THE ALMOST
2067 Words
Chapter Thirteen
Sera was asleep by midnight.
Selene sat beside her bed for two hours after that anyway.
She listened to the palace settle around her — the distant sounds of the cleanup, the quiet efficient movement of Draven's people doing what they did after something like this. She listened to Sera breathe. She thought about the throne room and the power and the three seconds she wasn't going to tell anyone about except that she already had.
She had told Draven.
She was still thinking about what that meant.
At two in the morning she got up quietly and went to the library.
---
He was already there.
She wasn't surprised.
He was at the table in the centre of the room — not reading, not working, just sitting with a glass of something amber and looking at nothing in particular. He looked up when she came in.
"Sera?" he said.
"Sleeping," she said. "Finally."
He nodded.
She sat across from him. Looked at the glass. "Is that helping?"
"No," he said. "But it gives my hands something to do."
She almost smiled.
They sat in silence for a moment. The library at two in the morning had its own quality — the books pressing in warmly from all sides, the single lamp on the table, the city dark and quiet through the high windows.
"Tell me about the rogue pack," she said.
He looked at her.
"Not asking," she said. "We said honesty. This is part of it."
He looked at the glass.
"Three years ago," he said. "A pack in the southern territory. Small — forty wolves. They'd been running raids on neighbouring packs for two years. Taking resources. Taking people." He paused. "I sent warnings. They ignored them. I sent enforcers. They killed two of them."
"So you went yourself," she said.
"I went myself," he said. "And I made a decision." He looked at the table. "The pack leadership — eight wolves. I ordered them removed." He paused. "I ordered the example made publicly. So that every pack watching would understand the consequence of killing my enforcers."
"Removed," Selene said carefully.
"Killed," he said. "Say what it is."
"Killed," she said. "And the families?"
"Were not the target." His jaw tightened. "The building where it happened — I didn't know families were inside. I should have known. I should have confirmed the intelligence before I gave the order." He looked at her steadily. "Eleven wolves. Three of them children. They weren't the target. They were in the wrong place because I moved too fast and I didn't check."
Selene sat with this.
"How long have you been carrying that?" she said.
"Three years."
"Have you told anyone?"
"No."
"Why not?"
He looked at her. "Because I'm the Alpha King," he said. "Admitting error isn't—"
"Human?" she said.
"Political," he said. "It's not political."
"And being human? Is that political too?"
He looked at her for a long moment.
"With me it usually is," he said quietly.
Selene looked at the man across from her. Not the king. The man. The one who couldn't feel his hands at his first ceremony. The one who sat on library floors and walked in silence and said *hope* like it cost him something.
The one who had given an order and lived with the consequence of it for three years without telling a single person.
"You'd do it again," she said. "The raid. Stopping them."
"Yes," he said.
"But differently."
He looked at her. Something moved in his face. "Yes," he said. "Differently."
"That's the difference," she said.
"Between what?"
"Between a man who made a mistake and a monster," she said. "A monster doesn't say differently." She held his gaze. "You're not a monster, Draven. You're a man who has been carrying something alone that he should have put down a long time ago."
He looked at her.
"You're not afraid of it," he said. "What I did."
"I'm not afraid of your past," she said. "I'm paying attention to your present." She paused. "The present where you sat on your own throne room floor because I needed someone beside me. The present where you let me talk to my ex because it was my choice to make." She held his gaze. "That's the man I'm paying attention to."
The library was very quiet.
"Selene," he said.
"Yes."
"I'm going to say something."
"Okay."
"And I need you to let me finish before you respond."
She looked at him. "That bad?"
"That important," he said.
She sat back. Gave him the space.
He looked at his hands on the table.
"I have been the most powerful wolf alive for ten years," he said. "I have run a continent. I have made decisions that changed the shape of the wolf world. I have been feared and respected and negotiated with and fought against." He paused. "And in ten years I have not once — not once — felt anything I couldn't manage." He looked up at her. "Until a woman told me to get out of her kitchen in the rain."
Selene didn't say anything.
"I didn't accept the bond because of politics," he said. "Or power. Or what a Soul Blessed mate means for my strength." He looked at her steadily. "I accepted it because for the first time in ten years something in me said — finally. This one. Her." He paused. "And I have been trying, very badly, not to move too fast. Because you asked me not to. Because you had just had your heart broken and I was not going to be the next man who pushed you into something before you were ready."
He stopped.
"That's it," he said. "That's what I needed to say."
Selene looked at him.
"You've been going slowly for me," she said.
"Yes."
"The whole time."
"Yes."
"Even when—"
"Especially when," he said.
She looked at him across the library table. At the man who had been holding a careful line for days because she'd asked him to. At the Alpha King who had sat on the floor and walked in silence and let her drive and told her about eleven wolves and said hope like it mattered.
"Draven," she said.
"Yes."
"I'm ready."
He went very still.
"For what?" he said carefully.
"To stop going slowly," she said.
The library was completely silent.
He stood up.
She stood up.
He came around the table.
Not fast — nothing about him was ever fast, everything was deliberate, chosen, the way he moved through the world — but he came around the table and he stopped in front of her close enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at him.
"Selene," he said. His voice different. Lower.
"Still here," she said.
His hand came up. The same movement as before — fingers against her jaw, slow, deliberate. But this time he didn't stop.
This time there was no door bursting open.
No alarm.
No Cain.
Just the library and the lamp and the books and his hand against her face and his eyes on hers and the bond between them humming like something that had been waiting a very long time.
"I'm going to kiss you," he said.
"I noticed," she said.
"I wanted to give you the option to—"
"Draven."
"Yes?"
"Stop talking."
He did.
---
The candles lit.
All of them.
Every candle in the library — the ones on the table, the ones on the shelves, the ones in the sconces along the walls — lit simultaneously without either of them touching them.
Neither of them noticed.
Or rather — they noticed, distantly, and didn't care, which was more accurate.
---
At some point they ended up on the floor.
Not dramatically. Just — the step backward to the shelf, the shelf at her back, the decision to sit made without discussion, the floor of the library at three in the morning with the candles burning and the city dark outside and every book Draven had ever read pressed in around them like witnesses.
He had his back against the shelf.
She had her back against him.
His chin resting on top of her head.
Neither of them talking.
"You lit the candles," he said eventually.
"I know," she said.
"All of them."
"I know."
"Without trying."
"Draven."
"Yes."
"I know."
He almost laughed. She felt it in his chest more than heard it.
"What does it feel like?" he said. "The power. When it's not—when it's like this. Not the throne room."
She thought about it.
"Like water," she said. "When it's controlled. Like something that has always been there and is finally—" She paused. "Like finally being the right size."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You've always been the right size," he said.
"I know that now," she said. "I didn't before." She paused. "That's what they took. Not just the power. The understanding of what I was allowed to be."
He tightened his arm around her.
She let him.
"Draven," she said.
"Yes."
"Your flaw."
"Which one," he said. "I have several."
She almost smiled. "The pack. The ruthlessness. The ten years of everyone being afraid of you." She looked at the wall across from them. "I'm not going to pretend I didn't hear what you said. That it wasn't—"
"Awful," he said.
"Awful," she agreed. "It was awful." She paused. "But I meant what I said. Past and present." She turned slightly to look at him. "I'm paying attention to your present."
He looked at her.
"Give me time," he said. "To be better at it. At being—" He paused. "At being a person rather than a king."
"You have time," she said.
"How much?"
She looked at him. At the Alpha King with his back against a library shelf at three in the morning asking how much time he had to become a person.
"All of it," she said simply.
Something happened in his face.
Not the almost smile. Not the recalibration. Something she hadn't seen before — open, unguarded, the expression of a man who had just been given something he had stopped believing was available.
He looked away.
Cleared his throat.
"The prophecy," he said.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Change the subject when something feels like too much," she said. "That's a pattern. I've noticed it."
He was quiet.
"I'm going to keep noticing it," she said. "Every time."
"That's going to be very annoying," he said.
"Yes," she agreed. "That's the point."
A pause.
"All of it," he said quietly. Not a question this time.
"All of it," she confirmed.
The candles burned.
The city was dark and quiet outside.
And in the library of Hargrove palace at three in the morning the Alpha King and his mate sat on the floor between the shelves and didn't say anything else for a long time and didn't need to.
---
She fell asleep against him at some point.
She woke up in her bed.
She didn't remember being moved. Didn't remember the corridor or the stairs or the door.
She remembered — vaguely, in the soft way of something that happened at the edge of sleep — being carried. And a voice, very quiet, saying something she couldn't quite catch.
She lay in her bed in the grey morning light and looked at the ceiling.
On the bedside table was a cup of tea.
Still warm.
And beside it — a book. The history of the twelve wolf kingdoms. A bookmark at page two hundred and twelve.
She stared at it.
Then she picked it up.
There was a note inside the front cover. His handwriting — precise, controlled, the handwriting of a man who did everything deliberately.
*The footnote on 212 was right about one other thing. Page 347. —D*
She flipped to page three forty seven.
Read the footnote.
She sat up in bed with the book in her lap and read it twice and then looked at the ceiling and thought about a man who had stayed awake long enough to find a footnote worth showing her and had left it beside her tea before she woke up.
"Insufferable," she said to the ceiling.
She was smiling when she said it.
---
- Writer
