Bound to the Alpha Twins

I Did Not Look Back

Lucian stood in the doorway for a moment longer than necessary, like a tree planted there. His eyes roamed over me in the unhurried way of someone who had already decided they had all the time in the world.

Then he moved slowly, deliberately, giving me time to watch him.

He did not come toward me. He simply moved to the side of the room, his hands clasped loosely behind his back, and looked at the shelves as though something there required his attention. We both knew he was stalling.

"You handled my sister well," he said.

There was something in his voice. The faintest curl of amusement, so slight that if I had not been fixated on him I would have missed it entirely.

"It does not feel like I handled anything," I said. "She said what she wanted to say and then she left."

"That is precisely what I mean." He glanced at me sideways. "Most people crumble within the first two minutes. You lasted the whole conversation."

It could have been a compliment or an observation. With Lucian, I was beginning to think there was rarely a difference.

"Most people are not from Ashen Ridge."

His lips curved. Not quite a smile, but close. "No. They are not."

Silence settled between us, the comfortable kind, which somehow made it worse.

Then it hit me.

His scent.

It drifted across the room to my nostrils, dark and clean, like cedar and night air and something warm beneath it that was difficult to name. It invaded my senses before I could prepare for it and made me press my feet firmly into the floor.

I turned slightly toward the bookshelf and said nothing.

"When," I said, keeping my voice even, "was someone going to tell me about the Council?"

"Tomorrow," he said.

I turned to look at him. "Tomorrow is the meeting."

"Yes."

"So you were going to tell me minutes before."

He met my eyes. "Well, I am telling you now, am I not?"

I stared at him. "That is not an answer."

There was a shift in his expression, the slightest tightening around the eyes. Not quite guilt. Not quite apology.

"The Council requested the meeting," he said, slowly approaching the long table at the centre of the room. His fingers grazed the back of a chair as he passed it. "It was arranged quickly. There was debate about whether you needed to be informed at all or simply brought in."

"Brought in," I repeated. "Like livestock."

"Like a Luna."

The word landed between us and neither of us touched it.

Swift leaped within me. I ignored her.

"What will they ask me?"

"Your lineage. Your status. Your intentions." He paused. "They will try to rattle you. Some of them will be unkind about it."

"And what do I say?"

He had moved without me noticing and was closer now. Not close enough to be improper. But just enough that his scent reached me again and my wolf stirred, pressing gently against my ribs.

"The truth," he said. "Where it serves you. Silence where it does not."

"Certain silence makes a wolf appear stupid." My fingers ran along the spine of a book, my eyes trained away from him.

"So you would rather say a damning truth?"

I looked up at him.

His grey eyes were steady on mine and in that moment the library shrank to just the small space between us, the firelight catching the sharp line of his jaw, the faint movement of his chest as he breathed.

He looked down at me. Really looked.

The careful composure he always wore loosened at its edges. His gaze dropped for a fraction of a second to my mouth, then back up, and I felt it like a hand pressed flat against my sternum.

He leaned in.

The air between us went completely still.

"Lucian," I whispered.

I closed my eyes. In readiness for a kiss. For our first kiss.

His breath was warm against my cheek. I could feel how close he was, the heat radiating from his body, his scent wrapping around me completely.

The thought of his lips against mine was enough to make my breath stutter. My imagination carved vivid images of us, my back pressed to the bookshelf, his hands finding every part of me as we shared a deep and consuming kiss.

It took me a moment too long to realise that no lips had come in contact with mine and his breath was no longer warming my cheek.

My eyelids lifted.

He was standing upright, a wicked smile playing across his lips.

Shame flooded through me. I quickly unpuckered my lips and tried to compose myself.

He laughed. A low, deliberate sound.

The heat in my face was proof enough that I resembled an overly ripe tomato.

"I suppose that is how you throw yourself at every male shifter that comes your way, is it not?" His tone was smooth and condescending, each word placed like a blade.

Swift whimpered and went quiet inside me.

The hurt she carried felt worse than the shame filling my chest. I wanted to answer him in kind, to give him something sharp enough to match what he had just done. But I knew next to nothing about this man, and no matter what I said, the sting of his words would still be there.

So I reined the anger in and said nothing.

The silence stretched long enough to become uncomfortable.

Lucian seemed unbothered. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes on the fire, his shoulders even, his breathing steady. Like a man waiting for a carriage. Like a man thinking about nothing in particular. Like a man who had not just done what he had done.

I cleared my throat. "Is that all?"

"For tonight," he said.

"Then I will see myself out."

I moved toward the doors.

"You will not."

I stopped. "I beg your pardon?"

He turned from the fire, unhurried as always, and looked at me with that grey gaze that gave nothing away. "You are staying the night. A room has been prepared."

Confusion and anger boiled together. "No one told me that."

"I am telling you now."

"You keep saying that," I said, unable to keep the edge from my voice. "You keep telling me things at the last possible moment as though my having time to prepare is an inconvenience to you."

Something moved across his face. Gone before I could name it.

"The Council meets at ninth bell," he said. "It is more practical for you to be here than to travel from Ashen Ridge in the morning."

"Practical," I repeated.

"Yes."

I looked at him for a long moment. He looked back at me but did not really see me. That much was obvious.

"My mother will be worried," I said.

"A messenger has been sent to Ashen Ridge."

"You thought of everything."

"I try to," he said simply.

No arrogance. No warmth. Just a statement of fact from a man who had organised this entire evening with the same detached efficiency he probably applied to everything else in his life.

I wondered, standing there in that library, if anything ever truly got beneath his skin. If anything ever made him lose that careful stillness, even for a moment.

I thought of the fraction of a second when he had leaned forward.

I thought of Swift going quiet.

Again, I said nothing.

A faint mistiness clouded his eyes for just a moment, there and gone, like a door briefly opened and then firmly shut.

He was mind linking someone.

A servant appeared in the corridor as though she had been waiting, which she probably had. A young woman with a neat bun and a neutral expression, holding a small candle.

"She will show you to your room," Lucian said.

I moved toward the door.

When I was level with him he spoke, and the words landed quietly, almost gently, which made them cut deeper than anything else he had said all evening.

"Walk in tomorrow like you have already decided the outcome. Because the moment they think you are asking for their permission, you have already lost."

Now, I did not look at him.

I followed the servant into the corridor and did not look back.