slowly. He was standing in the middle of the kitchen with his arms at his sides, looking at me with that same flat, assessing expression that I was starting to understand was not coldness, exactly. It was the face of someone who had learned to be very careful about what he let show.

"Damon," I said.

His jaw moved slightly. Just slightly.

"There's something I need to tell you," he said, and his voice had changed. Something tighter in it. More careful. "And I need you to hear it before tomorrow's session, because after tomorrow it won't just be between us."

I waited.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I think," he said slowly, like each word was a calculated risk, "that you're my mate."

The kitchen was completely silent.

The water was still running in the sink.

I turned back around and turned it off.

Breathed.

Turned back.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

He frowned. "I know what I…"

"I'm the pack slave," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "I'm the girl who killed the Alpha's heir before she was even born. I'm the person everyone in that dining room has watched get beaten for eighteen years without once saying a word." I met his eyes. "I don't get a mate. That's not how my life works."

He held my gaze.

"I know what my wolf is telling me," he said quietly.

"Then your wolf is confused."

A long silence. His eyes were doing something I couldn't read again, something deep and unresolved and more complicated than anything I was equipped for tonight.

"I'm not going to push it tonight," he said finally. "You've had enough pushed at you for one day." He straightened. "But I'm not confused."

He walked back out.

I stood in the kitchen for a long time.

My wolf had stopped pacing.

She was just sitting, very still, the way she sat when she had already made up her mind about something and was simply waiting for me to catch up.

We are not doing this, I told her.

She didn't even bother arguing