The alpha's chosen rogue

Chapter Five_ The Storm

I found out she'd told him because of the way he looked at me at dinner.

Not at me — around me. Like he was measuring something. Like there was new information sitting behind his eyes and he was still deciding what to do with it. He sat at the head of the long table — the Alpha's seat, the one that commanded sight lines across the full room — and he looked at me twice, which was twice more than he'd looked at anyone else, and both times he looked away before I could hold it.

I pushed my food around my plate and said nothing, because that was what I was good at.

After dinner I went to the eastern creek. It was dark by then, and cold, the kind of cold that has teeth, and I sat on my rock and I thought about four hundred years and a woman called a Tide and the question I had not asked Elder Maren because I was not sure I could survive the answer.

Is it reversible?

The power to permanently strip a wolf of their gift — what did it take to trigger that? Strong emotion, she'd said. High threat. What if I lost control? What if I already had, a hundred times, and just hadn't seen the wreckage from far enough away to recognize my own fingerprints on it?

I heard him before I saw him.

Not footsteps this time — he'd made sounds deliberately, I realized. A shift in gravel, a branch moved aside with more noise than necessary. He was announcing himself. Giving me warning.

Caden Blackthorn came to stand a few feet from my rock and stayed there, hands in his pockets, looking at the creek rather than at me.

"You've been sitting here for an hour," he said.

"How would you know that?"

"This is my compound."

Right. I had walked into that one.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Maren told you before she told me."

It wasn't an accusation. Just a fact being set on the table between us.

"Yes," I said.

"How are you handling it?"

I thought about telling him I was fine. I was twenty-two years old and I had been telling people I was fine since I was old enough to understand that the alternative was being a burden, and I was very good at it. I could deliver it without any visible seams.

Instead I said, "I keep thinking about every wolf who lost a fight they should have won after my father sent me away. Whether it was because of me."

He sat down on the ground — not on a rock, just the earth — with his back against a tree and his arms resting on his knees, and he looked at me for the first time since he'd arrived.

"You were trying to survive," he said. "Not trying to hurt anyone."

"That's not really how power works."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't." He paused. "But it's how blame works. And blame without intention is just punishment."

I looked at him.

"I know something about carrying damage that wasn't your fault," he said, and the way he said it — briefly, carefully, sealed at the edges — made clear that was all he was going to give me and that I should not mistake it for an invitation. It was something rarer than that. It was recognition.

We sat in the quiet for a long time after that. The creek ran. The cold deepened. Neither of us moved.

"I should tell you," I said finally, "that I don't know how to control it. Any of it. I don't know what I might accidentally do to the wolves near me."

"Maren will teach you."

"You're not concerned about the risk to your pack?"

He looked at the creek. "I'm concerned about a lot of things." A beat. "That's not at the top of the list."

"What is?"

He turned his head and looked at me directly, and in the dark his gray eyes were almost black, and whatever was moving behind them was complicated enough that it didn't have a name yet.

"Go to sleep, Seraphina," he said quietly. "You've had a hard enough day."

He stood, and he walked back toward the compound, and I sat by the creek and listened to him go, and then I sat in the silence he left behind and thought about the fact that he had come to check on me.

Not to debrief me. Not to assess the new variable in his pack. Not to manage a resource.

To check on me.

I pressed my hands flat against the cold stone of the rock, and I breathed, and I did not cry, because I had not cried in front of anyone in six years and I was not starting tonight.

But it was a near thing.

Inside the compound, through the lit windows of the meeting building, I could see the silhouette of Caden Blackthorn standing with his hands on the table, looking at nothing. Still. Like he'd walked back to where he was supposed to be and then forgotten what he was supposed to do next.

I understood that feeling exactly.

I was starting, in spite of everything, to understand a lot of things about him.

That scared me more than the power did.