Ruin Me, Alpha

Chapter One: The Kitchen Light

People say you can feel a room change when the right person walks into it. I used to think that was a line from the kind of novels I hid under my mattress as a teenager, the ones with cracked spines and heroines who always fainted at the worst possible moment. Then Dominic Hale came down the back stairs at two in the morning, and every nerve I owned turned toward him like a compass finding north.

I was supposed to be asleep. Ivy had put me in the guest room at the end of the second floor, the one with the slanted ceiling and the window that looked down over the lake, and I had lain there for three hours listening to the old house tick and settle around me. Hale House had been the closest thing to a home I’d known since I was eleven. It was strange how a place could smell exactly the same, woodsmoke and lemon oil and cold stone, and still make me feel like a stranger who had walked into the wrong life.

So I’d come downstairs for water, barefoot, in a sleep shirt that had seemed fine in my suitcase and now felt thin as a rumor. The kitchen was dark except for the light over the stove. I filled a glass at the tap and leaned against the island, watching the lake turn silver under a moon one night shy of full. I had been back in Ashgrove for forty hours. In that time I had cried twice, hugged what felt like forty people, and been told by Mrs. Ash at the market that I looked “just like your mother, God rest her,” which had been kind and also like being struck.

Ivy had asked me to be her maid of honor over a crackling video call six months ago, shrieking so loudly the screen froze. Theo had proposed on the dock at Midsummer with half the pack watching from the shore, and the wedding was set for the following June, because Hale weddings did not get rushed. I had said yes before she finished the question. I would have said yes to anything for Ivy. That was the thing about her. She made generosity feel like gravity.

I didn’t hear him. That was the first strange thing. Wolves are not quiet people, whatever the stories say, and the floors in this house had opinions about everyone. But when the bottom stair gave its small complaint, it was already too late to do anything but turn.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

His voice came out of the dark like something poured, low and rough at the edges, gravel and smoke. It was the kind of voice that never had to be raised to be obeyed. I had heard it all my life. I had heard it read bedtime stories to Ivy and me when we were seven, call us in from the dock at dusk, tell me to breathe at my mother’s funeral. I had never once heard it like this, pitched so quietly that it seemed meant for only one person in the world.

“Jet lag,” I said. The lie came out thin.

Dominic stopped at the far side of the island, the stove light catching him in pieces. He was fifty now. I knew because Ivy had thrown him a party in the spring and sent me photographs, and I had looked at those photographs longer than a girl should look at her best friend’s father. Silver had moved into his dark hair at the temples. His shoulders were broad enough to block the hall light behind him. He wore a gray henley with the sleeves shoved to the elbows, and his forearms were dusted with dark hair and corded with a strength that had nothing to do with any gym.

The Alpha of the Hale Pack. The whole town said it like a title carved over a door, and the whole town meant it. I had known him my entire life as Ivy’s father, the man who taught us both to ride bikes on the long drive, who signed my permission slips when Aunt Odile’s hands grew too stiff to hold a pen, who flew across an ocean to sit in the crowd at my graduation in a rented suit he clearly hated, because Odile was gone by then and I would otherwise have had no one watching.

I had not known him like this. Barefoot, unguarded, looking at me as though he had just noticed something he had spent a long time trying not to see.

“You’ve grown up, Mara,” he said quietly.

My pulse knocked at the base of my throat. “That tends to happen.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The ghost of the place where one used to live. “Three years,” he said. “I thought I was prepared.”

“Prepared for what?”

He didn’t answer. He came around the island slowly, and it wasn’t a threat, which was the problem. A threat I would have known what to do with. This was a decision being made one step at a time, each footfall unhurried, the way you approach a deer you don’t want to startle or a fire you have already decided to touch. I should have moved. The kitchen was big enough, and the door to the back hall stood open behind me. But my body had stopped taking instructions from my mind, and my mind, traitor that it was, had gone very quiet and very interested.

He stopped close enough that I caught his scent, cedar and rain and something darker underneath, something warm and wild that made my knees forget their one job. I had smelled it on his coats and in the hallways for years without knowing it had a name. Now I knew exactly what it was. It was want. Not his, I told myself. Mine, bouncing back at me off the walls.

“You should go upstairs,” he said.

“Probably.”

“Mara.” Just my name, soft, with something underneath it that I felt more than heard, a pressure that settled over my shoulders like a hand. The Weight. I had felt it before, in small doses, when he walked into a room full of pack and the talking died. Everyone else bowed their heads without noticing. I never had. It had always just hummed against my skin, like standing on a platform while the express goes through. Tonight it didn’t hum. It leaned.

“Look at me,” he said.

I did.

His eyes were the gray of the lake before a storm, and they held mine with a patience that frightened me more than any command could have. For a moment neither of us breathed. Then he lifted his hand, and I watched it come, big and scarred across the knuckles, steady in a way I was not, and his thumb touched the center of my lower lip.

Rough. Unhurried. A single slow line from one corner to the other, as if he were reading something written there. The whole kitchen tilted. I heard my own breath catch, a small humiliating sound, and saw his gaze drop to follow it.

This is Ivy’s father, my mind screamed. Ivy’s father. Ivy, who held your hair back after your first bad tequila. Ivy, who is getting married in June.

Don’t stop, every other part of me answered.

His thumb stilled at the corner of my mouth. I felt a tremor go through him, small and buried, a man holding a door shut against a flood. His jaw worked. When he spoke, his voice had dropped into a register I had never heard from him, and it raised the hair along my arms.

“This didn’t happen.”

“Nothing happened,” I whispered.

“Good.” But he didn’t move his hand. Two heartbeats. Three. I counted them, because counting was all I had left. I could feel the heat of his palm an inch from my jaw and the tight restraint in every line of him, and I understood in a dizzy, terrible rush that if he leaned down I would not stop him. I would not even pretend to.

Then somewhere above us a floorboard creaked, and Dominic Hale stepped back like a man waking from a dream he was ashamed of.

“Drink your water,” he said, and his voice was almost normal again, a father’s voice, the one for permission slips and burnt toast. “Go to bed.”

He took the back stairs two at a time. I heard a door close somewhere on the far side of the house, softly, the way people close doors when they don’t trust themselves to slam them.

I stayed where I was with the glass sweating in my hand. My lip burned. Not painfully. Like a note someone had just stopped playing, still ringing in the wood. I pressed my fingers where his thumb had been and felt my heart going as if I’d run the whole way up the ridge. Out the window the lake lay silver and smooth and innocent, and beyond it the pines stood black against the sky. Somewhere in those trees, I thought, something old and watchful was awake and listening. I told myself that was only the story of this place talking. I told myself a lot of things.

Upstairs the floorboard creaked again, and a thin line of light appeared beneath the stairwell door. Ivy’s voice floated down, thick with sleep. “Mar? Is that you? Everything okay?”

I set the glass in the sink and called up the lie I was going to have to get used to. “Fine. Just water.”

“Okay. Love you. Shower in nine days, you’re not allowed to be tired.”

“I love you too,” I said, and it was true, and that was the worst part. I climbed the stairs toward the sound of my best friend’s sleepy laugh, and every step felt like walking away from a cliff I had already, quietly, started to fall from.