The Unwanted Luna's Rise

Chapter Five

I felt it before I heard anything.

A heaviness at the end of the corridor. The particular stillness that a large, powerful presence creates before you even know it is there. My wolf went rigid the way she went rigid before a threat, except it was not the same feeling at all. It was something more like the moment before thunder, when the air goes completely still and everything waits.

I stopped picking up the plate pieces and looked up.

There was a man at the far end of the hallway.

I had never seen him before. Tall, very tall, with broad shoulders and black hair and a face that was all angles and precision. His eyes were pale, almost silver in the dim light. He had a scar running through his right eyebrow that should have made him look damaged and instead made him look like someone who had walked into something dangerous and come out the other side without apologizing for it.

He was looking at me.

Not through me. Not past me. At me. Directly, steadily, as if I were a person who warranted looking at.

I scrambled to my feet too fast and my knee hit the tile hard and I bit down on the sound that wanted to come out of my throat. I stood with my chin down, the way I was trained to stand when pack members were present. Eyes on the floor. Make yourself small. Take up less space than the air.

"You do not have to look at the floor."

His voice was low and unhurried. It landed like weight, not like sound. I lifted my eyes exactly to the level of his collar. Safe territory.

"I am sorry for being in your way," I said. "I am almost done."

He did not move. "What is your name?"

No one asked me that. Pack members who did not know me called me girl or asked someone else. Pack members who did know me called me something that was not my name. This man asked it straight out like the answer mattered to him.

"Nova." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "Nova Ashfield."

"Nova." He said it once, quietly, like he was putting it somewhere inside himself.

I looked back at the floor. My hands still held pieces of the broken plate and I was aware of exactly how I looked. Food-stained shirt. Hair coming out of its tie. The bruise on my face already darkening around the cheekbone where Vivienne's heel had found me.

I had been seen in worse states. But not by strangers. Not by someone who looked at me the way this man was looking at me, like I was a puzzle he was working on.

"Who did that to your face?"

He asked it the same way he had asked my name. Direct and without a lead-up.

My throat tightened. "I fell."

The silence that followed told me he did not believe me. But he did not press it. He stood there a moment longer and I could feel his attention the way you feel sunlight, something warm with actual weight that your skin registers before your mind does.

I kept my eyes on the floor.

"Nova." My father's voice came from the front hall, sharp and carrying. "I told you to clean that up and disappear."

I dropped to my knees and gathered the last pieces of the plate into my palm. I stood up without looking at the man in the corridor and moved toward the kitchen.

I was two steps past him when I felt it.

It was not a touch. He did not reach for me. It was simply the proximity, his presence at that close distance, and something inside me reacted to it the way a compass reacts to magnetic north. A pull that was deep and fundamental and completely without explanation.

Smoke made a sound inside my chest that she had never made before. Not a growl. Not a warning. Something quieter and more permanent than either of those.

I kept walking.

I pushed through the kitchen door and set the broken plate pieces in the trash and stood at the sink with my hands under cold water and I told myself it was nothing. Strangers had odd effects sometimes. Bodies did strange things. The stress of the evening was making Smoke unsettled.

I told myself all of this very calmly and very firmly.

None of it helped at all.

I turned off the water and dried my hands. I could hear voices in the front hall, my father's formal tone, the Luna voice he used for outsiders that bore no resemblance to the voice he used with me. The visitors being welcomed inside.

I needed to stay out of sight. That was the rule for nights when guests were in the house. I was not to be seen, not to speak to visiting pack members, not to do anything that might draw attention to the fact that the Alpha's daughter lived here like a servant.

I pressed my back against the kitchen wall and let out a slow breath.

His eyes had been silver.

I had never seen silver eyes on anyone before. Wolves had brown eyes and green eyes and amber eyes and blue, all varieties. Silver was unusual. Silver almost always meant the wolf inside was particularly dominant. Particularly strong.

I shook my head and pushed off from the wall. I had dishes to finish and a kitchen to close down and eight guest rooms to double-check before morning.

I did not have time to think about silver eyes.

I was halfway across the kitchen when his voice came from the hallway, low and certain, directed at someone else standing just outside the door.

"She is not a servant. Find out everything about her, Ryder. I want to know who she is and how she came to be in this pack house."

My hands went still on the counter.

The Alpha of the Stonepeak Pack was standing in my father's hallway asking his Beta to find out who I was.

I stood at the counter with my hands flat on the surface and I breathed once, twice, three times.

In my experience, when powerful people started paying attention to you, it was never because something good was about to happen. Attention in this house had always meant pain. Attention meant you had done something wrong or someone needed a target and you were the nearest available one.

But the way he had said my name was not the way anyone had ever said my name before.

And Smoke was still making that quiet, permanent sound inside my chest that she had never made in eighteen years.

And I was afraid. Not of him, not exactly.

I was afraid of what it meant that I was not afraid of him.