The Alpha's Hidden Obsession

What His Wolf Already Knows

Silas didn't corner me that day. He didn't have to.

He simply watched, from a careful distance, the way a man watches a fire he suspects is about to jump the firebreak, patient enough to wait for the wind to decide the rest for him.

Ronan found me behind the armory an hour later, where I'd gone to be somewhere with fewer people breathing the same air as me.

"You're not what you say you are," he said.

No greeting. No warning. Just that, flat and certain, like a fact he'd been carrying around all morning waiting for a place to put it down.

"I'm exactly who my papers say I am." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the only small mercy of that entire day. "Wes Calder. If you have a problem with my papers, take it to the woman with the ledgers."

"That's not what I mean, and you know it isn't."

He stepped closer, and I made myself stand still instead of backing away, because backing away from Ronan Kade in a narrow space behind the armory was not a mistake I intended to make twice.

"My wolf doesn't react like this to cadets. Not to anyone. Not once, in three years, has it done what it's been doing since you walked through our door."

"Maybe your wolf has bad instincts."

Something almost like a laugh escaped him, short and without much humor in it.

"My wolf has excellent instincts. That's the entire problem."

We stood close enough that I could see the exact shade his eyes settled into when he was working hard not to let them go gold in the middle of a conversation, and for one long, unsteady moment I thought about telling him.

All of it.

The wedding, Kestrel, the ditch, the kitchen knife and my own hair on the ground beside the road.

I thought about how much lighter I would feel, setting it down.

Then I thought about what happened to girls whose secrets got set down in front of the wrong person, and I thought about Milo's face, and I kept my mouth shut.

"I think you should worry less about your wolf's opinion of your roommate," I said instead, "and more about whatever's making Silas Bramwell look at me like I owe him money."

That landed.

I watched it land, watched something sharpen behind Ronan's eyes that had nothing to do with gold or scent and everything to do with a boy who had clearly known Silas long enough to trust that particular kind of attention meant trouble.

"Stay away from him," Ronan said.

"I intend to."

"I mean it, Calder."

"So did I."

He looked at me a moment longer, like he wanted to say something else and couldn't decide whether it was worth the risk of saying it, and then he turned and walked back toward the yard without another word, leaving me alone behind the armory with my pulse refusing to settle and no better idea than before of how long I actually had.

RONAN

I did not understand what was happening to me, and I have never liked not understanding things.

My wolf had gone quiet in a way it never went quiet.

Not restless, not straining at the leash the way it did in a fight or a chase, but settled, the way it settled around den and pack and the handful of people I had ever fully trusted.

It had done that around a boy I had known for three days.

A boy whose scent, underneath the sweat and the road dust, carried something I could not place and could not stop noticing, something that made the animal half of me want to stand closer instead of farther away.

I told myself it was nothing.

I have told myself a great many things that turned out, later, to matter more than I wanted them to.

What I could not tell myself away was Silas.

I had shared a training yard with Silas Bramwell long enough to know exactly what his face looked like when he thought he'd found something worth keeping, and I had seen that face today, aimed squarely at my roommate's back.

I went looking for my father's second, the one man at Duskmoor who owed my family enough favors to answer an inconvenient question without asking one back, and found him near the stables, checking a shipment manifest by lantern light.

"I need you to find out something for me," I said. "Quietly."

He didn't look up from the manifest.

"About the new cadet."

It was not a question, which told me he had already noticed something himself, which told me I had less time to figure this out than I'd hoped.

"Calder," I said. "Wes Calder. I want to know where he trained before this, who signed his intake, and why nobody in three years has smelled anything like him on this campus."

That got his attention.

He looked up, lantern light catching something careful in his expression, and for a moment I thought he was going to refuse me outright.

Instead he said, "There's something else you should know first."

"What."

"Word came in an hour ago from the southern border patrol." He set the manifest down slow, like he was choosing his next words with more care than the sentence deserved. "Alpha Draven Kestrel's men are asking questions in every market town along the cadet road. Description of a girl. Nineteen, dark hair, ran the night before her own wedding."

The lantern flame did not move.

Nothing in that stable moved.

But something in my chest went very still and very sharp at once, the two words landing together before I had any right to put them together at all.

A girl.

And I thought, with a certainty that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with an instinct I had stopped trying to argue with an hour ago behind the armory, that I already knew exactly whose scent had been keeping my wolf awake since the night she walked through our door.