The Alpha Who Let Me Go

Rhea POV The sun isn't up yet, but I'm already on my knees, scrubbing the office floor. Cold water soaks through the thin fabric of my dress and my hands have gone numb around the brush. My brother Torin likes this room spotless before he wakes. If it isn't, I pay for it. I've learned that lesson enough times that my body flinches before my mind even finishes the thought. I dip the brush again and scrub harder at a mark near the desk leg. My knuckles are cracked and raw. I don't stop. I never stop until the job is finished, because starting late means finishing late, and finishing late means Torin notices, and Torin noticing is never good for me. "Where is she?" Doran's voice booms down the hallway before I even hear his boots on the wood floor. He's Torin's Beta. Once, a long time ago, before everything went wrong, he was supposed to be my mate. That ended the night he rejected me in the basement and left me with bruises to remember it by. I don't let myself think about that night more than I have to. I scramble to my feet, grabbing the cleaning basket so fast that water sloshes onto my sleeve. The second Doran's eyes land on me, his hand comes up and cracks across my cheek. I don't make a sound. Sound only makes it worse. I learned that when I was a child, and I have never once forgotten it since. "Alpha Silas is coming today," Doran snaps, standing so close I can smell the coffee on his breath. "The office needs to be perfect. Do you understand how important this deal is? Alpha Trey and I are trying to make an impression." I nod. I don't ask what deal, or why it matters, or why an Alpha's visit means I have to be up scrubbing floors before the sun. Questions are for people who are allowed to speak first, and I have never once been that person in this house. "We need his help," Doran mutters, straightening his collar in the hallway mirror. "Obsidian Crest is the biggest pack in the region. If Alpha Silas signs onto us, no one will dare touch Ashwood again." I don't understand why we would need protecting. As far as I know, no one has ever attacked us, and we have never attacked anyone. But I keep my mouth shut and my eyes on the floor, because that's the only way I know how to survive a morning like this one. Doran shoves me toward the office, his boot catching me hard enough behind the knee that I nearly stumble. "Useless girl," he mutters, already walking away, already forgetting I exist the moment I'm out of his sight. I slip inside the office and pull the door shut behind me, leaning my back against it for just one second of quiet. My cheek still stings where his hand landed. I press my palm to it and breathe, letting my eyes travel over the already-clean room. There was nothing left for me to do in here at all. That's when I hear someone clear their throat. I freeze. My whole body goes rigid, because I thought this room was empty. I always check. I always make sure I'm alone before I let my guard down, even for a second, and somehow I had missed this. Slowly, I lift my eyes toward the sound, and there, in the corner chair I hadn't even noticed, sits a man. One leg is crossed over his knee, a glass of something dark resting easily in his hand, like he's been sitting there for hours and has nowhere else in the world to be. His hair is short and black. His shoulders are wide enough to fill the whole chair. And when his eyes finally lift to mine, they are grey. Not the warm grey of a cloudy sky, but grey like steel left out in the cold, grey like a storm that hasn't decided yet whether it's going to break. I have never smelled a wolf like him before. His scent rolls through the room like heat pouring off a fire, thick and heavy and impossible to ignore, even for someone like me, whose sense of smell has never worked the way it's supposed to. "Is this how you greet every Alpha?" he asks. His voice is low and even, deep enough that I feel it more than hear it. There's something underneath his words though, some thread of real curiosity, like he's actually asking me a question instead of setting a trap for me to fall into. "I'm sorry," I whisper, pushing myself away from the door and straightening my dress with hands that won't quite stop shaking. "I thought no one was in here." He doesn't answer that. He just watches me, tilting his head slightly, the way you'd study something you were trying to figure out. I have been looked at plenty of times in my life, with disgust, with pity, with the kind of amusement that comes right before someone decides to hurt you. I have never been looked at like this. Like I am a puzzle instead of a problem to be solved with a fist. "Come forward," he says. My stomach drops straight to my feet. I already know, in this house, what it usually means when a man tells me to come closer. But something in his voice isn't like Torin's voice, isn't like Doran's voice, isn't like any voice I've heard directed at me in years. Still, refusing an Alpha is far more dangerous than obeying one, so I take a slow step forward anyway. He leans in slightly as I approach, nostrils flaring, and his brow pulls together in confusion. "You smell strange," he says. "Wrong, almost. Are you even a wolf?" The word wrong lands like a slap, worse somehow than the one Doran gave me an hour ago. I have heard that word my whole life, whispered behind hands, spat across rooms, hissed at me in the dark of the basement. Hearing it from a stranger with eyes like a storm still stings just as much as it ever has. "Yes," I whisper, keeping my eyes low, because I cannot bear to watch his face while he decides what to think of me. "Then why can't I place your scent?" His voice sharpens. "And why didn't you scent me the moment you walked through that door? You should have known I was in here before you ever saw me." I say nothing. I never explain. Nobody who has ever asked me that question actually wanted the real answer they wanted a reason to laugh at me, or a reason to punish me. I have learned it is safer to stay silent than to hand someone a new weapon to use against me. "I asked you a question," he says, quieter now, and somehow that quiet is more frightening than if he had shouted. "I do not like repeating myself." I open my mouth, some half-formed excuse rising in my throat, and that is the exact moment the door slams open behind me hard enough to rattle the glass in the window. "Rhea!" Torin's voice cracks across the room like a whip. "What in the hell are you doing in my office?" I close my eyes. I already know what's coming. I can hear his boots crossing the floor, feel the air shift as his hand rises, and for one long, terrible second, all I can think is that I am about to be struck in front of a stranger who has been watching my every move since the moment I walked through that door.