THE ALPHA I REJECTED

Chapter 10: What She Didn't Ask For

She saw him on Wednesday.

Not on the river path — in the middle of the day, on main street, entirely without warning. She was coming out of the hardware store with a replacement shelf bracket and he was coming around the corner with Silas, the two of them deep in conversation, and there was no time to redirect or prepare or arrange her face into something other than what it was.

They stopped. So did she.

Silas's expression moved through several things quickly before settling on carefully neutral. He said, "Aria," with a warmth that she appreciated, and then manufactured a reason to step into the nearest doorway, which happened to be the insurance office, and disappeared.

That left her and Lucien on the sidewalk with the morning sun doing its unreasonable best and the bracket cutting into her palm where she was holding it too tightly.

"Helena Crane," she said. She hadn't planned to say it. It came out before she could stop it, flat and factual, and she watched something shift in his face — surprise, then something more complicated.

"You heard," he said.

"It's Crestwood."

He looked at her steadily. "It's not decided."

"It doesn't need to be decided for it to be appropriate." She kept her voice level. "You have obligations. I'm aware of that. I've always been aware of that."

"Aria—"

"I'm not saying this as a complaint," she said, with more precision than it cost her to produce. "I'm saying it because I want you to know that I understand. That I'm not — I don't have a claim on what you do next. I made sure of that myself."

Lucien looked at her for a long moment. In the daylight, with the street busy around them, he was harder to read than on the river path — the Alpha composure fully in place, the careful control back in every line of his face.

Then he said, quietly: "Do you want one?"

The bracket dug into her palm.

"That's not a fair question," she said.

"I know." He held her gaze. "I'm asking it anyway."

She looked away first. Down the street, at the ordinary Saturday movement of a town going about its life — people with groceries, a dog pulling its owner toward the park, two children arguing over a bicycle. Ordinary, human, uncomplicated.

"I didn't ask for any of this," she said. It wasn't an answer. It wasn't meant to be.

"Neither did I," he said. Not as accusation. Just truth.

She left him on the sidewalk and walked back to the shop with her shelf bracket and her perfectly maintained composure and the question he'd asked sitting in the center of her chest next to the bond, both of them humming at the same frequency, both of them waiting for an answer she didn't know how to give.