Bound to the Enemy Alpha

chapter 8

Janet

Ironmoor's main house is nothing like I imagined.

I don't know what I imagined, exactly. Something fortress-like, perhaps all stone and severity, built to match the reputation of the pack that lives inside it. What I find instead is a long, low structure of dark timber and river stone, wide windows, deep eaves, the kind of building that looks like it grew out of the hillside rather than being placed on it. Lanterns burn along the entrance path. Someone has planted things along the edges of it, not decorative things, useful things, herbs and low shrub and the whole effect is less fortified stronghold than it is a house that has been lived in by people who intended to stay.

It is the middle of the night. The pack is asleep.

Asher moves through the entrance without slowing, and two sentries who were absolutely about to challenge us take one look at him and step aside. He is still bleeding. He has not mentioned it since we crossed the ridge, and I have decided that pointing it out again would be wasted effort.

Mara follows us inside and disappears immediately, the way she does. one moment present, the next simply not. I am beginning to understand that this is a habit rather than an ability. She goes where she wants to go and appears when she decides to appear, and the rest of the time she is elsewhere doing things she does not feel obliged to explain.

Asher leads me down a corridor and stops at a door.

"Guest quarters," he says. "They're not" he pauses, seeming to search for the right word. "They're modest."

I look at him.

"I spent the last two years sleeping in a room where the window didn't close properly," I tell him. "Modest is fine."

Something moves across his expression. Not pity, he has been careful not to offer me that but something adjacent to it, more complicated. Awareness, maybe. The particular awareness of someone realising for the first time the full dimensions of something they only had partial information about before.

"I'll have someone look at the wound," I say, because it seems like someone should, and he is not going to be the one to say it.

"I'll manage."

"You've been managing it for four hours." I meet his eyes. "At some point managing becomes something else."

A pause. Then: "In the morning. There are healers here."

"Tonight."

He looks at me for a long moment. Long enough that I become aware I am negotiating with an Alpha in his own house at three in the morning and he is not quite smiling, but in the vicinity of it.

"Tonight," he concedes.

I go into the room and close the door and sit on the edge of the bed and put my face in my hands.

The presence inside me, my wolf, apparently, the wolf I have spent twenty years not having stirs once, slow and warm, like an ember settling. It doesn't feel foreign anymore. That is almost more frightening than if it had.

I breathe through it.

Through all of it.

Then I lie down on top of the covers, still fully dressed, and let unconsciousness take me before any more of tonight can happen.

⁂

Asher

I stand outside her door for longer than is reasonable.

Not listening, there is nothing to hear, she is already asleep, I can tell by the shift in her breathing even through the wood. I stand there because I am trying to assemble the events of the last several hours into an order that makes sense, and they resist ordering. They keep rearranging themselves around her.

The healer, Bren, finds me in the corridor and fixes the wound without commenting on the fact that I let it go this long. He is sixty-three and has been patching Ironmoor wolves since before I was born, and he knows better than to say the obvious. He works quickly and leaves without ceremony.

Then I stand in the corridor alone and think about what Mara said.

An anchor.

I have read about them the way you read about things that existed before written history, skeptically, at a distance, with the comfortable assumption that such things belong to myth rather than the present moment. The old texts describe them in language so layered with ritual significance that the practical meaning gets lost. But the core of it is simple enough: an anchor is a convergence point. A being in whom two bloodlines meet and amplify each other into something neither could produce alone.

They are not weapons. The texts are very clear about that. But they are, the texts also note, extraordinarily difficult to keep safe. Because everyone who encounters one immediately begins calculating what it would mean for them if they controlled it.

I think about the council meeting three days ago, before all of this.

Cassius had been watching me from across the table with the expression he always wears when he is building something, that particular quality of stillness he has, like a man assembling a machine in his head while everyone else talks. He'd said nothing unusual. Asked nothing unusual.

But he had known I was going to the border that night.

I file that away. I will return to it when I have slept and the wound has closed and I can think without the complication of her scent on the other side of that door.

I push off the wall and go to my own room.

I do not sleep for a long time.