The Alpha's Bargain

CHAPTER TWELVE

The following weeks established a pattern that Jo found herself, despite every reasonable caution, looking forward to with increasing eagerness.

Selene always seeked her out during quiet mid-afternoon lulls in the border commission's formal work, ostensibly to discuss diplomatic matters that somehow always drifted, within minutes, toward considerably more personal territory.

"Tell me something you've never told anyone else," Selene said, one such afternoon, the two of them settled beneath a wide oak tree at the edge of the manor's formal gardens, a spread of untouched paperwork between them serving as increasingly thin professional pretense.

"That's a considerable request."

"I have considerable curiosity about you," Selene said, unrepentant. "I'll go first, if it helps. I've never told anyone that I used to dream, as a girl, about running away from my uncle's household entirely — disappearing into some ordinary human town, taking up an ordinary trade, never once having to calculate political advantage again."

"Why didn't you?"

"Where would a Kestrel niece even begin to disappear to? My face is known throughout this entire region. And underneath that practical concern, I think some part of me always believed running away meant admitting my family had broken something in me too thoroughly to ever fix." Selene's smile turned rueful almost instantly. "Your turn. Something you've never told anyone."

Jo considered the request seriously, surprised by how quickly an answer surfaced in her. "I used to resent my mother, a little, for dying and leaving me to hold everything together," she admitted. "I've never said that aloud to anyone, not even Ruth. It felt too ungrateful, given how much she actually sacrificed for our family before the illness took her."

"That's not ungrateful," Selene said gently. "That's simply honest about how complicated grief actually is, underneath the parts we're supposed to feel about it."

"I know that, logically. It still felt safer to keep it private."

"I understand that particular safety," Selene said. "I think perhaps that's why I keep finding myself here, under this tree, telling you things I've never told anyone else. Something about you makes honesty feel less dangerous than it usually does."

They continued this particular ritual through subsequent weeks — trading confessions beneath the oak tree's dappled shade, each afternoon peeling back another careful layer of the polished, professional composure both had initially presented to the other. Jo learned that Selene had broken her arm at age nine, climbing the Kestrel stronghold's outer wall on a dare, and had told her uncle she'd simply fallen down stairs rather than admit to the reckless climb; Selene learned that Jo had once, in a fit of exhausted frustration during the drought's worst year, screamed at the sky itself for the unfairness of watching her family's entire livelihood slowly die despite every possible effort to save it.

"Jo..." Selene trailed off before regaining her confidence, "I think I'm falling for you..."

The confession came one particular golden afternoon, arriving with a directness that stole Jo's breath entirely. "I've been trying to convince myself it's simply admiration, or curiosity, or the particular intimacy that comes from sharing this many careful confessions. I don't think that's honest anymore."

"Selene—"

"I know exactly how impossible this is," Selene continued, before Jo could formulate a response. "I know you're bonded, fated, married to a man who by every reasonable measure deserves your complete loyalty. I'm not asking you to reciprocate, or to act on whatever this is between us. I simply couldn't keep pretending it wasn't real, sitting here trading confessions with you like we're not both perfectly aware of exactly what's actually happening underneath the conversation."

Jo's heart hammered with a confusion that tangled guilt and undeniable want into something she had no easy name for. "I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything," Selene said softly. "I simply needed you to know. Whatever you decide to do with that knowledge is entirely yours to decide."

They sat together in charged, uncertain silence for a long moment, the oak tree's dappled shade shifting slowly overhead, and Jo found herself, despite every reasonable caution screaming otherwise, unable to summon any genuine desire to deny what Selene had just named plainly for the first time.

"I think...I might be falling too," Jo admitted finally, voice barely above a whisper. "I don't know what that means, or what we're supposed to do about it. But I'm not going to insult either of us by pretending it isn't true."

Something in Selene's expression cracked open at that — relief, and fear, and fierce, careful hope all tangled together. "Then perhaps we simply exist inside this particular uncertainty for a while longer," she said softly, "before either of us has to decide what it actually requires of us."

"Perhaps," Jo agreed, though some honest corner of her heart already understood, sitting there in the golden afternoon light, that this particular uncertainty was unlikely to remain comfortably unresolved for very much longer.

They rose eventually, brushing dried grass from their clothes with the particular reluctance of two people unwilling to let a golden afternoon end, and Selene caught her hand once more before they parted ways toward their separate obligations.

"Whatever happens next," Selene said, "I want you to know this afternoon mattered. Regardless of how impossible everything else about our situation eventually proves to be."

"It mattered to me too," Jo said softly, and carried that particular golden memory with her through the following days, a private, treasured anchor against whatever difficult uncertainty still waited to unfold.