Bound to the Enemy Alpha

CHAPTER THREE

JANET

If my heart pounds any harder, Julia will hear it through the floorboards.

She takes another step into my room, her eyes moving with the slow, methodical patience of someone who already suspects the answer and is simply waiting for confirmation. I press my nails into my palm and hold my face very still.

Think.

"What was that?" she asks again.

"A rat, I think." I force a small, embarrassed laugh, the kind that costs me something. "I heard scratching earlier, near the baseboard. I should have said something sooner."

Julia's expression curdles immediately. She has an almost theatrical hatred of rodents; she once woke my father at two in the morning over a mouse she claimed had looked at her. I am counting on that now.

"A rat." She repeats it like a word in a foreign language.

"I'll set a trap tomorrow. First thing."

For a breath-long moment, I think it's worked. Her gaze lingers on the floor near the bed on the hanging edge of the blanket, on the shadows beneath and then her hand lowers, reaching for it.

My nails break skin.

The crash from the kitchen is enormous.

Julia startles so hard she takes a step backward, her hand flying to her chest. A second sound follows something rolling across stone and then silence of a completely different quality from before.

"Moon Goddess" Julia is already turning, already moving, her irritation with me eclipsed by whatever disaster she's imagining in the kitchen. "What in the world"

Her footsteps recede down the hall. A door swings. Her voice rises in sharp, indignant tones that I stop hearing because all the air has left my body at once.

I sit down on the edge of the bed. My legs simply stop holding me up. I press both hands over my mouth and breathe through my nose until the shaking in my chest subsides to something manageable.

"What," I whisper to the floor, "was that?"

A pause. Then, from beneath the bed frame, a low voice answers.

"I threw a spoon."

I close my eyes.

"You threw a spoon."

He slides out from under the bed with considerably more ease than someone with a wound like his should manage, straightening up slowly and pressing one hand to his side. He looks despite everything entirely composed. Like a man who has navigated worse situations than hiding under a stranger's bed while her stepmother nearly discovered him.

"There was a metal ladle on the shelf beside the kitchen entrance," he says. "I scented it when you brought me through. I calculated that a distraction was preferable to discovery."

I stare at him for a long moment.

"You calculated."

"It worked."

The laugh comes out of me before I can stop it a breathless, slightly hysterical thing that I have to muffle with the back of my hand. He watches it happen with an expression I can't quite read. Careful. Attentive. Like he's filing the sound away somewhere.

"I'm Asher," he says, when I've collected myself. Simple. No title, no pack name. Just the word, offered like it's ordinary.

"I know you think that was clever," I tell him.

The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile, more like the shadow of one, the suggestion that smiling is something he's capable of but rarely bothers with.

He steps closer.

The room isn't large, and he fills more of it standing up than I'd accounted for. I stay where I am on the edge of the bed, tipping my chin up to maintain eye contact, refusing to be the one who moves.

"You risked your life bringing me here," he says. His voice has dropped, the rough edges of it smoothed into something quieter and somehow more dangerous for it. "You don't know who I am. You don't know what I am. You brought a bleeding stranger into your home in the middle of the night and hid him from your family." A pause. "Why?"

I open my mouth.

Nothing comes.

The honest answer is that I don't know, the decision happened somewhere below the level of reason, in the part of me that saw a man bleeding in the dark and simply could not leave him there. But admitting that feels like handing him something I can't get back.

"You needed help," I say finally. "That was enough."

He looks at me for a long moment. Then his hand rises and his fingers brush my cheek barely contact, the lightest possible touch and the world comes apart.

It moves through me like voltage. Not pain, exactly, but close a searing, electric heat that starts where his skin meets mine and tears outward to every edge of my body in less than a second. I stumble back, catching the bedpost, a sharp gasp escaping me before I can stop it.

Asher has gone completely still.

He is staring at me with an expression I have never seen on anyone's face before something raw cracking through the controlled surface of him, something that looks almost like fear in a man who I'm certain has never been afraid of anything.

"What was that?" I breathe.

He doesn't answer. He just looks at me looks through me and says one word in a voice stripped of everything except the weight of it.

"Impossible."

⁂

Asher

Pain is the baseline.

I've operated through worse through wounds that should have dropped me, through hunts that lasted three days without sleep, through losses that carved out something essential and left the hollow behind. Pain is information. I process it and move on.

What I cannot process is her scent.

It reached me before consciousness did, threading through the dark while I was still too far under to move. Something soft. Wildflower and rain and underneath both of those, something warmer that doesn't have a name in any language I know. I came back to awareness pulling toward it like a compass finding north.

My wolf said one word.

Mine.

I've been ignoring him since.

I've killed rogues at seventeen. I took command of the Ironmoor Pack at twenty-two, after my father's death, in a challenge that three older wolves didn't survive. I have negotiated treaties and broken them. I have made decisions that cost lives and lived with the weight of them.

I do not stumble. I do not lose my footing. I certainly do not feel the ground shift beneath me because a girl in a small room laughed.

And yet.

When the laugh escaped her, startled out of her, real and unguarded in a way that nothing else about her has been, something in my chest moved in a direction it has not moved in a very long time.

I touched her cheek. I don't know why. It was not a calculated decision, which is nearly unprecedented for me.

The bond fire was instant.

I felt it tear through both of us felt her gasp before I heard it and every instinct I have screamed the word my wolf had already been saying since I first scented her in the dark.

Mate.

She doesn't know. I can see that clearly. She felt the charge of it but has no framework to understand what it means no way to know that what just moved between us is something wolves spend their entire lives searching for, something most never find. She is looking at me now with wide eyes and an expression caught between wonder and alarm, and she has no idea.

Good.

Because if she knew, everything would become considerably more complicated. And things are already complicated enough, given that I am bleeding in a room inside Fearlock territory with my identity undisclosed and at least two people in this house who would not survive learning that the man their reluctant daughter dragged home is the Alpha of Ironmoor, the pack Fearlock has been quietly preparing to go to war with for the last eight months.

Her father would kill her for this.

The thought is followed immediately by something cold and absolute: he would not get the chance.

I file that response away to examine later, when I have more distance from her.

The sound stops every thought in my head.

Low. Rhythmic. Coming from the far side of the window, just below the sill.

A growl.

Janet turns toward it with the confused expression of someone who hears a sound but doesn't yet understand what it means. I am already on my feet, already moving her back with one arm, my body between her and the window before the second growl comes.

Rogue.

The scent hits me a half-second later wild and wrong, the particular chemical signature of a wolf who has spent too long without a pack, whose edges have started to fray. But underneath it, something else. Something that stops my blood cold in a way that the wound in my side hasn't managed.

I know this scent.

I know it the way you know the smell of smoke from a fire that burned your house down. Bone-deep. Permanent. The kind of knowing that lives in your body long after your mind has tried to move past it.

This wolf died four years ago.

I watched it happen. I stood at the grave.

A scratch at the window frame deliberate, almost delicate and Janet draws a sharp breath behind me.

"What is that?" she whispers.

I don't answer, because I am still working through the architecture of the impossible. If I'm right, if that scent is what I think it is, then whoever is on the other side of that window did not find me here by accident. They followed me. They've been following me, perhaps for longer than tonight.

And Janet, who knows nothing about any of this, who only ever wanted thirty quiet minutes to herself, is now standing in the middle of something she cannot begin to understand.

The scratch comes again. Slower this time.

Patient.

"Stay behind me," I say quietly. "And don't open that window for any reason."

"I wasn't going to"

"Any reason," I repeat. "No matter what you hear. No matter what it says."

She goes still.

"It?" she says carefully. "You mean they."

I don't correct her.

Outside the window, something that should be dead exhales slowly against the glass.