The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

CH.9 - What She Is

Evan's POV

I don't go to second period.

I get as far as the stairwell at the end of the science wing, the one nobody uses because it only goes up to the storage floor, and I sit down on the bottom step and put my head in my hands and try to breathe like a person.

She touched my arm.

That's all. She grabbed my sleeve the way anyone grabs a sleeve, to stop me walking off, a completely ordinary thing, and the bond went off in my chest like a flare. Not the low steady pull I've been living with since the boat. This was the whole thing, all at once, the tether snapping tight and every nerve I have lighting up at the point where her fingers met me, and for one second the entire school went silent and there was nothing in the world but her hand and the warmth of her and the wolf throwing himself against my ribs so hard I nearly staggered.

Ours, he said. Not a whisper this time. A roar.

And she felt it.

That's the part I can't get past. That's the part that's got me sitting in an empty stairwell with my hands shaking again. She felt it too. I saw it hit her, saw her eyes go wide, saw her go still the exact way I went still, and there's only one thing that means and I've been refusing to look straight at it for days.

The bond runs both ways.

It shouldn't. That's the whole point. She's human. A human doesn't feel the bond, that's what I've always been told, that's the tragedy of it, the reason wolf and human pairings are cursed things, one side feeling everything and the other feeling nothing, one side bound and the other free to walk away and never understand what they walked away from. That's supposed to be the mercy of it and the horror of it at once. She's meant to feel nothing. She's meant to be able to leave.

She's not feeling nothing.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see colours. What does it mean. A human who feels the pull. A human whose voice reaches me in the place nothing reaches. A human my wolf chose so hard and so fast that three years of suppressant can't blunt it. Every part of it is wrong, is impossible, is outside anything I was ever taught, and I don't have anyone to ask, because the only people who could tell me are the people I ran from, the ones who'd kill her for being what she is the second they understood what she is to me.

What is she.

The rogue's voice comes back to me. I only met him once, years ago, a lone wolf passing through, and I asked him a stupid drunk question about mates because I was seventeen and alone and aching to belong to something. He'd laughed at me. Said most of us never find them. Said the bond's rare and the human ones rarer still, and the human ones almost never take, because a human's got nothing in them for the bond to grab. He'd looked at me sideways and said, unless there's old blood in them somewhere. Way back. Sleeping. Then it takes like a house fire, and the goddess help them both.

Old blood. Sleeping.

I didn't think about it for years. I think about it now, sitting on a cold step while a school full of people I'll never know goes about its morning above me. A fisherman's daughter who's never afraid of the water. Who moves through it like she was made for it. Whose family settled at that one specific harbor, that one exact stretch of coast, and never left. Who has a pull in her chest she doesn't understand and a voice that reaches into the dark and hauls me back from the worst thing I am.

And that's the other cruelty of it. If she were plain, if she were forgettable, maybe I could hold the line. She isn't. I've spent days trying not to notice and notice anyway. The sun-and-salt colour of her, skin browned from a life on the water, dark hair gone lighter at the ends where the sea and the light have been at it. The swimmer's build, strong through the shoulders, the easy way she moves like her body has never once let her down. Freckles across her nose. And her eyes, that's the thing that gets me, hazel that won't hold still, green when she's calm and gone warm and gold when she's angry, and she's angry a lot, so I keep getting the gold. She looked at me on that boat with the gold eyes and told me I owed her an apology and I think some part of me was gone from that second on.

And the scent of her. Salt and sun-warm skin and something green underneath, cut grass, rain on stone, and beneath all of it a sweetness I've never smelled on anyone, that goes straight past every wall I've got. It's the scent that undoes me worse than the sight. A wolf lives by scent, and mine has decided hers is the only one that matters, and there is no suppressant on earth strong enough to argue him out of it.

No. I stop the thought before it finishes. It's grasping. It's a scared boy inventing a reason for a thing he wants to be true, and I can't afford it. What I can afford is the plain fact in front of me, which is that she felt the touch, which means the bond has her, which means she is not going to be able to walk away from this the way a human is supposed to, the way I've been counting on her to.

Which means staying away from her doesn't protect her anymore.

Because if she feels it too, then leaving her isn't mercy. It's just leaving her bound and confused and aching for something with no name and no explanation, wondering her whole life what was wrong with her, why she couldn't let go of a boy who vanished. I've spent every day since the boat telling myself that if I hold the line, if I stay cold, if I never touch her, she gets a clean life. That's gone now. There's no version where she gets a clean life. I already ruined that by existing near her.

I laugh, and it comes out ugly in the empty stairwell.

My phone buzzes. Will.

need you tonight. the card i told you about. good money. don't make me ask twice

I look at it for a long time. Under everything else, the ordinary problem of my life keeps grinding forward. The fights. The money I need to keep this fake life running. Will, who saved me and who I owe, calling in the thing I do for him, the thing I hate, the thing that keeps putting me in a ring with blood in the air and a wolf that wants out.

And a new backer. Deep pockets. That's what he said last night, watching me too closely, pricing me out. I still don't know why it sits wrong. But it does, the way a room sits wrong when someone's been in it who shouldn't have been.

I type back: can't tonight.

The reply comes fast: not asking. be there.

Then, a second later: you don't want to disappoint the new money, evan. trust me on that one.

I sit with that. The wrongness of it sharpens into something closer to a warning, though I couldn't say what I'm being warned about. New money that already knows my name. New money you don't disappoint. Will, who used to talk to me like a brother, now talking to me like a man handling something that belongs to someone else.

I put the phone away. One problem at a time. The fight tonight, fine. I'll go, I'll do what I do, I'll come home hollow the way I always do.

But first there's a girl waiting for me by the gym doors after last period, expecting to break into a records room, thinking she's collecting a favor. A girl who felt the bond snap tight and looked me in the eye and told me she isn't afraid of me. A girl who's already worked out that I lied about the static, I could see it on her face, she's not stupid, she's the furthest thing from stupid.

She's going to keep pulling at this. I know her well enough already to know that. Warn her off and she pushes harder. Lie to her and she digs. The only person in my life who's ever looked at me and refused to see the monster everyone told her to see, and she is going to chase the truth of me straight off a cliff if I let her.

So I have a choice to make before the last bell, and neither side of it is safe.

I can meet her and lie again, keep the mask up, get her the paperwork, and try one more time to send her back to her ordinary life, knowing now that there's no ordinary life left for her to go back to.

Or I can meet her and start, carefully, to tell her the truth. And risk everything. Her fear. Her running. The Pack finding out there's a human who knows. My whole hidden life coming down.

I get up off the step. My legs hold.

Three more periods. I've got three more periods to decide whether to keep lying to the one person the universe chained to me, or to blow up my entire life by trusting her.

The wolf already knows what he wants. He's been saying it since the boat, since the water, since her hand on my arm an hour ago.

Ours, he says. Tell her. Ours.

For the first time in three years, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to tell him no.