The Alpha Who Killed Me First

Chapter 6: A Question I Can't Answer

His hand was still on her shoulder when she turned fully to face him, and for a moment neither of them moved, the corridor holding its breath around them the way it had a moment ago when she'd mistaken her own fear for someone else's.

"Long enough," Mia said, before she could think better of it, "to know I probably shouldn't have."

It wasn't a lie. That was the strange part—she hadn't planned that answer, hadn't rehearsed it the way she'd rehearsed a dozen others on the drive over, and yet it came out steady, almost disarming in its honesty. Sometimes the truth, offered small enough, worked better than any lie could.

Something flickered across his face. Not anger. Something closer to relief, quickly hidden, like a man who'd braced for a blow and gotten a handshake instead.

"Most people would deny it," he said.

"Most people probably aren't as bad at lying as I am." She held his gaze, steady, deliberate. Let him think her nerve was clumsy. Clumsy women didn't get watched closely. "I heard voices. I got curious. I know that's not much of a defense."

He released her shoulder and stepped back half a pace, giving her room in a way that felt, unsettlingly, like courtesy rather than caution. "Curious about what, exactly."

Careful. "About you, a little," she said, because a partial truth was safer than a clean lie with him, she suspected, than it would have been with anyone else. "You're the reason my family isn't losing everything by the end of the month. People don't usually do that much for strangers without a reason."

"There's a reason." His voice had gone quieter. "It isn't the one you're imagining."

"What am I imagining?"

"That I need something from your family." A pause, and something crossed his face that looked almost like fatigue wearing a very good disguise. "I don't. I did this because the alternative was watching good people lose everything over a clerical error no one bothered to explain properly. That's all."

She wanted, badly, to believe that was the whole truth. She let herself hold the wanting at arm's length instead of trusting it.

"You look tired," she said, and regretted it instantly—too personal, too close to the kind of thing a wife might have said, not a stranger meeting him for the second time in her life.

He didn't seem to notice the strangeness of it. "I am tired." Simple. Unguarded in a way she hadn't expected from him at all. "Did you hear that part too? Through the door?"

There it was—the real question underneath the polite one. She kept her expression easy, curious rather than knowing. "I heard enough to worry it's not really any of my business."

"It isn't." He almost smiled. Almost. "That's never stopped anyone with a good instinct before."

He studied her for a long moment, and Mia made herself hold still under it, the way she'd learned to hold still under far worse scrutiny than this in a life that hadn't happened yet.

"Can I ask you something strange," he said, finally, "and trust you won't repeat it to anyone in that room."

"You barely know me."

"I know." A pause, careful, like he was weighing the sense of his own decision even as he made it. "You don't know enough about me to have decided what I'm supposed to be yet. Everyone in that room already has. That makes you either the wrong person to ask, or the only one."

Mia's pulse climbed. This is it. This is the moment where you find out how much he already suspects about himself.

"Have you ever noticed anything wrong with me," he said, "since you've been here today. Anything that felt—off. Even something small."

The question landed like a hand closing gently around her throat. Every honest answer she had was dangerous. She'd watched his thumb press against his own wrist like he was checking whether his heartbeat still belonged to him. She'd watched the moon come up in his voice like a threat he hadn't chosen. She'd stood outside a door and heard grown men who feared him more than they respected him.

Tell him nothing. Or tell him exactly enough to be useful, and no more.

"Your hand," she said carefully. "In the meeting. You touched your wrist like you were checking a pulse. And when your friend mentioned the full moon, you went somewhere else for a second. Somewhere I couldn't follow."

His breath left him slowly, like something in his chest had been holding on for confirmation and finally got it.

"You noticed that in one meeting."

"I notice things. It's not a gift. It's mostly just fear dressed up as attention." That, at least, was entirely true.

"Sometimes a stranger notices what the people closest to you have stopped seeing," he said, quietly, more to himself than to her. "I lose time sometimes. Hours I can't account for. I've been told it's stressful. I don't think it's stressful."

He doesn't know. He genuinely doesn't know what he is. The realization landed with a strange, disorienting tenderness she hadn't given herself permission to feel yet—grief for a man who hadn't done anything wrong in this exact moment, standing three years before he would do something unforgivable.

"What do you think it is," she asked, and hated how much she meant the question.

"I don't know." Quiet. Honest in a way that terrified her more than any threat could have. "I was hoping, for one absurd second, that a stranger who noticed my hand shaking might have a better answer than I do."

She almost told him. The words rose up her throat unbidden—it's a full moon, it's been a year, there's a name I haven't said out loud yet, there's a knife in a future you haven't lived through—and she caught them just before they reached her mouth, swallowing them down so hard it hurt.

"I don't have an answer," she said instead. "I just have an observation. Sometimes that's the only thing anyone can offer."

Something in his expression settled, not quite relief, not quite disappointment—recognition, maybe, that she'd given him exactly as much as a stranger reasonably could, no more.

"Thank you," he said, "for not pretending you didn't notice."

For one impossible second, she wanted to tell him everything.

Then she remembered the knife.

He turned to go, then stopped, glancing back at her with an expression she couldn't fully name.

"I don't know why," he said, "but I don't think this is the last strange conversation we're going to have, Miss Callahan."

He walked away before she could answer that, which was fortunate, because she had absolutely nothing to say to it that wouldn't have given her away completely.

That night, she dreamed of the wedding again.

The knife was where it always was, buried just below her ribs, and Kade's hand was where it always was, wrapped around the handle. But his eyes weren't brown going gold going black this time. They were black from the very start, endless and depthless, and when he leaned down close to her, the words he whispered weren't the ones she remembered.

They weren't goodbye, Mia.

They were something else entirely—low and rhythmic, the same cadence as the chanting she'd heard once through a pendant's pulse of light. And past his shoulder, in the candlelit dark of the ballroom that had never held anyone but the two of them in every version of this memory before, she saw a shape standing motionless among the guests. Still. Watching. Gone the instant she tried to focus on it, as if it had only ever existed at the edge of where she was allowed to look.

She woke up gasping, hand pressed to her side where the wound should have been, and thought, with a cold and creeping horror: if that memory can change, what else have I remembered wrong—and who else was in that room with us the whole time?