Chapter 3: The Pack House (Cont.)
1965 Words
The kitchen was warm and smelled like the best thing she'd eaten all year and Reva talked the way some people breathed - continuously and without apparent effort.
"So. Journalist."
"Yes."
"Walked into the northern boundary by accident."
"I had a GPS."
"That boundary has been marked for six years." Reva slid a bowl in front of her and dropped into the chair opposite with the ease of someone who has never once sat down carefully.
"Eat first. Then I want to know everything."
Azalea picked up the spoon and took one mouthful and stopped.
It was extraordinary. The kind of food that tasted like someone had made it wanting it to be good, not just functional. Warm and deep and exactly what her body had been missing without knowing it, and she sat in the warm kitchen of a werewolf compound after two hours in a cold forest and felt, against all reasonable expectation, something in her unclench.
"This is incredible," she said.
Reva looked delighted. "Finn. He'll be insufferable, don't tell him." Then, without transitioning: "He walked you in himself."
Azalea kept her eyes on the bowl. "The terrain was difficult."
"There's always difficult terrain. He sends Corvan for trespassers." Reva had her chin in her hand and was looking at Azalea with bright, patient interest. "You weren't afraid of him."
"I was afraid of the wolves."
"That's not what I said."
Azalea looked up.
Reva was watching her with the same quality of attention Kael had, just warmer, just more openly curious, like she wasn't trying to read a document so much as understand a person. It was disarming in a completely different way.
"I met him twenty minutes before I met you," Azalea said carefully. "I don't know him."
"Sure," said Reva, in the tone of someone who has noted that an answer was given instead of a response.
A crash from the great room. Then, with remarkable composure: "That was already like that."
"Dray," said Reva, without moving.
From the hallway, Mara, with quiet devastation: "Dray, I swear on every single star—"
Laughter erupted. Dray's low rumble of something that wasn't quite an apology. More laughter underneath it, easy and warm and entirely unguarded.
Azalea found herself looking toward it before she'd made the decision to.
This house was full. Full of people who belonged to each other in the bone-deep, unthinking way of people who've never had to question it. The kind of belonging that didn't announce itself because it didn't have to.
She'd been alone in a one-bedroom apartment for three years with a coffee maker and a deadline and the ambient sound of other people's lives through thin walls, and she'd told herself she preferred it.
Sitting here, she was less sure.
"Stay a few days," Reva said.
Casual. Like a thought occurring. Like she wasn't watching Azalea's face very carefully.
"I have a story to file."
"You're sitting in the story."
"Your Alpha won't allow it."
Reva's expression did something she smoothed over quickly. "No," she agreed. "He won't."
Said with the diplomatic weight of someone holding back a great deal more.
Azalea was still turning that over when footsteps sounded in the doorway and the air in the kitchen changed.
She knew before she looked.
She looked anyway.
Kael stood at the kitchen entrance and the room did that thing again, reorganized itself around him like he was the fixed point and everything else was working out its position relative to that. He was leaning one shoulder against the door frame, arms loosely crossed, and he was looking at her with an expression that was - for the first time since the forest - not completely closed.
Not open. Not readable. But a fraction less sealed than usual. A fraction of something that might, on a different man, have been called pleased.
She'd been laughing when he'd walked in, she realized. Whatever she and Reva had said before the footsteps, she'd been laughing, and he'd come in on the end of it, and now he was looking at her with this expression she didn't have a word for.
Her stomach did something inadvisable.
"Room's ready," he said. Still looking at her.
Reva looked between them. She looked between them with the focused, unblinking attention of someone watching something very interesting develop.
Azalea stood up. "Thank you," she said to Reva. Meaning it.
"Breakfast," Reva said. "Finn's eggs. Non-negotiable. Life-altering, I'm serious."
Azalea smiled and followed Kael out of the kitchen, and as she passed him in the doorway he didn't move. Not fully. He stayed in the frame and she passed close - closer than she needed to, the doorway was not that narrow - and she caught his scent again, pine and cold and that warm note underneath, and her step didn't falter because she was a professional and a competent adult.
But she felt him watching her walk out.
She felt it the entire length of the hallway.
She felt it on the stairs.
The east room was everything the rest of the compound had prepared her to expect: real, warm, built for someone to actually live in.
Wide bed. Cedar linen. A window looking over the compound where a fire pit had been lit below, figures gathering around it in the dark, voices drifting up in warm pieces. Someone had started the guitar. Something slow, something that didn't perform itself, the kind of playing that happens when it's just the night and the people you trust and nowhere to be.
She stood at the window for a moment longer than she needed to.
Then she turned and saw the sweater.
Folded on the end of the bed. Precisely. Oversized, soft grey wool, folded with an intention that did not match the warm comfortable chaos of the rest of this house and had been placed there by someone who was, she was beginning to understand, very precise about the things he decided to do.
She picked it up.
She was going to put it down.
She smelled it.
Pine. Cold air. That specific warm note underneath that she'd been failing to stop cataloguing since the moment he stepped out of the trees and her body decided, without consulting her, to have feelings about it.
She stood in the east room of a werewolf compound holding an Alpha's sweater to her face like a complete and total disaster of a person and thought: this is what you've come to.
She was still holding it when the knock came.
Two knocks. Brief. Even.
She knew.
She put the sweater down - on the bed, not folded, just down - and opened the door and there he was.
Different shirt, same dark color. Sleeves pushed up. Holding a phone charger with the simple air of a man who noticed a problem and solved it. His hair was slightly less disheveled than it had been in the forest, which meant someone had run a hand through it at some point in the last hour, and she was not going to think about that.
He held out the charger.
She reached for it.
His fingers covered hers.
Not a brush this time. Not glancing. His fingers closed briefly over hers on the charger, just for a second, just for the length of a deliberate pause, warm and certain and completely still, and she looked up at him because she couldn't not, and he was already looking down at her with those grey eyes at close range and all that composed, unhurried attention aimed directly at her face.
Her heart stopped doing anything sensible.
He let go.
His eyes moved past her. To the sweater on the bed, not folded, dropped hastily, telling a very specific story about what she'd been doing when he knocked.
A silence.
Then the corner of his mouth moved. Just barely. Just enough to be the most devastating thing she'd seen in recent memory.
She felt her face go warm.
"It'll be cold before morning," he said. His voice was low. Lower than the quiet hallway required. Lower than anything required.
"You didn't have to," she said. Meaning the charger. Meaning, possibly, all of it.
"I know," he said.
He held her gaze.
She held his back because she wasn't going to be the one to look away, not again, not when he did this, when he looked at her like she was something he was in the process of deciding about and the decision was going a specific direction.
The guitar drifted up from the fire pit. The mountain pressed cold against the window behind her. Somewhere in the house someone laughed, low and easy, and the sound traveled through the walls the way warmth does, gently, everywhere.
"Kael," she said. His name came out before she'd planned it, which seemed to be the way her mouth worked around him, ahead of her brain, operating on a different set of instructions.
His eyes sharpened.
Fractionally. Barely. But she was close enough to see it, the specific quality of attention that her voice saying his name produced, like a sound that required adjustment, like something that landed somewhere it was felt.
She didn't have a sentence. She'd said his name into the narrow amber-lit hallway with nothing to follow it with and now she was standing here looking up at him and he was looking down at her and the space between them was very small and his jaw in this light was a genuinely unfair situation.
He looked at her for a long moment.
The kind of long that was chosen. That said: I'm doing this on purpose and you know it.
Then he looked at her mouth.
One second. Less than one second. The most controlled, deliberate, unreasonably significant fraction of a second.
Back to her eyes.
"Get some sleep," he said. Quiet. The specific quiet of restraint, of a man who has looked at something he wants and chosen, for now, not to reach for it.
He turned and walked down the hall. Straight-backed. Unhurried. The dark taking him the way it always took him.
Completely. Without effort.
Like he'd always lived on the other side of it.
She stood in the doorway until she heard the door close below.
Then she stepped back inside.
Stood in the middle of the room.
Pressed one hand flat against her sternum where her heart was doing something that had no business happening after four hours.
He had looked at her mouth.
One second. Less than one. And he'd done it like he knew she'd notice and had decided she could.
She picked up the sweater. Put it on. Pulled the collar up.
Lay down on the cedar linen and stared at the ceiling while the compound breathed around her, warm below and cold above, and the guitar played on from the fire pit, and she thought about grey eyes and a fraction of a second and the very specific quality of a man not doing something he wants to do.
The wanting was there.
She'd seen it.
And she was leaving in the morning, she was absolutely leaving in the morning, except that she was lying in his sweater with his scent all around her and her heart was still not behaving, and the problem, the real problem, was that she'd seen it and she hadn't looked away either.
She'd looked right back.
The guitar played on.
The mountain pressed against the window.
She closed her eyes and told herself she was going to sleep and she was going to be fine and she was going to leave in the morning.
None of which explained why some quiet, inconvenient part of her was hoping the morning would be slow to arrive.
- Writer
