You Wanted Me Too Late, Alpha

0003: This Changes Nothing

ANNA'S POV

The candle was already lit by the time he reached the doorway.

I heard him before I saw him — footsteps heavier than mine, and slower, stopping short of the room. Then nothing.

I didn't turn around. I set the burnt match on the edge of the nightstand.

His shadow reached across the carpet before he did. His eyes moved over the room before he did — the narrow bed, the worn chair, the wardrobe that held everything I owned. Six years of a room he'd never once stood in.

"You've kept this room... separate," he said. Not a question.

"It wasn't mine to share," I said. "Not until now."

I didn't wait for an answer. I turned my back to him and started on my earrings, one gold hoop and then the other, the way I had every night for six years.

Behind me: an exhale. Then the door, closing soft.

He was inside now.

I set the earrings on the nightstand and slipped the cardigan from my shoulders, folding it once before I let it go.

"I imagined this once." My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. "Not like this. Never like this."

I didn't explain further. I climbed into bed first — not the far edge, the center — and lay on my back with my hands folded over my stomach, staring up at the ceiling I'd memorized years ago.

Tonight I wouldn't be alone in it.

"Are you going to stand there all night?"

He didn't move. Then: "Anna… this isn't necessary."

I turned my head on the pillow. He was still in the doorway — arms crossed, his weight not yet given to the room.

"Neither was six years of silence," I said.

His eyes came up to mine, then dropped to the floorboards.

I looked back at the ceiling. "You gave your word, Luca. I'm not asking you to want this. I'm asking you to keep it."

He said nothing. Then the floor creaked under him.

I listened to him cross the room rather than watching him do it — the whisper of his jacket coming off, the small clink of his watch set down on the wooden chair, his steps slow across the floor.

The bed dipped behind me.

He lay on his back, far enough that his half of the mattress barely moved. Wide enough for another person between us. Maybe two.

I could feel him anyway — not just the bond, awake too and pulling toward his side of the bed the way it always had, but the heat coming off him in the cold room, his breath faster than a man who claimed to feel nothing had any right to.

The distance between us wasn't inches. It was six years.

Neither of us said anything.

The candle burned lower. His breathing slowed, then caught, then slowed again. He wasn't sleeping. I wasn't either.

Sometime later, he shifted. Not much — enough that the mattress moved under me, enough that the gap between us thinned by a few inches without either of us naming it.

Close enough that if I reached back, I'd find him.

I didn't reach back.

Then his hand moved. Just his knuckles, against the blanket near my hip. Not reaching for me. Just there. An accident. Probably.

I didn't breathe.

For one long second I thought he'd close the last of the distance. He didn't. His hand went still, and stayed exactly where it had landed.

I pressed my palm flat against my own chest until my heartbeat gave up its pace.

"This won't change anything." His voice was low, rough, barely more than the candle's sound.

"I know," I said, and closed my eyes.

The candle flickered once more. He was still beside me — close, not touching, and every part of me knew exactly where he was without needing to look.