The Interview
1173 Words
The Valdemar estate rose from the mountains like it had been carved out of stone and bad intentions. Dark walls, iron gates, lit windows, and guards at every point that mattered. It was cleaner than my father’s place, but colder too, and somehow that made it worse.
I stood outside the front gate with my bag over one shoulder and my new name sitting strange on my tongue.
Salomé Vega, a lone wolf, a nobody, a woman with no pack, no history worth tracing, and no reason for anyone here to look twice.
I lifted my chin anyway.
One of the guards stepped forward, he was broad enough to block the entire path, his eyes fixed on me with open suspicion.
“Name,” he said.
“Salomé Vega.”
“Purpose?”
“Refuge.” I kept my voice even. “And work, if you have use for either.”
His gaze dropped to my hands, my boots, the cut of my hair. He was looking for fear. That was always the first thing wolves looked for in strangers.
I gave him none.
He studied me a moment longer, then spoke into the earpiece at his chest. There was a pause, then another pause. His expression changed only slightly, but I saw it. He had been told to let me in.
The gate opened.
The estate paths were wide and silent, lined with stone lamps that cast pale light across trimmed hedges and black gravel. Every step I took felt calculated by invisible eyes. I could smell the pack before I saw anyone else; clean sweat, cedar, steel, old blood, and wolf.
This was not my father’s world.
It was way worse than I thought.
A younger guard led me through the main hall without speaking. The floor was polished stone, the walls lined with dark art and weapon displays that looked more like warnings than decoration. No one laughed here, no one lingered, even the servants moved with the kind of careful silence that came from knowing mistakes were remembered.
At the end of the corridor, the guard stopped in front of a thick wooden door.
“Wait,” he said.
Then he knocked once and opened it without waiting for an answer.
The study was large, warm, and built for control. Dark shelves covered the walls. A fire burned low in the hearth. A desk sat near the center of the room, clean except for a stack of papers and one glass of whiskey untouched beside them.
And behind that desk sat Bastián Valdemar.
He was not what the rumors had prepared me for.
Rumors made men louder than they were, bigger, crueler in obvious ways, but Bastián was none of that. He was still, too still, the kind of stillness that did not come from calm, but from restraint. He sat with one hand resting against the desk, his shoulders relaxed in a way that felt intentional, his dark eyes fixed on me as if he had already weighed every lie I might tell.
I did not breathe right for a second.
His face was sharp in the firelight, his expression unreadable and cold enough to make the room feel smaller. He looked like a man who had never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed.
“Leave us,” he said.
The guard shut the door behind me, and silence dropped hard between us.
I stepped closer and forced myself not to flinch under his gaze. Up close, he was even more imposing. Not because he was huge, though he was tall enough to make me feel small, but because nothing in him seemed wasted. Every inch of him looked controlled, like a blade kept hidden until the moment it was needed.
“You asked to see me,” he said.
His voice was low and calm, there was no warmth, no invitation.
“Yes.”
He leaned back in his chair, one finger tapping once against the desk. “You have three seconds before I decide you are wasting my time.”
I held his stare. “Then I will be quick.”
One brow shifted slightly.
“I am looking for refuge,” I said. “And for work. I travel alone, I do not cause trouble. I track, scout, and notice things other people miss.”
“You have no pack.”
“No.”
“You have no recommendation.”
“No.”
“You walk into my estate with a forged name and expect me to take you in.”
“I expect you to listen before you refuse.”
That got the smallest pause.
He studied me with that same unnerving stillness, his eyes moving over my face, my hands, the plain jacket I had chosen to look forgettable in. I could feel the Bond under my skin like a live wire, faint but awake, and I hated how much harder it made it to stand still.
Do not react, I told myself.
He looked at me for another beat, then spoke again. “Why come here?”
“I heard the Valdemars keep their word.” I replied.
“We do.”
“That is useful to me.”
“And why should I believe you are useful to me?”
I did not answer right away. I let the silence stretch just enough to make it look like I was thinking, though the truth was simpler.
I was reading him.
The room, his posture, the way his gaze did not drift, the fact that his hand was close to the whiskey but had not touched it. He did not look like a man who drank to relax but one who had already decided not to show anyone what was happening inside him.
“I know the mountain routes,” I said. “The old paths too. I know how to move without being seen and how to find someone who does not want to be found.”
“Who taught you?”
“A lifetime of being overlooked.”
His eyes narrowed a fraction. “That is not an answer.”
“It is the one you get.”
Something almost like amusement flickered in his face and vanished so fast I might have imagined it.
He stood, and every nerve in me tightened. One moment he was behind the desk, and the next he was in front of it, close enough that I could feel the heat from his body and smell the faint clean bite of his scent beneath the fire and wood.
He was silent for a long time.
Then his nostrils flared.
My chest tightened in the same instant, the Bond was humming low and strange beneath my skin like it had recognized danger before I did. His gaze sharpened, not on my face this time, but somewhere lower, like he was catching a scent that did not belong.
His voice changed by the barest edge.
“Why do you smell like ashes?”
- Writer
