Hunted Mate

Chapter 5

NYRA

The welcome dinner was seventeen wolves around a table and Cassius Vane seven seats to her left.

She had placed herself correctly. Far enough that conversation would require deliberate effort, close enough that avoiding her gaze would itself be noticeable. She focused her attention on the Alpha and Luna of Silver Moon, Rowan, and the food she moved about her plate without tasting, while Cassius spoke to Zayden's Beta Kael with the relaxed authority of a man used to being heard.

Zayden was seated at the head of the guest formation.He had only looked at her once since they sat down, when she arrived and took her seat, and the look had been brief and calculated, giving her nothing other than that he knew precisely where she was in the room, which she found both reassuring and alarming in equal measure.

The bond was a background current. She had compartmentalized it with the specific efficiency she applied to everything she could not afford to feel in public. It sat in her chest and pulled in Zayden's direction and she breathed against it and kept her face still.

Her father was at the end of the table.

She hadn't reached him before dinner.She had tried twice and been stopped both times, once by her mother and once by Lyra, who had welcomed the evening with the zeal of someone who found the presence of exotic wolves invigorating rather than terrifying. . She would get to him after. She had to.

The conversation moved through politics and alliance and the bureaucratic language of pack cooperation, and Nyra tracked it without contributing and watched Cassius in her peripheral vision and measured the distance between his gaze and her face with every minute that passed.

Forty-seven minutes in, Cassius looked at her.

Not casually. The specific attention of a man running a visual check on someone whose presence had registered and needed accounting for. His gaze moved to her face and stayed there for two seconds.

One second was curiosity.

Two seconds was recognition attempting to complete itself.

Nyra held his gaze with the flat, politely blank expression of a pack member performing appropriate deference toward an elder guest and felt the cold run up the centre of her spine and kept it entirely off her face.

He looked away.

He turned back to Kael.

She could not tell if he had placed her or was still searching.

She looked at her plate and counted her breathing and felt Zayden's attention from the other end of the table without turning toward it.

Three minutes later, Kael said something to Cassius that made him look toward the door.

Two Nightfang wolves appeared at the dinner room entrance. They crossed to Kael and bent close and spoke quietly.

Kael's face changed.

He stood up. He said something to Zayden in a low voice. Zayden's hands on the table went still.

Kael said, “there has been an incident at the eastern perimeter.”

The table went quiet.

Kael said, “three Silver Moon sentinels have been found unconscious on the border. Nightfang tracking suggests they were taken down by hunters.”

The word moved through the room like cold water.

Nyra looked at Cassius.

Cassius was looking at her.

Not with the half-formed recognition of a man struggling to place a face.

With the flat, steady recognition of a man who had already placed it and was deciding what to do next.

She knew that look.

She had seen it once before, at a border crossing, for a single second before running, and it had kept her running for three years. .

Her chair scraped the floor as she stood.

Zayden was already moving.

He moved quickly around the table, not sprinting, but approaching it, and positioned himself between Nyra and the length of the table where Cassius was sat. His hand gripped her wrist precisely, as if to prevent someone from going in the wrong direction, rather than with force.

His voice, when he spoke, was directed at the table.

He said, “the perimeter incident requires my personal attention. My Beta will coordinate with Alpha Tristan.” He looked at Nyra once, quickly, with an expression that told her clearly to say nothing and go where he directed. He said, “Silver Moon's territory is Nightfang's responsibility tonight. Nobody moves alone.”

He steered her toward the side door.

She went.

Behind them she heard Cassius's chair move.

She heard Kael's voice, calm and authoritative, redirecting the table's attention to the perimeter report.

She heard her father's voice asking a question that Kael answered before it could be directed at Zayden.

The side door closed behind them.

Zayden did not slow down. He went into the service corridor with his hand still around her wrist, and she kept up the pace and said nothing until they were far enough away from the dining room that her voice could not be heard.

She said, “he recognized me.”

Zayden said, “I know.”

She said, “that was not forty-eight hours.”

He said, “no. It was not.”

She said, “the hunters at the perimeter.”

He said, “Cassius made contact the moment he identified you. Probably before dinner. Probably before the formal welcome.”

She understood what that meant. He knew she was there before she sat down to dine. He'd spent the entire lunch debating if the girl from the border was enough of a risk to take tonight or if he needed more time.

She said, “he decided she was a risk.”

Zayden said, “he decided you were a risk. Yes.”

She felt the cold settle into something steadier. Not panic. The thing underneath panic, the place she had lived since she was fourteen, the specific temperature of understanding that you were in a situation with no room for mistakes.

She said, “where are we going?”

He said, “somewhere Cassius cannot reach you until I have him contained.”

She said, “and if containment fails.”

He stopped walking.

He turned and gazed at her in the service corridor, with the noises of the dinner table rearranging behind the closed door and the sounds of the Chicago night outside, and his countenance was that of a guy who had stopped regulating his expression because no one else was watching but her.

He said, “containment will not fail.”

She looked at him.

He said, “I have been hunting this for eighteen months. I am not losing it tonight because he moved faster than I expected.”

She said, “you came here hunting a witness.”

He said, “yes.”

She said, “and you found her.”

He said, “yes.”

She looked at him for a moment longer.

She said, “the bond.”

He did not answer immediately. She felt it between them, pulling in the specific way it had been pulling since the garden, consistent and patient and entirely undeterred by everything else that was happening.

He said, “the bond is real. That is separate from everything else.”

She said, “is it.”

He said, “the witness and the mate are the same person. I am aware of how that looks. I cannot make it look differently. I can only tell you that the extraction I planned for the witness and the protection I intend for my mate are the same action and I would not distinguish between them.”

She stood in the service corridor and held that.

Outside, somewhere on the eastern perimeter, hunters were already inside Silver Moon territory.

Behind the closed door, Cassius Vane was sitting at a dinner table surrounded by her family.

Beside her, the Alpha of Nightfang was waiting for her answer.

She said all right.

Zayden moved first and she followed and the service corridor closed around them and somewhere behind the dinner room door her family was still sitting at a table with a man who had just called hunters onto their territory.

She thought about her father's face. She thought about the border crossing. She thought about three years of running that had ended tonight in a corridor with the Alpha who had been hunting the same man from a different direction.

She kept pace with him and did not look back.