The Alpha who was Meant to Kill Me

Chapter 5.2

He reached again, and this time he did not stop. His arms closed around me and pulled me hard against his chest.

"I don't need to be careful. You're Wren. You're my little bird. I know you."

He did not care how it looked. I did.

Half the soldiers around us, and all of Darien's men, still believed Wren was a boy. The scene we were making did not read like a king comforting a traumatized soldier. It read like something else entirely. I felt Darien's eyes on us from two paces away and did not meet them.

"Start cleaning up the bodies." Darien's voice was flat. He turned his face. "Move."

The soldiers moved.

Alec kept one arm around me and walked me toward the well at the far side of the square. "Come on. Let's get you cleaned up."

"I can clean off myself." I pulled away. "Go help them. I'm all right."

I walked to the well. Leo trailed me without a word. Alec had ordered him to, I could feel it.

Leo did not speak until we reached the well. He drew up a bucket and splashed water on his face first. Then he nudged the bucket toward me.

"I remember the first time I killed a man," he said quietly. "It was him or me. I chose me. That's all today was, little bird. Somebody was going to die. We chose to live. It's easier if you see it that way. Not who you killed. That you fought to live."

I dunked my hands in the bucket. The water went red.

"This could have been handled better," I said. "They were men. They could have been shown mercy."

"Maybe." Leo watched me quietly. "We left one alive. Time will tell what he does with the mercy. Sometimes the bad guys are the bad guys. Those men were preying on villagers. This one's clean."

I scrubbed at my forearms. The water went redder.

"Leo."

"Mm?"

"Does it get easier?"

He was quiet for a long moment.

"I hope not," he said.

***

Across the square, Darien caught up to Alec.

I could not hear all of it from the well. I caught pieces on the wind, the way you catch pieces of a conversation in a crowded hall, and I filled in the rest by watching their faces.

"Your Wren is a vicious little fighter." Darien's voice carried farther than he meant it to.

Alec said nothing. I knew that silence. It was the silence Alec wore when he was choosing every word he was about to say with tweezers.

"No idea why you were worried." Darien kept his voice lower now, but I heard the shape of it. "A boy who moves like that does not need a nursemaid."

"It was his first real battle." Alec's voice, pitched for Darien and not for me.

"Bullshit."

I saw Alec's head turn. Slow.

The rest came in pieces. Darien's eyes kept cutting back toward the well where I was scrubbing down, and I kept my hands moving in the water like I was not listening to every word I could catch. Something about instincts. Something about earned. A killer. Blood-lust. The phrase doesn't add up cut across the square clean as a bell.

Alec's answer was too quiet for me. I caught since the day he was born and still trying to make sense and I dunked my hands deeper into the bucket and willed my face into something blank.

Then Darien stopped walking.

I watched it happen. I watched his shoulders set. I watched him put his hand on Alec's arm and turn him so they faced each other, and I saw the Alpha come up in him from ten paces away the way weather comes up over a ridge. It was not loud. It did not have to be. His Alpha pressed on the air and the soldiers nearest them flinched without knowing why. Leo felt it beside me and his hand went still on the bucket rope.

"Magic," I caught. And, "something that's been put in your path."

I could not hear Alec's reply. What I could see was his mouth opening. What I could see was him not saying it. I knew that shape too. I had worn it myself. It was the shape of a truth bitten down on.

Alec had given my father his word.

"I trust him with my life." Alec's voice rose just enough for me to catch. "I believe he just saved yours."

"Convenient timing." Darien.

"Darien."

Darien held him there a long moment. I could not see his face. I could see Alec's, and Alec's face did not break. After whatever passed between them, Darien's shoulders dropped half an inch.

"If you say so." Loud enough that I heard it clean. "If you say so."

He turned.

He did not come toward the well. He walked past it. His stride was slower than it had been when he had crossed the square. As he passed, he did not look at me. He did not need to. I felt his attention drag across my back like a hand testing a wall for a hollow spot, and his eyes, I was sure of it, paused on the strap where the black sheath rose above my pauldron.

I kept scrubbing. My wrists ached.

I did not turn my head until I heard his boots move off. Even then, I only caught the back of him, and the way his hand brushed the pommel of his own sword as he walked, and the quiet pull he gave the air as he passed that had the closest of his own soldiers lift their chins and come to attention without being told.

Alpha wolves do that without meaning to. Their bodies move the air around them.

I pressed the wet cloth against my forearm and watched him go.

Whatever his wolf had caught on me in the square, he had not put a name to it yet. I could see that in the set of his shoulders. But he had caught something. And Darien did not strike me as a man who left a scent untracked.

"Wren." Leo handed me a second cloth. "You're going to take the skin off."

I took the cloth. I started again.