Before His Fated Mate

Chapter Two: The Man Who Knew Too Much

Eirlys did not move.

She just stood there looking at him, this stranger who had appeared out of nowhere on the worst night of her life, talking about things Zevran was hiding like it was something casual. Like he had not just dropped something heavy right into the middle of her already destroyed evening.

“Who are you?” she asked again.

He did not answer immediately. That alone was enough to make her uncomfortable. People who took their time answering simple questions were people who were deciding how much to give you. She had learned that a long time ago.

“My name is Dravenor,” he said finally.

It meant nothing to her. She had never heard that name inside this pack, and she knew most of the names worth knowing by now. Which meant he was either new, or he had never wanted to be known. Neither of those options made her feel particularly relaxed.

“That does not answer my question,” she said. “What do you mean, what Zevran is hiding?”

He looked at her for a moment like he was genuinely deciding something. Then he tilted his head slightly toward the far end of the path, away from the hall doors.

“Not here,” he said.

“I am not going anywhere with you,” Eirlys said flatly. “I do not know you.

”Something shifted in his expression. Not offense exactly, more like mild surprise, like he had not expected her to push back that quickly.

Then that almost smile came back.

“Fair enough,” he said.

He leaned against the wall beside him, arms crossed, completely unbothered.

“Then we talk here.”She watched him for a second, trying to read him the way she had learned to read everyone in this pack. Looking for the angle, the motive, the thing underneath the surface that told you what someone actually wanted.

With most people in that pack, it did not take long to figure out. They were not subtle.

Dravenor was different.

She could not find the edge of him.

“That woman he brought back,” he started. “You think she just appeared?”

“He said she is his fated mate,” Eirlys said.

The words felt strange in her mouth. Like saying them out loud gave them more reality than she was ready to hand over.

Dravenor made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and something darker.

“Fated mate,” he repeated slowly, like he was tasting how hollow it sounded. “Is that what he called it?”

“What would you call it?”

He looked at her directly then. Really looked at her.

“A setup,” he said. “A very carefully arranged one.

”Eirlys felt her stomach shift.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that woman did not just show up tonight. She has been part of a conversation happening above your head for a long time. Zevran knew she was coming. He has known for months.

”He paused.

“The question you should be asking is not why he chose her. It is why he kept you close while he knew she was on her way.”

The cold felt sharper suddenly. Or maybe it was just that her body had finally caught up to what her chest had been feeling since she walked out of that hall.

She wanted to tell him he was lying. That he was some stranger who did not know Zevran, who did not know anything about what they had or what he was like. That he was showing up with poison dressed as information, and she was not stupid enough to swallow it.

But she could not get the words out.

Because the thing was, she had felt it too.

Something about tonight had felt off in a way she could not name. Not just the pain of the announcement, but something underneath it. Zevran’s energy had been wrong for weeks before tonight. She had noticed it and told herself she was imagining things. Told herself she was being paranoid because things were good, and she had never really learned how to trust good things.

What if she had not been imagining it?

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

Her voice came out quieter than she intended.

Dravenor was quiet for a moment.

“Because someone should have told you a long time ago,” he said. “And nobody did.”

It was the simplest answer he had given her, and somehow it was the one that landed the hardest.

Not because she trusted him. She did not. Not even close.But because he was right.

Nobody had told her anything.

Zevran had kept her comfortable and close and completely in the dark, and everyone around her who might have known something had said nothing.

She turned away from him and looked out at the trees beyond the pack grounds. The noise from the hall had dimmed a little, but it was still there. Still celebrating. Still completely unbothered by the fact that she was standing outside in the cold, having a conversation that was rearranging everything she thought she knew.

“What do you want from me?” she asked without turning back around.

“Nothing tonight,” he said. “Tonight, I just wanted you to know that what you felt in there was right. You were not wrong about him. And you are not wrong about her.”

She turned back around at that.

“What does that mean? Not wrong about her, how?”

But he had already pushed off the wall and was straightening up. Done with the conversation apparently on his own schedule.

“Get some rest,” he said. “Things are going to move quickly from here, and you need to be clear headed when they do.”

“You do not get to just say something like that and walk away,” she said.

He stopped. Looked back at her over his shoulder.

“I am not walking away. I will be around.”

Something in the way he said it was not a threat, but it was not entirely a comfort either. It sat somewhere in between, in that uncomfortable space where you could not decide how to feel about a person.

Then he walked back inside like he had just stepped out for air and everything was completely normal.

Eirlys stood there staring at the door he had gone through.

She did not know what to do with any of what had just happened.

Part of her wanted to go straight back into that hall and find Zevran and demand answers right now, in front of everyone, let the whole pack watch.

Another part of her, the part that had survived this long by being smart about when and how she moved, told her that was the worst thing she could do right now.

She needed to think.

She needed to be somewhere quiet where she could lay everything out and look at it properly without the noise and the celebration and the weight of a hundred pack members around her.

She started walking toward the residential side of the pack grounds.

Her quarters were small. They had always been small. Nothing about her accommodations had ever been designed to make her feel important.

But tonight, small and quiet was exactly what she needed.

She was almost at her door when she heard it.

Voices.

Coming from the corridor just past her quarters. Low and urgent in the way people speak when they think nobody is listening.

She almost kept walking.

Almost.

She stopped.

One of the voices was Zevran’s.

She pressed herself close to the wall and stayed completely still. She could not make out every word, just pieces. Enough pieces though. Enough to hear the tension in his voice that had never been there before. Enough to hear a name she did not recognise repeated twice with a weight that made her skin prickle.

Enough to hear him say, low and tight like it was being dragged out of him,

“She cannot find out. Not yet.”

Eirlys stopped breathing.

She cannot find out.

She stood there in that corridor with her back against the cold wall and her heart doing something violent in her chest and understood that Dravenor had not been lying.

Zevran was hiding something.

And whatever it was, it was about her.