Bound to the Enemy Alpha

CHAPTER FOUR

JANET

The sound comes in sets of three.

Scratch. Scratch. Scraaaape.

Like something testing the glass. Learning it.

I have backed up until my calves hit the bed frame and I cannot go any further, which means I am standing very still and trying to understand why the sound makes every hair on my body rise the way it does, not the sharp, obvious fear of a threat, but something older. Something that lives below thought.

Asher has gone predator-still in the way that large animals do when they are deciding whether to fight or flee and have not yet committed. His eyes are fixed on the window. His shoulders are back. The wound in his side, which he has been managing with careful, controlled breath since I dragged him through my door, seems to have stopped mattering to him entirely.

"Stay behind me," he says. Not a request.

I stay where I am, which is already behind him, and watch his face instead of the window.

The scratching stops.

The silence it leaves is worse.

Then the growl comes, low and resonant, pressing through the glass like something physical and Asher moves toward the window with the slow deliberateness of a man approaching something he already knows he won't like. He reaches for the curtain.

I almost say don't. I don't say it in time.

He pulls the curtain back.

The wolf outside is enormous, shoulder height well above the sill, fur so dark it reads as absence against the night behind it. Its eyes catch the moonlight and hold it, two points of silver that move immediately, without hesitation, from Asher to me.

Not Asher.

Me.

My scream comes out as barely a sound, strangled in my throat. I press back hard against the bedpost. The wolf doesn't flinch, doesn't move it simply watches me with an attention so focused it feels like pressure, like a hand laid flat against my sternum.

And then I see the mark.

A stripe of white fur along the left side of its neck, stark against the black. A single irregular band, wider at the top and tapering to a point. Utterly distinctive. The kind of marking that could not belong to two animals.

The recognition hits me somewhere I don't have words for.

I've never seen this wolf before in my life.

I have seen that mark.

In pencil, on paper that had gone soft at the folds from being opened and closed too many times. My mother's handwriting in the margin, the letters small and careful: The Guardian. A sketch she kept at the back of her wooden box, the one she never let me open, the one that disappeared after she died and that I have spent years convincing myself I imagined.

"That's not possible," I whisper.

The wolf holds my gaze for one more moment. Then it turns and moves into the trees, unhurried, and the darkness swallows it completely.

Gone. As though it was never there.

I realize my hand is pressed over my heart. I lower it slowly.

"What was that?" My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to expect.

Asher lets the curtain fall. When he turns, his expression is the most unguarded I've seen it, something working behind his eyes that he hasn't yet managed to lock down.

"That wolf died fifteen years ago," he says.

The room tilts.

I wait for him to take it back, to qualify it, to tell me he's speaking metaphorically. He doesn't.

"It was linked to your mother," he says.

My pulse goes strange and arrhythmic.

"You knew my mother."

It isn't a question. The way he said it, linked to your mother, not a wolf that looks like something your mother drew carries a specificity that only comes from knowledge. He has been careful with every word since he woke up in my bed. He would not be careless with this one.

His jaw tightens.

He looked, for just a moment, like a man who has said more than he meant to.

"Asher"

Voices outside. Male. Two of them, maybe three, moving along the side of the house with the particular cadence of a patrol that has heard something and is investigating without yet committing to alarm.

Asher closes the distance between us in two steps and pulls me against him.

There is nothing romantic about it. It is tactical, his arm across my back, his hand at my waist, positioning us both away from the window in a single efficient motion. My face ends up against his shoulder and his mouth is at my ear and he says, very quietly: "Don't move."

I don't move.

The patrol passes. I track them by sound boots on packed earth, the low exchange of words I can't make out, a pause that lasts long enough to make my breath go shallow, and then the footsteps continuing and fading.

Asher doesn't release me immediately.

I don't step back immediately.

There's a moment, several seconds, longer than necessary where we are simply standing there in the dark of my small room, his heartbeat under my palm, his breath warm against my hair. And I become aware, with a horrible, inconvenient clarity, of the exact amount of space he takes up. The solidity of him. The way he smells like pine resin and something darker underneath, something that bypasses my brain entirely and speaks directly to the part of me that is much older than reason.

I look up.

He is already looking down.

His expression is doing something complicated, the controlled surface of him pulled thin by something working underneath it, something that looks almost like restraint. Like a man holding a door shut from the inside with both hands.

I should step back. I am in the process of deciding to step back.

Then the pain comes.

Sharp. Burning. Localized to a point on the left side of my neck, just below the jaw. I make a sound I don't intend to make and my hand flies up, and Asher jerks away from me as though he's been burned from the outside.

My fingers find the spot. Warm. Raised. Wet.

I look at my hand.

Blood on my fingertips. Two small points of it.

"What." The word comes out flat and strange. "What did you just"

Asher is staring at me with an expression I have never seen on anyone's face before. Horror, yes. But underneath it something anguished, the look of a man confronting something he cannot undo and cannot justify and does not entirely regret.

"It was instinct," he says. His voice has gone rough in a new way.

"An instinct," I repeat carefully, "to put your teeth in my neck."

"To claim you."

The words land in the room and stay there.

I stare at him.

He meets my gaze and doesn't look away, which I think takes more courage than anything else he's done tonight.

"Claim me," I say. "You" I stop. Start again. "We met two hours ago. I don't even know your last name. You were bleeding in my forest and I"

The bang against the front door is hard enough to rattle the frame.

We both go still.

Another bang. Harder. The kind that isn't asking.

Julia's voice comes through the wall, shrill with the particular edge it gets when she is frightened and converting it to fury: "Janet! Open this door!"

I am already moving, already trying to think of what story covers two hours of absence and a bleeding man in my bedroom and a bite mark on my neck, when the second voice stops me completely.

Male. Low. The kind of voice that carries without being raised, that expects to be obeyed not because it is loud but because it has always been obeyed.

"Open up." A pause, deliberate, the pause of someone who knows how to use silence. "I know someone is in there with you."

My blood goes cold.

Because I know that voice.

And I know what it means that he is standing on the other side of that door.

I turn to Asher. His face has closed completely, every trace of what just passed between us sealed off, the Alpha mask back in place so fast it's as though I imagined the rest. He is already scanning the room. The window. The wardrobe. The door.

Calculating.

"Who is he?" Asher asks, low and even.

My mouth is dry.

"My father," I say. "The Beta of Fearlock Pack."

Something moves through Asher's eyes. Recognition, maybe. Or the specific recalibration of a man who has just learned that bad has become considerably worse.

The door shudders in its frame.

"Janet." My father's voice again. No anger in it. That's what makes it frightening. "Last chance."