Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by His Enemy

CHAPTER 13: NOT SELENE

I didn't scream. I want that on record too, right after the part about kissing Draven first. I didn't scream, I grabbed the water jug off my nightstand and threw it at her head, because apparently that's where my instincts land when a locked door stops meaning anything.

She dodged. Barely. It clipped her shoulder instead of her skull, and something about the way she moved was wrong — too fast, too fluid, none of Selene's usual careful economy.

"That was rude," she said, in Selene's voice, wearing Selene's face, and every hair on my body stood straight up.

"You're not her."

"I'm exactly her. Ask anyone." A smile that didn't belong on that face. "Well. Almost exactly."

I was already moving, off the bed, putting furniture between us, screaming Draven's name loud enough to wake half the compound because subtlety had officially left the building along with my dignity.

She lunged. I ducked, barely, felt the wind of her hand where my throat used to be, and scrambled backward into the wall hard enough to knock the air out of me.

The door burst open.

Draven came through it already shifting, half a heartbeat from full wolf, and the thing wearing Selene's face turned to look at him with an expression that had never once belonged to the real Selene — something cold, amused, patient in a way that made my skin crawl worse than the eyes had.

"Ah," it said. "The Alpha. Right on time."

Draven didn't waste breath answering. He hit her — it — full force, and they went down together in a tangle of limbs and snarling, and I pressed myself into the corner because I had exactly nothing useful to contribute to a fight happening at that speed.

It ended fast. Too fast. Draven had his hand around her throat, claws out, and the thing wearing Selene's face just laughed, wet and awful, blood at the corner of her mouth that looked wrong somehow, too dark, too thick.

"You can't kill what isn't really here," she said.

Then her whole body went loose. Not dead-loose. Empty-loose, like something had simply stopped occupying the space, and Draven scrambled back with a sound of pure disgust as the face started to change.

Not melt. Not anything so dramatic. Just — shift, slow, features rearranging themselves into someone I'd never seen before. A stranger's face. Gray eyes, flat and hollow, the same as the one from the field.

"What the hell was that," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

"I don't know." Draven was breathing hard, staring down at the body — the actual, dead body now, whoever it had really been underneath Selene's borrowed face. "I've never seen anything shift like that. Not shapeshifting. Something else."

"A mimic," said a voice from the doorway.

I turned. Fenrir stood there, pale, staring at the body like he recognized something in it.

"You know what this is," I said.

"I've read about it. Old texts, mostly dismissed as myth. A Ravenshade discipline — wearing another person's shape for a limited time, using blood or hair or some piece of them to hold the illusion." He crouched down slowly, careful not to touch it. "It burns out fast. That's probably why it attacked instead of finishing whatever conversation it wanted to have. It was running out of time in that shape."

My stomach turned over, slow and sick. "So the real Selene—"

"Is somewhere else," Fenrir said. "Alive or not, I don't know. But this wasn't her."

Something in my chest that had been braced for the worst finally cracked open, relief and horror tangled together so tight I couldn't separate them.

We found the real Selene twenty minutes later, in a storage room near the kitchens, bound and gagged and furious in a way that was unmistakably, entirely her. Bruised. Missing a chunk of hair at the temple, which explained the material the mimic had used.

"How long," Draven asked, once the gag was off, once she'd stopped coughing.

"I don't know. Hours. I went to check the eastern fence again after — after what you saw me doing." She looked at me, guilt written plain across her face now, no performance in it. "I was meeting an informant. Someone who's been feeding me information about Ravenshade movement for months. I didn't tell either of you because he made contact through channels I wasn't supposed to have, and I didn't want him getting killed over pack politics."

"That's what the conversation I heard was about," I said. "Stalling. Losing patience."

"He's scared they'll figure out he's talking to me. That's the patience he meant." She rubbed at her wrists, raw from whatever had bound them. "I should have told you both. I know that now. I was trying to protect a source and it almost got someone else killed wearing my face instead."

Nobody said anything for a moment. It was a lot to hold at once — relief that she wasn't the mole, horror that something could wear any of us like a costume, and underneath all of it, a colder thought I didn't want to have and had anyway.

If they could wear Selene's face for hours without anyone noticing, they could be wearing anyone's right now. Fenrir's. Draven's. Mine, eventually, if it came to that.

Draven found me on the balcony afterward, the same one from that first dawn, except nothing about tonight felt like healing. He looked wrecked — blood still on his hands he hadn't washed off yet, exhaustion carved deep into every line of his face.

"You could've died in there," he said. Flat. Not accusing. Just stating something he clearly couldn't stop turning over.

"I didn't."

"That's not the same as being fine." His hands were shaking, I noticed, same as mine had been in the field. "I keep almost losing you to something new every few days. I don't know how much more of that I can watch happen."

"You don't get a say in whether it happens. Neither do I." Sharper than I meant it, but I didn't take it back. "This isn't something either of us gets to control by wanting it hard enough."

"I know that." His jaw tightened. "Doesn't stop me wanting it anyway."

We stood there, not touching, the space between us doing that thing it kept doing lately — charged, unresolved, neither of us reaching first. I thought about the mimic wearing Selene's face, about how easily it had fooled me, about the debt his family owed a group that could apparently wear anyone's skin like a coat.

"How do I know it's you," I said, quiet. "Right now. How do I know this is actually you standing here."

Something in his face went very still.

"You don't," he said. "That's the answer. You don't, and I don't know how to fix that for you."

I stared at him a long moment, at the blood still drying on his knuckles, at eyes that looked like his but that I suddenly, horribly, couldn't be fully certain of anymore.

Behind us, deep in the compound, someone started screaming.