The Enstranged Alpha's Mate

Chapter Two:Voss Territory

The border between Ashwood and Voss land wasn't marked by any fence or sign. It didn't need to be. Rowan felt it the second the truck crossed over — a pressure change in the air, like driving into a storm front that hadn't decided yet whether it wanted to break.

Brie felt it too. Her hands tightened on the wheel. "You good?"

"I'm fine." Rowan wasn't fine. Her heart had started doing something erratic somewhere around the last mile marker, and the bond mark under her collarbone had gone from a dull ache to a live wire, humming louder with every mile they put behind them. Ten years of silence, and her own body was betraying her before she'd even laid eyes on him.

Not weakness, she told herself. Just biology. You don't owe biology anything.

The Voss compound came into view at the top of the ridge — a sprawl of timber lodges and stone longhouses built into the mountainside like they'd grown there instead of being constructed, smoke rising from a dozen chimneys, wolves moving between buildings with the unhurried confidence of a pack that had never once had to wonder where its next meal or its next fight was coming from. Rowan had grown up in nothing like this. She still didn't entirely trust it.

A welcome party waited at the gate — six wolves in Voss colors, and in front of them, unmistakable even after a decade, Kane.

He'd changed the way mountains change: slowly, and only if you knew exactly what you were looking for. Broader through the shoulders. A hardness around the eyes that hadn't been there before, or maybe had always been there and she'd been too young and too in love to see it. He was in a dark jacket instead of ceremonial furs, hands loose at his sides in a way that looked deliberate, like he'd practiced not clenching them.

The truck rolled to a stop. Rowan made herself breathe once, twice, before she opened the door.

The moment her boots hit Voss soil, the bond mark flared hot enough that she had to fight not to press her hand to it. Across the yard, she saw Kane go rigid — the same jolt, mirrored. Good. At least the universe was being fair about who it tortured.

"Rowan." Her name in his voice was rougher than she remembered, like he hadn't used it out loud in a long time and wasn't sure it still fit in his mouth.

"Alpha Voss." She kept her tone flat, professional, the tone she used on difficult elders and dishonest traders. "You wanted a meeting. I'm here to have one."

Something moved behind his eyes — she refused to call it hurt, because that would mean she cared whether he was hurting, and she'd promised herself on the drive over that she didn't. "I appreciate you coming. I know what it cost you."

"You don't know anything about what it cost me." The words came out sharper than she'd planned, and she watched several of the wolves behind him shift their weight, uneasy. Good. Let them be uneasy. Let the whole territory understand that she hadn't come here soft.

Kane didn't flinch. If anything, something in his jaw set harder, like he was absorbing the hit on purpose, taking it as owed. "You're right. I don't. I'd like the chance to understand, if you'll give me one. But that's not why I asked you here." He gestured toward the largest of the timber lodges. "The elders are waiting. Can we table the rest until the alliance is settled?"

It was, infuriatingly, the correct thing to say. Rowan hated that he still knew how to say the correct thing.

"Fine." She turned to Brie. "Get the others settled. I'll find you after."

The walk to the lodge felt longer than it should have, Kane a half-step behind her and to the left — an Alpha's position, she realized, the place a leader walked when guarding someone without crowding them. He used to walk like that beside her once, back when she was seventeen and had just discovered what it meant to be someone's mate. Back before she'd learned what it meant to be someone's liability.

"The pack looks well," she said, mostly to fill the silence, mostly because the alternative was listening to her own pulse.

"It survives." Something flat in his voice. "That's different from well. We'll get to why, inside."

Rowan glanced sideways at him for the first time since the yard, really looked, and caught something she hadn't expected — exhaustion, bone-deep, the kind that didn't come from one bad season. Whatever threat had made him swallow his pride enough to write that letter, it wasn't a small one.

"How bad is it?" she asked, before she could stop herself, before the part of her that still wanted to protect this pack — protect him, some small traitorous corner of her whispered — could be talked out of asking.

Kane looked at her, and for one unguarded second, the Alpha mask slipped, and she saw the boy she used to know underneath it, tired and afraid in a way he'd never once let anyone see back then. "Bad enough that I was willing to ask the one person who owes me nothing for help I have no right to."

The lodge doors opened ahead of them. Rowan filed the answer away, along with the look on his face, to examine later, when she wasn't standing three feet from the man who'd once destroyed her in front of three hundred witnesses and somehow still made her chest ache like it wanted to fix him.

Later, she told herself. Business first.

She stepped through the doors before he could see how much that look had cost her.