THE ALPHA WHO ERASED ME

Chapter Three — Three Paces

He came at dawn, which I should have expected.

The archive is a stone room at the back of the pack hall with a door that has never had a lock, because for four hundred years nobody has wanted anything in it. I had been awake all night. There were eleven ledgers open on the long table and I had not eaten and my hands were grey to the second knuckle with old paper dust.

I heard him stop in the doorway. I did not look up.

"You're not supposed to be near me," I said. "Three days. It's the law. You'd know, you quoted the other one well enough."

"Wren."

The bond came awake at my name in his voice — not torn open the way it had been, but raw, like a burn under a sleeve. I kept my eyes on the page and breathed through it.

"I'm working."

"You haven't slept."

"Neither have you."

That got quiet. I turned a page I had already read, just to have something to do with my hands.

He came in. I heard him stop at — and I did not have to look, I knew it to the inch — three paces.

"I need you to understand something," he said.

"No, you don't." I set my pen down and I did look at him then, and it cost me. He had not changed his shirt from the Choosing. There was grass on the knee of it. "You need me to forgive you, which is a different thing, and you want to do it at six in the morning while I'm standing up so it's over quickly. I'd rather you didn't."

I watched that land. To his credit he didn't flinch from it.

"My brother died four months ago," he said.

"I wrote the entry."

"I know you did." He looked at the ledgers on the table, all of them open, all of them turned to pages from a single year, and I saw him begin to wonder. "Wren. If I'd taken you last night, the council would have had my claim void before the moon set. Varrick had the law ready. He's had it ready since the day Caleb died. I'd have lost the pack and you'd have gained nothing — you'd have been the unranked girl who cost Ironridge its Alpha, and they would never have let you walk through this valley again."

"I know how the law works," I said. "I keep it in a box in this room."

"Then you know I had no—"

"You had the choice to ask me."

He stopped.

"You asked Marek," I said. The calm in my voice surprised us both. "Four hundred people, and a bond you felt as hard as I did, and your first question was to an old man about a line of ink. You didn't ask me what I was. You asked the paperwork." I spread my hand over the open ledger. "I have spent my entire life being a line in this book, Alpha. I'm used to it from them. I had about four seconds last night where I thought you might be different, and I'd quite like those four seconds back."

Something went across his face then that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Not anger. I could have used anger.

"You're right," he said.

I had not prepared for that.

"I should have asked you." He said it slowly, as if he were checking the weight of it. "Last night, in front of all of them. I should have asked you and I didn't, because I already knew the answer and I was frightened of what I'd do if you looked at me while you said it." He let out a breath. "That's not a defence. I'm aware."

The silence sat between us. Three paces of it.

"Get out," I said, not unkindly.

"Wren—"

"I mean it. There's a reason I'm not throwing you out harder and you won't like it." I made myself look at him. "The bond isn't closed. You rejected it. I never accepted. So every time you stand in a room with me it pulls, and I have work to do, and I can't do it while you're three paces away being sorry at me."

He went very still.

"You didn't accept."

"No."

"Why not?"

And here is the thing. I could have told him. I could have said because somebody forged my record and I am going to find out who, and he might have helped, and the next thirty chapters of my life would have gone differently.

But he had asked the paperwork first.

"Because I didn't feel like it," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then at the eleven open ledgers. Then back at me, and I watched the Alpha come up behind his eyes — not the boy who hadn't slept, the other one, the one who had been running a pack for four months on nothing but nerve.

"What are you looking for?"

"An error," I said.

"In what?"

I closed the ledger. The sound was very loud in the stone room.

"In your family's," I said.