Rejected by My Mate, Claimed by the Triplet Alphas

Chapter 12: Nathan’s Effect

Viene’s POV

Nathan found me on the terrace an hour before dawn.

I hadn’t been able to sleep. Not after the voice, not after the woman who wouldn’t stop shaking, not after watching Neil’s face change while reading something he wouldn’t show me. I’d come outside because the walls of my room felt like they were listening too.

“You should be resting,” he said.

“So should you.”

He didn’t argue that. He just crossed the terrace and stood beside me at the railing, close enough that I felt the change in the air before he said anything else.

“Tell me exactly what she said to you,” he said. “The voice. Word for word.”

“I already told Neil.”

“I want to hear it from you. Not filtered through his notes.”

I gave it to him straight — the tenderness in it, the way it used my name, the line about being frightened of me once. He listened without interrupting, mouth working slightly with each new detail, like he was cataloguing threats I couldn’t see.

“You weren’t always,” he repeated, quietly. “That’s what she said.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a threat. That’s an apology dressed up as one.”

“I don’t want your theories right now. I want to know why you three keep looking at each other like you already know who she is.”

“We don’t know who she is.”

“You know enough to go quiet every time I bring her up.”

“Knowing a shape isn’t the same as knowing a name,” he said. “I’d rather give you nothing than give you something wrong.”

“That’s a decision you keep making for me.”

“It’s the only one I trust myself to make right now.”

He didn’t answer anything after that. His hand came down on the railing next to mine, not touching, but close enough that heat rolled off him and hit the mark under my collarbone before I could brace for it.

I sucked in a breath.

“What,” he said, watching me.

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

I wasn’t fast enough to stop it. The mark flared, sharp, spreading warmth down toward my sternum, and I pressed my palm flat against my collarbone before I could think better of it.

Nathan’s eyes went straight to my hand.

“It’s doing it again,” he said. Not a question.

“It’s fine.”

“You keep saying that. It’s never been fine once.”

He stepped closer instead of stepping back, which was exactly the wrong instinct and exactly what I expected from him. The mark burned harder, a wave of heat that made my knees want to buckle the way they had the first time he’d cornered me on that street.

“Move back,” I said.

“Why.”

“Because it gets worse when you’re close. You know that. You’ve known that since the room.”

“I know it gets worse. I don’t know if that means I should stay away or stay exactly where I am until we understand it.”

“That’s not your decision.”

“No,” he said. “It’s yours. So decide. Tell me to leave and I will.”

“You didn’t leave the last three times I asked.”

“You never actually asked. You told me it was a bad idea and then didn’t move either.”

“That’s not the same as wanting you here.”

“Isn’t it.” He wasn’t smiling when he said it, which somehow made it worse. “You could have gone back inside the second I walked out here. You didn’t.”

“I was here first.”

“You could have left when I sat down.”

“I’m not going to run from my own terrace because you make my skin do something I didn’t ask it to do.”

“Then stop pretending this is only happening to your skin.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to leave.

I didn’t.

The quiet went on long enough to become its own answer, and something in his expression shifted — not triumph, nothing that simple closer to relief, like he’d been braced for rejection and gotten something else instead.

“Viene.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re standing there. That’s enough. That’s always been enough with you, and I hate it.”

“Hate what exactly? Me, or what happens to you when I’m close?”

I didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t give him more than I wanted to give. The mark kept burning, steady now instead of sharp, like it had settled into a rhythm that matched something else entirely — my pulse, maybe, or his.

I looked away first.

I always looked away first with him. It should have stopped meaning anything by now. It didn’t.

“That’s twice,” he said, low.

“Twice what.”

“Twice you’ve looked away instead of telling me to go.”

“I don’t owe you an explanation for where I look.”

“I’m not asking for one. I’m just telling you I noticed.”

“Noticing isn’t the same as it meaning anything.”

“No,” he said. “But it’s nothing either. Stop acting like we both don’t know the difference.”

I didn’t have a defense for that, so I said nothing, and the quiet between us filled with everything neither of us was willing to name out loud.

Footsteps behind us. Neil, fully dressed despite the hour, a tablet under one arm like he’d been awake working through everything the rest of us had been trying to sleep off.

“Both of you should be inside,” he said, though his eyes were on the mark visible above my collar, still faintly glowing under my palm.

“We’re fine,” Nathan said.

“You’re not. I can see the reading from here without a scanner.”

“Then say what you came to say,” Nathan said.

“I didn’t come to say anything.” Neil’s gaze moved between us, something quiet and careful settling into place. “I came to look. I’ve seen enough.”

“Enough for what,” I asked.

He didn’t answer that either. He simply turned and walked back inside without another word, and something about the way he’d said enough sat wrong in my chest long after he’d gone.

Nathan finally stepped back, putting distance between us that should have felt like relief and didn’t.

“Go rest,” he said. “I’ll have someone walk you back.”

“I can walk myself.”

“I know you can. I’d still rather you didn’t do it alone tonight.”

I didn’t argue that one. Something about the way he said it made it sound less like control and more like a request, and I didn’t have the energy left to pick apart the difference.

I went, because staying felt more dangerous than anything waiting for me down that corridor.

Later, long after I should have been asleep, I woke to the sound of a door and found a slip of paper someone had left just inside my room, slid under the gap at the bottom. Neil’s handwriting, precise, clinical, the kind of note meant for a file and not for me.

Nathan contact = fastest spread rate recorded. Confirm before reporting to the others.

I wasn’t supposed to see it.

Fastest spread rate recorded.

Not a guess. Not a theory. A measurement.

Nathan wasn’t just reacting to the mark.

He was making it spread.

By the third time I read the note, my hands had started shaking worse than the mark ever made them.