Rebirth Of The Lost Heiress

Chapter 10

Brielle

My father spent an entire hour choosing what to wear.

As I stood in the doorway watching him, something in my chest felt so tight. He kept adjusting his collar, checking his reflection, turning away from the mirror like it had said something unkind, then going back and checking again, like maybe this time it would say something different.

I knew that look. I'd grown up watching it on his face. He carried it around a lot. The Moonshine Pack had lost ground over the years. Other packs didn't say anything to our faces. They just said it with their eyes, pausing slightly before they answered us and smiling just a little too late, like they had to remind themselves to be polite to us.

My father never forgot every single one of those moments. Instead, he held onto them like bruises he kept pressing on.

"Dad," I said.

He stopped, his hand still on his collar, and looked at me through the mirror.

"You built this pack from nothing," I said. "Stop letting them make you feel small."

He blinked. And then slowly, some of the tension released from his shoulders, and his back straightened.

"Since when did you get so wise?" he asked.

I smiled. "I had a good teacher."

He laughed a little at that, and this time when he smiled, it actually reached his eyes.

As I watched him finish getting ready, I felt something warm settle in my chest, though there was something sharper underneath it. Because I remembered that in my past life, I’d walked into rooms like this and watched him shrink and apologize because of the littlest things.

And I hadn't known then what I knew now: that the people making him feel that way had an agenda, and that agenda had eventually cost us everything.

Not this time.

The meeting with the Alpha King was set for midday at the regional administration building. It was neutral ground, and it had been deliberately built so that no pack could walk in with an advantage just because of the location. It had long white corridors, high ceilings, and nothing decorating the walls, so it looked completely blank.

I wasn't supposed to be there. I came anyway.

I'd scouted the building the day before, which most people would probably call excessive. I called it being prepared. I'd found a side entrance that ran along the back of the building, away from the main check-in desk and the pack representatives milling around the front lobby.

I moved through the back corridor quickly and quietly, the way Aldric had been drilling into me since before I could remember, taking care not to make any noise.

I found the angle I needed. A long glass panel ran along the wall beside the main conference room. From the right spot, I could see the whole table laid out in front of me—their faces, body languages, and reactions—without being in the room at all.

So I took that position and looked in.

I saw Ryder before he saw me. He was already seated at the head of the table. Of course he was.

He had silver hair and broad shoulders, and he looked absolutely still like he’d trained himself over the years to decide exactly what he was going to show and what he was going to keep hidden.

He sat like the chair had been designed specifically for him, and the air in the room had slightly shifted to make room for him when he walked in.

I remembered those hands from when he was lying on the forest floor with a wound that should have been fatal. He’d been barely conscious and was still somehow radiating danger from every pore. I'd worked on him like he was just a patient because that was the only way I could manage to do it. Inside I'd been terrified. I hadn't let that show, and I was very glad I hadn't.

I kept my breathing steady as I let my eyes move across the room quickly. My father was seated two places down from the center. He looked steadier than he had an hour ago in his bedroom, which was a relief. His shoulders looked more relaxed. Good.

Then Ryder turned his head. Not toward my father or anyone else at the table, but directly toward me.

His eyes found mine through the glass like he hadn't needed to search for me at all and he'd already known exactly where I was the moment he walked into the building. He was looking at me like finding me there was less of a surprise and more of a confirmation.

I didn't look away. I wasn't going to be the one who looked away first. He didn't look away either.

I counted the seconds. One. Two. Three.

Then I turned deliberately and walked back down the hallway.

My heart was slamming against my ribs so hard that I could feel it in my throat. I kept my pace even, making sure my shoulders didn’t look tense because I was not going to let him see me rattled, even through a wall and a pane of glass and a hallway's worth of distance.

I turned a corner and stopped. Then I placed my back against the wall and stood there.

Okay. That was a real problem.

I'd been so sure he wouldn't remember me. He'd been unconscious, practically gone, and barely holding on. He shouldn't have retained anything from that night. The blood loss alone should have wiped everything clean.

That was what I'd told myself every time the memory crept up on me in the days since, once I'd started to feel uneasy about it. He was out. He wouldn't remember. I was fine.

But the way he'd just looked at me wasn't the look someone like him would give a stranger. It wasn't curiosity or even a coincidence. It was recognition.

I pressed the back of my head against the wall and closed my eyes, counting to three.

In my past life, I'd died partly because I was bad at this. I’d been bad at reading people, bad at seeing moves before they happened, and bad at knowing when I was already in someone's sights before it was too late to do anything about it.

I'd promised myself I wasn't going to do that again. And here I was, having already made an assumption I should have known better than to make.

He remembered. He'd heard something, felt something, or retained more than he should have. And now he knew my face.

I needed to rethink everything I'd considered safe about this situation. All of it, starting right now.

I pushed off the wall and headed for the exit, already sorting through it in my head. What he could know. What he couldn't. What I needed to do.

But even as I moved through the empty hallway, back toward the side entrance and out into the open air, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that his eyes were still on me.

Like he was still watching through the glass, the walls, and the whole length of that building.

I needed to be more careful.