The Alpha Who Killed Me First

Chapter 5: Every Full Moon

Mia told her mother she'd wait by the car, and then she didn't. She turned the other way on purpose, back toward the corridor where Lucas's voice had gone low and urgent, because some part of her had already decided, before she'd finished deciding anything, that she would rather risk being caught than leave this building not knowing what he'd meant.

The corridor was quieter here than the meeting room had been, the kind of hush that belonged to a building where important people spoke carefully because they'd learned, the hard way, that words carried further than they meant them to. She counted three closed doors before she found the one with light and sound leaking through it, and stopped just short, back to the wall, the way she used to stand outside her mother's bedroom as a child when the bills came due and the voices on the other side went low and frightened.

The door was open just enough to let sound through and not enough to let her see. She slowed her breathing, the way she'd taught herself that morning when panic had nearly given her away to her own mother.

"—a full year," a voice was saying, weary in a way that had nothing to do with lack of sleep. Older, careful, the voice of a man who chose his words like he was setting down something breakable. "That's not a phase, Lucas. That's a pattern."

"He's still himself in every way that matters." Lucas's voice had gone tight, and underneath the words was a small catch, like he'd swallowed the rest of the sentence before it could betray him further.

"Is he?" A second voice—sharper, faster, impatient with the first man's gentleness. "Marcus lost two hours last week. Couldn't account for a single minute of them. That is not the behavior of a man who is still himself, and I am tired of pretending otherwise for his comfort."

Maybe they're exaggerating, Mia thought. Elders love a crisis. It would be easier, almost, to believe that—easier than whatever sat underneath it, waiting for her to stop lying to herself.

A third voice, quieter than both, cut in before Lucas could answer. "No one's questioning his heart. We're questioning what's using it."

Not unkind. Almost gentle, in a way that somehow frightened Mia more than the sharp voice had. Gentleness, she'd learned, was often just cruelty that hadn't decided yet whether it needed to raise its voice.

No, she thought. They're not exaggerating. Men like this don't call a Council vote over rumors. Whatever else these three were, they weren't the kind of men who panicked easily. That, more than anything they'd said so far, told her how serious this actually was.

The building had gone quiet around her. Too quiet. She realized, with a small lurch, that she could no longer hear anything from inside the room at all.

Someone else is breathing. Close. Behind her.

She froze.

One heartbeat.

Two.

Her mind raced through every excuse she'd have ready if she turned around and found someone standing there—lost, looking for a restroom, waiting for her mother—each one thinner than the last, none of them likely to survive a second question.

Then the voices started again inside the room, and she realized the second breath had been her own, echoing strangely off the narrow corridor walls. She hated that fear could sound like another person. She hated how close she'd come to giving herself away over nothing at all.

"The Council will ask for a decision at the next full moon," the sharp-voiced elder said. "If there's no explanation by then, they'll ask for a temporary suspension of his authority. You know that, Lucas."

"He'd rather die than hand over the pack." Lucas's voice cracked slightly on die.

"That," the gentle one said, "is exactly what worries me."

Every full moon, Mia thought. She had always remembered the knife. She had never once remembered the moon—not its shape that night, not whether it had hung full and heavy over the ballroom windows or hidden itself behind clouds. Three years of marriage, and it had never once occurred to her to ask what the sky looked like on the one night it should have mattered most.

Every full moon, she thought again, letting the words settle somewhere deep enough that she understood she would never be able to forget them now. She turned the phrase over the way she'd turned over the pendant's shape in her memory that first morning—something small enough to hide inside a single sentence, and large enough to change everything she'd believed about the man standing on the other side of that door.

"There's precedent," the sharp voice said, lower. "It happened before, in his father's time—"

"That is not a conversation for this room," the cautious elder said quickly, too quickly, and the sharp voice went silent in a way that told Mia more than the sentence itself had.

His father. She filed that away without understanding it, the way she'd learned to file everything since she'd woken up three years too early—cold, exact, for later use, refusing to let curiosity slow down the cataloguing.

A chair scraped. The meeting was ending. She eased back from the wall, counting her steps toward the stairwell, and made herself hold the pieces together before they could scatter with her nerves.

Council. Full moon. His father. Missing hours. Four threads, four days before the moon came around again, and for the first time since she'd woken up in a life she'd already died in, she had something to actually pull.

Four clues, she thought. I finally have somewhere to start.

She'd almost reached the landing when she made herself stop, hand on the railing, and admit what she'd been avoiding since the word father left that room: this had never been a story about one cruel man punishing an unwanted bride. There were other people bleeding into it. Other history. A shape she hadn't been able to see from the inside, not once, not even standing this close to the center of it.

Time to go.

Cedar. Faint, warm, underneath the building's stale air conditioning—familiar before she'd even placed it, her body recognizing him a full second before her mind caught up and told her why that should have frightened her.

The floorboard creaked directly behind her.

She turned too fast, breath already catching—

And a hand closed over her shoulder. Not rough. Certain. She should have been afraid of the grip alone. Instead some old, foolish part of her noticed, before anything else, that he'd never tightened his fingers enough to hurt.

"Exactly how long have you been listening, Miss Callahan?"

He studied her a beat too long before he spoke again—not the polite attention from the conference table, something closer, sharper, a man trying to place a face he had no memory of ever seeing. His eyes moved over her the way you'd study a name on the tip of your tongue, certain the answer was somewhere close and infuriated that it wouldn't come.

"You're not what I expected to find eavesdropping outside that door," he said, quietly. Not an accusation. Almost, unsettlingly, an observation about her specifically, rather than about what she'd overheard.

Something unreadable crossed his face. It wasn't a suspicion.

It looked dangerously close to recognition.

And that was impossible.

His voice stayed calm, and that calm was the most frightening thing about him. Calm enough that she understood, with a sick certainty, exactly how much would depend on whatever answer she gave him next.