THE MATE THE ROGUE ALPHA WAS MEANT TO KILL

Chapter 10—The Mark

Ravin's POV

She was already waiting by the oak when I arrived, and that surprised me slightly, not that she was there but that she had beaten me to it, standing with her arms loosely crossed and her eyes on the treeline beyond the garden fence like she had been thinking about something and had not quite finished yet.

She turned when she heard my footsteps with an expression I had already learned to read as her thinking face, the one where something was sitting just behind her eyes waiting to come out.

I sat on the bench. She did not sit immediately.

"You disappear every evening," she said.

Not a greeting. Not a warmup. Straight to it, which was very Elara and which I had started to find more interesting than I probably should have.

"I do," I said.

"Every single day since you transferred. Last bell rings and you are just gone. Nobody sees you leave, nobody sees where you go." She finally sat, turning slightly toward me. "That is not normal transfer student behaviour."

"You said that before," I said.

"I am saying it again because it is still true," she said. "Where do you go?"

I looked at her for a moment, steady and unhurried, and then I stood and tilted my head toward the path that ran along the east wall. "Walk with me."

She gave me a look that said she knew exactly what I was doing, which was redirecting the conversation without answering it, and she stood anyway and fell into step beside me because she was curious enough that walking was better than standing still.

We moved along the path at an easy pace, the late afternoon quiet settling around us, and I waited until the silence had stretched long enough to be comfortable before I spoke.

"I have responsibilities outside of school." Things that require my attention in the evenings. It is nothing dramatic."

"What kind of responsibilities?."

"The kind that are mine to manage," I said, which was not an answer and we both knew it, but I said it easily enough that it did not land like a shut door, more like a door that was simply not open yet.

She looked at me sideways. "You are very good at saying things that sound like answers but are not actually answers."

"I have been told that."

"Does it usually work?"

"Usually," I said, and she laughed, short and genuine, and something in my chest did the thing it had been doing every time she laughed since I first heard it. I had stopped pretending I did not notice it.

We walked a little further and the conversation shifted the way it did between us easily, moving from one thing to another without effort, and I let myself simply be in it without calculating every word the way I did in every other space I occupied. It was the strangest thing about her. She made the space around her feel lighter without seeming to try.

We had looped back toward the oak when she slowed slightly and I noticed her eyes had dropped to my collar, where the top two buttons of my shirt were open from the heat of the walk. I had not planned for that detail and noted it a second too late to do anything about it without being obvious.

"What is that?" she said.

I followed her gaze. The edge of the mark was visible just below my collarbone, the faint raised line of old scarring that curved across my chest, dark against my skin and impossible to miss once you had seen it.

"A scar," I said.

"I know it is a scar," she said, looking up at me. "Where did it come from?"

"A fight, rival pack warrior. It was a long time ago."

She looked back at it with the expression she used when she was deciding how much to push. "It looks like it hurt."

"It did," I said simply, which was true, and the simplicity of it seemed to satisfy something in her because she did not press further, just kept looking at the mark with a quiet curiosity that felt different from prying.

We had stopped walking without deciding to, standing near the old oak with the evening light coming through the branches above us, and she was close enough that I was aware of every small movement she made. That was something I had stopped fighting, the awareness, the way my attention oriented toward her without being told to, like a default setting I had not chosen and could not turn off.

She reached out.

Her fingers were light against my chest, barely touching the edge of the scar, and I went very still the way I went still when something required my complete attention, and the garden went quiet around us, or maybe it had always been quiet and I was only now noticing it.

She looked up.

Our eyes met in the particular way they sometimes did where neither of us looked away and the air between us had a quality to it that was difficult to name but impossible to miss, and I had about two seconds of rational thought left before I made a decision that was not a decision at all because it had already been made somewhere before this moment.

I closed the distance between us and kissed her, my hand coming up to cup the side of her face the way it had in the corridor, and she went still for one heartbeat and then she kissed me back and the garden and the school and the curse and everything else that lived in the space between us simply ceased to exist for a moment.

I had spent weeks building walls around this exact thing, telling myself I was watching her for strategy, telling myself the pull was just the curse, telling myself the garden was just conversation, and all of it collapsed in the space of one heartbeat when she looked up at me with her fingers still resting against the edge of that scar.

Just her.

Just this.