The Executioner's Mate

Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

Heath’s POV

I have led this pack for eight years and in that time I have developed a reliable relationship with sleep. It comes when called. It stays until needed. It is one of the more functional aspects of my life and I have never taken it for granted because I watched my father in the last years of his leadership develop insomnia and I understood what it meant and made a point of not developing it myself.

Tonight it was not coming when called.

I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and conducted a thorough internal assessment of the situation. It’s the bond.

She was awake. One floor up and thirty feet east and awake, the bond communicating this regardless of whether I had requested the information. I had not requested the information.

I got up at one fifteen because lying in the dark being frustrated was doing nothing for me.

I wanted to go upstairs.

I wanted to knock on her door and have her open it and not have the door between us anymore.

I wanted to be in the same room with her without having to consider why she was spying on my pack. I wanted to know what she looked like when she was not keeping her face in the expression she kept it in.

My wolf had no patience for me tonight. He had not had patience since the forest, since first smelling her at the eastern marker.

I went, had a cold drink of water, looked out the window at the dark compound and my wolf and I reached an agreement that we have reached every night this week which is that we are going to stay exactly where we are and he is going to be professional about it and tomorrow is another day and eventually the wanting and the ready are going to be the same thing and tonight is not that night.

He accepted this begrudgingly. I accepted his compliance gratefully. We were both very mature about it.

The wanting didn't go anywhere. It never does. It just sat there being exactly what it was while I looked out the window in the dark and waited for it to be tomorrow.

I ended up outside her door.

I didn’t even remember making the decision to leave my room.

This was not the plan. The plan had been to give another attempt at sleep and possibly the whiskey I kept in the desk drawer for situations that had exceeded other management options. The plan had not included the corridor outside the guest room on the upper floor.

I stood outside her door and looked at it and ran through the list of things that had brought me here.

Alpha instinct. True. The presence of an unknown in the compound during an active threat period warranted heightened awareness of that one’s location and status. I had not invented this reason this night. It was a real reason.

Security consciousness. Also true. She had been inside my borders for nearly a week and inside my compound for less than twenty four hours and the full shape of her mission remained a mystery. Monitoring the situation was not unreasonable.

These reasons were real and they were comprehensively insufficient and I knew it standing in the corridor around two in the morning looking at a locked door.

The bond placed her on the other side of the door. Awake. She was not distressed. She was thinking, the bond communicating this as a particular kind of active alertness rather than the restless discomfort of someone who could not sleep for ordinary reasons.

She was running the same calculation she had been running since the forest. I could feel the shape of it without the content, which was perhaps the most useful and most frustrating thing the bond had given me so far. I knew she was working through something. I did not know what she was working through.

I could not push for what she was working through.

I wanted her to tell me.

I wanted her to trust me with it before I had given her sufficient reason to trust me with it.

My father would have had something useful to say about this. He generally did. He had a wisdom that operated most effectively when I was doing something he had anticipated and had prepared for without telling me he had prepared for it. I had found it aggravating while he was alive.

He would have said: you can't earn trust you haven't been given time to earn. Give her the time.

He would have been right.

He would have also said something about standing outside women's doors at two in the morning that I did not need articulated.

I went back to my room.

Sleep remained unavailable.

I lay in the dark and I thought about the conversation in the office this morning, the picture that had assembled itself from two incomplete pictures, the shape of something considerably worse than either of us had separately. I thought about the half second in the Elder Counsel meeting and the name in my grandfather's correspondence and the timeline Oryn was working against.

I thought about the bond.

The bond at night in the dark when there is nothing else requiring my attention is a different experience than the bond during the day. During the day it is something I managed alongside other things, the constant awareness of her location and the quality of her attention and the various things she is doing with her face that her face is not quite fast enough to conceal, all of it running in the background while I run everything else. At night it is not background. At night it is the only channel receiving and it tells me things I spend the days carefully not acting on.

It told me she had stopped thinking somewhere around three. The condition of her wakefulness shifted into the less active thing that precedes sleep.

The bond settled with her. Not sleep exactly. Something quieter than what it had been.

My wolf settled with it completely and without the restlessness that had characterized him before the forest. He had been restless for years in the way of something looking for something it cannot name. He was not restless now. He was the quietest and most certain he had been in my adult memory and I was still catching up to the certainty.

I looked at the ceiling.

The compound breathed around me with its own deep night and I was almost something that was not quite awake when the phone buzzed.

I had it in my hand before the second buzz. Not because I am fast, though I am, but because some part of me had been waiting for it,

The message was from a number I had not looked at in three months. Callum Rowe. A wolf who owed me a debt significant enough that he had been willing to put himself at risk to deliver information he could not safely send through official channels.

Three words.

I read them.

Read them again.

Sat up in the dark with the phone in my hand and the bond telling me she was asleep and the compound quiet around me and three words sitting in the lit screen of my phone that rearranged several things I had been holding in careful provisional positions.

Watch your Beta.

Not Gareth.

Declan.