Auctioned To The Halden Alphas

Out of Time

Nobody would tell me what "out of time" meant. I asked six different ways over the next three days, in the kitchen, in the hallway, once memorably while chasing Dez down a staircase in socks that had no business attempting that staircase, and I got six different flavors of the same non-answer. Roman said it wasn't safe to discuss yet. Grey said it wasn't his story to tell. Dez said, with a wink that did not land the way he wanted it to, that some things were better as a surprise, and then physically fled the room when I picked up a butter knife in response.

Thane didn't say anything at all. Thane, I was learning, had two settings: silent and watching, and silent and gone, off somewhere behind his own eyes doing math the rest of us weren't invited to see. He'd apologized, once, for the graves comment, in a low voice that didn't sound like it had practiced apologies very often. He didn't take it back. He just said he was sorry it had been the first thing I ever heard him say, like the content of it wasn't the problem, only the timing.

I want to be honest about something, because this story only works if I am: it would have been easy to hate all four of them. I'd been bought. Bought, like a used car, by men who then spent three days refusing to explain the terms of my own life to me while occasionally going feral over paper cuts. I had every right to spend those three days furious, and some hours, I was.

But here is the complicated, inconvenient truth of it: being furious at someone and finding yourself unable to stop noticing things about them turned out to be two feelings that could exist in the same chest at the same time, taking up equal space, refusing to cancel each other out.

I noticed that Roman, for all his ice, was the one who quietly told the kitchen staff my favorite tea before I'd told anyone what it was. He must have asked the driver, or the guard, or somebody, some small invisible act of attention dressed up as nothing. I noticed that Grey, despite being the one most likely to growl at furniture, was the one who noticed first when I flinched at a raised voice two rooms away, not his voice, someone on staff, arguing about a delivery, and quietly closed a door between me and the sound without making a single comment about it. I noticed that Dez's jokes always, always came right before something hard was about to be said, like he was clearing space for it, padding the floor before someone fell.

And Thane. Thane I noticed the way you notice weather, not because he did anything, but because the air around him changed depending on what he'd seen that day, and some days it changed so badly that Dez would find some excuse to sit near him at meals, close enough to bump shoulders, not saying anything, just being a wall between whatever Thane had dreamed and the rest of the table.

There was, in fairness, one genuinely funny incident in those three days, and I'm including it because otherwise this account makes the house sound like a museum of tension, and it wasn't, not entirely. On the second morning, I went looking for coffee and instead found Dez standing in the pantry, dead serious, interrogating a box of cereal like it had personally wronged him.

"Problem?" I asked.

"Roman had the staff remove anything with 'natural flavor' on the label," he said, without turning around. "Something about an incident. Nobody will tell me what the incident was. I've been trying to piece it together for two years using only the ingredients that survive."

"That's the saddest detective story I've ever heard."

"It's ongoing," he said gravely, and set the cereal box down like evidence in a case that would never close.

I laughed, actually laughed, for the first time since the auction floor, loud enough to surprise myself, and Dez looked so pleased with himself that I understood, all at once, that making me laugh had been the entire point of the performance, cereal box and all. It was such a small, deliberate kindness, dressed up as nothing, that I had to look away from him for a second before I did something embarrassing like get emotional over a man being weird about cereal.

That was the thing about this house I hadn't expected: that between the terror and the withheld answers, there were these small pockets of ordinary, almost sweet absurdity, like the four of them had built entire personalities specifically designed to keep a stranger from falling apart in their kitchen. I didn't know yet whether that made them kind or just very good at management. I was starting to suspect, uncomfortably, that it might be both.

"You're staring again," Grey said, on the third evening, finding me on the back terrace where I'd taken to hiding with a book I wasn't reading, watching the tree line go dark.

"I'm cataloguing," I said. "It's different."

"Cataloguing what."

"Whether any of you are actually going to tell me the thing that made your brother go the color of drywall over a grapefruit cut, or whether I'm supposed to just live here collecting clues like this is a scavenger hunt for my own life."

Something in his jaw worked. He sat down across from me, which he hadn't done before. Usually he stood, arms crossed, like sitting implied a level of settling in he wasn't ready to commit to.

"There's a legend," he said finally, like each word cost him something specific. "About what happens when four of us are born at once. It's not supposed to be possible. Alpha blood that concentrated is supposed to kill the mother, kill the pups, or worse. We shouldn't exist. All four of us, alive, sharing power that should have split four ways and instead somehow didn't, that's never happened before. Not in any pack's memory."

I waited for the punchline, out of pure habit, before I remembered that this house didn't hand out punchlines for free the way Dez did. Grey earned every sentence like it cost him blood, and I was starting to understand that his silences weren't coldness so much as a kind of careful rationing, a man who'd learned somewhere along the way that words, used carelessly, could do real damage, and had decided the safest policy was to simply use as few as possible.

"Okay," I said, when he stopped. "That's a fact about you. It's not an answer about me."

"The legend says," he went on, slower now, like he was picking his way across ice, "that when something that shouldn't exist manages to exist anyway, the world tries to correct itself. Balance the ledger. And the only thing powerful enough to correct four Alphas born from one birth is..."

He stopped. His jaw worked again.

"Is what," I said.

"Is the same event, happening in reverse," he said. "One person. Built to unmake exactly what we are."

I felt something cold settle low in my stomach, a physical, specific dread that had nothing to do with metaphor.

"And you think that's me."

"I think," Grey said, and for the first time since the car, he looked at me not like a threat, not like a problem, but like something he was afraid of losing before he'd properly had it, "that Thane's been dreaming about your face since he was fourteen years old. Standing over four graves. Ours. And I think the fact that you cut your thumb on a grapefruit and all three of us dropped to our knees inside for it means whatever this is between us is already moving faster than anyone prepared for, and none of us know yet whether that means we finally get to keep you, or whether it means the clock Thane's been watching his whole life just started running out loud."

I didn't get to answer him, because that was the exact moment Roman came out onto the terrace, phone in hand, and for the first time since I'd met him, his careful, expensive control had a crack straight through the middle of it.

"We have a problem," he said, and the phone screen, when he turned it toward us, showed a single security still, grainy, night-vision green, timestamped from an hour earlier, of a man standing at the edge of their property line, just past the tree line, not moving, not trying to get in.

Just watching the house.

Grey was on his feet before I'd even finished processing the image, already moving toward the door with the particular controlled speed of a man who wanted to run and was forcing himself to walk instead. Roman caught his arm, said something low I didn't catch, and Grey stopped, jaw tight, hands flexing open and closed at his sides like he needed somewhere to put the violence that had just woken up in him.

"Do we know how long he's been out there," Grey asked, and his voice had dropped into a register I hadn't heard from him yet, quieter than his anger and somehow more dangerous for it.

"Security caught him twice tonight," Roman said. "Same spot both times. Not approaching. Not leaving. Just standing there, like he's waiting for an invitation."

He looked up from the phone, and when his eyes found mine, some of the ice in them had gone, replaced by something that looked almost like an apology, which was so unfamiliar on his face that it scared me more than the photograph had.

"Wren. Does the name Garrick Voss mean anything to you?"

"He's my stepfather," I said, and my own voice sounded far away to me, like it belonged to someone standing behind me instead of in my own throat. "Garrick Voss. He's the one who sold me."

I recognized him the second Roman turned the screen fully toward me, and the recognition hit like a second, colder version of the auction floor going silent, because the man in that photograph, staring up at the house that had just paid twenty million dollars for me, was standing there with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, patient, like a man checking on an investment.

He wasn't trying to get in. He wasn't hiding, either, not really. Security had caught him twice because he hadn't particularly cared whether he was seen.

That, more than anything, was what turned my stomach.

Garrick had spent seven years teaching me to be afraid of him in small, careful ways, never enough to leave a mark anyone could point to. This wasn't small. This was a man standing at the edge of four Alphas' property in the dark, unafraid, like he already knew something the rest of us didn't.

And in the photograph, grainy and green and an hour old, he was smiling.