Chapter3
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I had walked into that party for one reason.
Roman had extended the invitation as a peace gesture, a political performance for the benefit of the other territories, and I had accepted it for the same reason I accepted everything Roman offered, as an opportunity.
I hadn't expected the opportunity to walk across the room and kiss me.
I sat in the back of my car with Ariana Vance beside me and Ryder Cole driving, and tried to do what I always did, which was think clearly.
It was not going particularly well. The mate bond was not subtle. Draven, my wolf said. He, who had spent the better part of six years in a controlled and quiet fury, was currently behaving like an entirely different animal, pacing, insistent, circling the edges of my composure with the kind of energy that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the woman sitting eighteen inches away from me.
She is ours, he said.
I know, I said.
Then why are you sitting over there like a stranger ?.
Because I am a stranger, I said, I just met her forty minutes ago, and besides, I'm thinking ...
Stop thinking, he said.
That is genuinely terrible advice, I told him.
Then I looked at Ariana. She was watching the city move past her window with a stillness that had no business being on someone who had just blown up her own engagement party, kissed a man she had never spoken to before tonight and walked out with him in front of every powerful wolf in the five territories.
Most people would be shaking. She looked like she was waiting for the next item on a list.
"You're not scared," I said.
She turned from the window and said, "Should I be ?.
"You just left your engagement party with the man your fiancé has been trying to destroy for six years.
"Yes," she said.
'Most women would be falling apart right now.
Something moved at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile, something drier than that. "I'm not most women," she said.
'No," I said, "You're really not.
I looked at her for a moment longer than I should have."Who are you?
Ariana Vance," she answered immediately.
She held my gaze, and something shifted in her eyes, something that went deep and complicated. The kind of look that didn't belong on a twenty-three- years- old face, like she was carrying a weight that had been there long enough to become part of her posture.
"Someone who finally knows what she wants," she said.
Ryder Cole's eyes found mine in the rearview mirror. I had known Ryder Cole for eleven years. I could read his face the way other people read words, and what his face said right now was somewhere between what is happening and I have significant questions, and I will be asking all of them later.
Then I looked away.
"You'll stay at the compound," I said.
"Your own space, your own terms, I'm not holding you.
"I know you're not. She said.
"Then we understand each other. I said.
"What are we? she said quietly, "If we understand each other, what does that make us?
"Allies," I said, "For now. Then she turned back to the window." For now," she agreed.
But Draven felt what her wolf felt when she said it, the ripple of something underneath the agreement, and I filed it away the same way I filed everything, quietly, carefully, for later.
***
The compound was lit when we pulled in.
My wolves moved through the grounds the way they always did at this hour, purposeful and unhurried, the Ashborne Pack running the way I had built it to run, like something that didn't need me watching to function, every wolf knowing their position and choosing it.
I had built this from nothing. After Roman took everything, after the exile and the assassination attempt and the years of surviving on rage and strategy alone, I had taken the wolves nobody wanted and built the one thing in the territories that Roman could not touch.
I was proud of it in the way I was proud of most things I had bled for. Quietly, and without telling anyone,
Ryder Cole pulled up to the main entrance, and I got out.
Theo Cross was on the steps.
My Gamma, steady and familiar, the kind of man who had been at my side long enough that his presence had become something I stopped noticing the way you stop noticing the walls of a room.
"She's really here then," Theo Cross said, looking past me at Ariana.
"She's really here,"l said. "Roman is going to lose his mind," "That's the idea. Theo Cross nodded slowly, but something in his face was off, a flicker of something I didn't have a name for, gone before I could examine it.
I noted it, he said
Filed it, I said.
Ariana stepped up beside me and looked at the compound with those sharp, quiet eyes,
"It's bigger than I expected," she said.
"What did you expect?
"Something rougher," she said, "Something that looked like a man who built it angry,"
I looked at her.
"I built it angry," I said, "But I built it right," She turned and looked at me with something in her expression that I couldn't fully read.
"Yes," she said quietly, "You did.
I showed her to her rooms and left her there and stood in the corridor for three seconds longer than I needed to before I walked away.
Yet Draven said nothing. He didn't need to.
We both already knew that allies for now were going to be the shortest arrangement either of us had ever made.
- Writer
