The Alpha's Forbidden Pact

CHAPTER 6: PULLED BACK

"Kade."

Damaris's voice cut through the room like a blade dropped flat on stone, and Kade's hand was gone from my wrist before the second syllable finished.

Neither of us had heard the door.

I turned, my pulse still slamming from a moment neither of us had managed to end on our own, and found Damaris standing in the doorway, one hand still on the frame, his eyes moving from Kade to me and back with a stillness that felt worse than shouting would have. He didn't raise his voice. He never had to. Something about the quiet way he took up a doorway made shouting look like the weaker option.

"How long," Damaris said, "were you standing like that?"

"It wasn't what it looked like," Kade said.

"I didn't ask what it looked like. I asked how long."

"A few seconds."

"A few seconds is all it takes."

"Nothing happened."

"Something clearly happened, or you wouldn't already be explaining yourself before I've finished a sentence."

Kade's jaw worked, and for a man who never backed down from anything, he looked, for the first time since I'd known him, like a man who had genuinely forgotten how to defend himself. His hands hung open at his sides, empty, like he didn't trust them anywhere near me while his father was watching.

"I need air," Kade said finally, low, more to himself than to either of us.

"You need to leave this room," Damaris said. "Now."

"I know what I need."

"Then you already know I'm right."

"Do I." Kade's voice had an edge to it. I rarely heard him use it with Damaris, something that sounded almost like a challenge. "You weren't standing here two minutes ago. You don't know what almost happened, or what didn't, or why."

"I know enough."

"You know what you walked in on. That's not the same as knowing why."

"It doesn't need to be the same. The pact doesn't care about your reasons, Kade. It only cares whether you touched her."

That landed somewhere I felt more than saw, a flinch Kade tried and failed to hide.

"I let go," Kade said. "The second you said my name, I let go."

"A second too late is still too late."

Kade's eyes cut to mine, one last time, something unreadable passing over his face, guilt or want or both tangled together too fast for me to separate one from the other. He looked like he wanted to say something else, something meant only for me, and I watched him decide against it in real time, his jaw setting the way it did whenever he chose duty over everything underneath it.

"Go," Damaris said. Just that. One word, low, final.

Kade didn't argue. He crossed the room, and something about the speed of it, the way he moved like a man walking away from a fire before it caught his sleeve, told me exactly how close we'd actually come to something neither of us had a name for yet.

He passed close enough that I felt the heat of him one last time, and for half a second his hand twitched at his side, like some part of him wanted to reach for me again even now, even with Damaris watching, even knowing exactly what it would cost.

He didn't.

Then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him with a sound too quiet for how loud everything else in the room suddenly felt. I stood there staring at the place where he'd been standing, my wrist still warm where his hand had held it, the ghost of his grip lingering on my skin long after the rest of him had disappeared down the hall.

The broad shouldered one from the gathering hall was already halfway to standing, tugging the quieter one with him without a word exchanged between them, some old instinct in both of them recognizing exactly what kind of room they'd just walked into. Neither of them looked at me on their way out, which somehow felt like its own kind of mercy. I heard their footsteps recede toward the back of the house, a door opening and closing somewhere distant, the ordinary sounds of a home settling back into itself even though nothing about tonight had been ordinary at all.

Theo lingered a second longer than the others, his eyes flicking from his father to me, something working behind them that he didn't say out loud.

"Theo," Damaris said, not unkindly, but leaving no room for argument either.

"I'm going," Theo said, though the way he said it made it sound less like obedience and more like a question he wasn't ready to ask yet. His eyes found mine on his way past, quick, almost apologetic, like he wished he could stay and couldn't say why he thought that mattered. He left anyway, pulling the door shut with more care than the others had, like he didn't want to be the reason it slammed.

The house settled into the particular kind of quiet that comes after a room has emptied fast, footsteps fading down the hall, a door somewhere further off closing softer than the first, and then nothing at all, no voices, no movement, just the low tick of a clock somewhere I couldn't see and the sound of my own breathing, still too fast, still catching on something I hadn't fully named yet.

And then it was just the two of us.

I hadn't been alone with Damaris, truly alone, no Kade at my shoulder, no Theo in the doorway, no one else's breathing in the room to soften the space between us, in longer than I could remember. Six years, maybe more. He had made sure of that himself, always finding a reason for someone else to be present whenever the two of us were in a room together, some errand, some meeting, some excuse that had never once struck me as strange until this exact second, standing here with the door shut and his eyes still on me like he hadn't yet decided which version of himself was about to win.

He didn't move toward me. He didn't move away either.

I tried to remember the last time it had been just us, really tried, and came up with nothing solid, only a vague sense of childhood, of being small enough that his height alone had felt like safety instead of something else entirely. Somewhere between that memory and tonight, he had built a wall out of other people's presence, brick by brick, meeting by meeting, and I had never once noticed him laying it because I had never had a reason to look for it.

I have one now.

For a long moment, neither of us said anything at all, and I became aware, slowly, of how loud my own heartbeat had gotten in a room that had gone otherwise completely silent, of how strange it felt to stand across from a man who had spent six years making absolutely certain this exact moment never happened, and now here it was anyway, uninvited, unavoidable, with no one left in the house to interrupt it. The lamp in the corner threw half his face into shadow, and I found myself studying the half that stayed lit, searching for whatever it was Theo had seen earlier tonight, whatever it was that had made his own son look at his father like a stranger.

Whatever it was, I couldn't find it. Not yet.

But I could feel it, the way you feel a storm before it breaks, the pressure building in a room that had, until tonight, always felt like the safest place in my entire life.