The Alpha Who Killed Me Twice

Chapter4

Chapter Four: The Things Damon Should Not Know

Ariella Thorn.

HE WILL KILL YOU TOO.

She read it twice.

Then she folded it.

Not because she had finished processing it. Because the door was opening and she had approximately two seconds to decide what to do with a dead woman's warning written to someone who should not have existed in this timeline yet.

She pressed the page flat against her thigh and turned.

Damon.

No knock. Again.

He stood in the doorway and looked at her the way he had been looking at her since morning, like a man trying to solve an equation that kept changing every time he got close to the answer. His eyes moved to her hands. Her thigh. The shape of something flat and folded pressed beneath her palm.

"You found something," he said.

"I was reacquainting myself with the room."

"What is in your hand."

"Nothing that concerns you."

He stepped inside and closed the door and she watched him look at the fireplace. The fresh ash. His jaw moved. Tightening and releasing in the particular way of someone who already knew what they were looking at.

Then it happened.

His hand came up to his temple. Two fingers pressed hard. His eyes lost focus for just a fraction of a second, something flickering behind them like a light struggling against wind, and his breath changed. Short. Sharp. A man absorbing sudden pain.

Then it was gone.

He lowered his hand like nothing had happened.

"How long have you been having the headaches," she said.

He looked at her sharply. "I do not have headaches."

"You just pressed two fingers to your temple and stopped breathing for a moment."

"I am fine."

"I was a healer," she said. Then caught herself. "I know what pain looks like."

Something shifted in his expression. Not suspicion exactly. Something closer to the look of a man who had just heard a word in a language he did not know he spoke.

"Sit down," she said.

He sat on the window bench without arguing and she noted that as something worth remembering. Damon Vexley did not take instruction easily. She had watched him in the reception hall, the way rooms reorganized themselves around him, the way people adjusted their posture when he entered. He was not a man who sat when women told him to sit.

And yet.

"The headaches," she said. "When did they start."

"They are not headaches."

"Then what are they?"

He was quiet for a moment. His eyes moved to the window. Outside the light was shifting toward afternoon, long and golden and indifferent to everything happening inside this room.

"Flashes," he said finally. Quietly. Like the word cost him something. "Images. They arrive without warning and they are gone before I can." He stopped. Pressed his lips together. "It does not matter."

"What kind of images."

He looked at her directly and the quality of his gaze changed. Something raw moving underneath the surface of it.

"Rain," he said. "I see rain. And chains." His voice dropped lower. "And a woman in a white dress who says something I cannot hear clearly before I." He stopped again. His hand moved toward his temple and he caught himself and lowered it deliberately. "Before the pain arrives and takes it."

Ariella did not move.

A white dress.

Chains.

Her white dress. Her chains. Her execution square in the rain three years from now that had not happened yet in this timeline but had apparently left marks on him anyway, fragments of a future memory burning through his skull like embers through paper.

"How long," she said. Her voice came out steady. She was proud of that.

"Three months." He looked at his own hands. "They started three months ago. Before." He glanced up at her. "Before I knew you were alive."

"And after seeing me today."

He said nothing. Which was its own answer.

"Worse," she said.

"Considerably."

She stood and crossed to the window and stood beside him and looked out at the grounds below where court attendants moved in small clusters across the stone paths and nothing about any of it looked like a world that had already decided both of them were going to suffer enormously.

"What does the woman look like," she said. "In the rain."

She felt him go still beside her.

"I cannot see her face clearly," he said carefully. "The images are never complete."

"But you feel something when you see her."

A long pause.

"Dread," he said. "And something else I cannot name."

She turned and looked at him and he was already looking at her and the distance between them was smaller than she had intended and his eyes in the afternoon light were not the flat silver of the man on the execution platform. They were darker. More complicated. The eyes of someone carrying something very heavy for a very long time without being able to set it down.

"Did it hurt," he asked, like he already knew the answer.

There it was again.

That question.

Landing in the same wrong place it had landed the first time, bypassing every wall she had built, finding the specific gap in her armor she had not known was there.

"What," she said.

His eyes dropped. Just for a fraction of a second. To her throat. Then back up. And she understood again what he had been looking at. Where a blade would have fallen. Where the wound would have been.

Where there was nothing now.

"You are asking about the wrong woman," she said carefully.

"Am I."

The room was very quiet.

His jaw tightened suddenly and his hand came up fast to the side of his head, pressing hard, and this time the pain was clearly worse because his eyes closed and his breath came out sharp through his nose and he bent forward slightly like something was pressing down on him from inside his own skull.

She moved without thinking.

Her hand went to his back. Between his shoulder blades. The way she had steadied patients through pain a hundred times in the healing halls. Firm and present and communicating without words that the pain was temporary and she was not going anywhere.

He went very still under her hand.

The moment stretched.

Then he straightened slowly and she pulled her hand back and they both looked at the space where the contact had been like it had left a visible mark.

"That happens when you see the images," she said. Keeping her voice clinical. A healer observing symptoms. Not a dead woman touching the man who had watched her die.

"Yes," he said. His voice was rougher than before.

"And something triggered one just now."

He turned and looked at her fully and the expression on his face was the most unguarded she had seen since the doorway this morning.

"You moved toward me," he said. "And I saw her. Just for a second. The woman in the rain." He pressed his lips together. "She was reaching for someone."

Ariella said nothing.

"The headaches are getting worse," he said quietly, "when I am near you."

The silence between them stretched long and complicated and full of things neither of them had the language for yet.

"Damon," she said finally.

"Do not," he said. "Do not tell me it means nothing. I have had three months of physicians telling me it means nothing and every single one of them is wrong."

She looked at him.

This man who would one day stand above her in the rain and give an order and not flinch. Who would cut the bond the Moon Goddess tied between them and hand her to an executioner. Who had taken one involuntary step forward too late.

Whose skull was being cracked open from the inside by fragments of a future he could not remember clearly enough to understand.

She filed all of it away carefully.

"Rest," she said. "We can continue this tomorrow."

He stood and moved to the door and stopped with his back to her, his hand on the frame, and she watched him stand there a moment too long the same way he had before.

"Lyra," he said without turning.

"Yes."

"The woman in the rain." A pause. "She said something before the image broke. I can never hear it fully." His hand tightened on the frame. "But tonight, for the first time, I heard the beginning of it."

Ariella's chest went very tight.

"What did she say," she said quietly.

He turned his head just slightly. Not enough to look at her fully. Just enough for her to see the edge of his profile and the particular tension in his jaw.

"When I come back," he said.

The room stopped.

He left without finishing it.

Ariella stood alone in Lyra Vale's room with her own last words hanging in the air between the walls and understood for the first time that this was not going to be as simple as revenge.