Seducing the Alpha: A How-To Guide for Disasters

Chapter Six: The "I'm Totally Normal" Protocol

The silence in the communal mess hall was not peaceful. It was oppressive. It was the kind of silence that made you wonder if you'd accidentally forgotten to wear pants, or if everyone had collectively decided to stop acknowledging your existence, or both. I sat at the long wooden table with my spine so straight it felt like it might snap, my eyes fixed on a very interesting knot in the wood paneling across the room, and I breathed very carefully through my nose like a woman who had absolutely everything under control.

I had decided, after extensive deliberation that had kept me up until two in the morning, that the secret to becoming an Alpha's partner was to master the art of the unreadable expression.

Not charm. Not wit. Not the careful professional competence that had taken me a decade to build. No — the elders had something I didn't, and what they had was the ability to sit in a room looking like they were made of expensive marble while everyone around them quietly imploded. I had watched them do it at the gala. I had watched Silas do it every single time I was within fifty feet of him. There was a quality to their stillness — ancient, assured, entirely unbothered — that made the rest of the room arrange itself around them like iron filings around a magnet.

I was going to learn that quality. Starting this morning. Starting now. Starting with not blinking for ten minutes.

My eyelids were, at the four-minute mark, beginning to register a formal protest. I ignored them. I was a rock. I was a mountain. I was a woman who did not blink and did not fidget and did not spend her breakfast internally narrating her own behaviour in increasingly unhinged terms.

Across the room, Silas was seated at the head table with two sub-alphas and an elder whose name I could never remember, deep in what appeared to be a serious operational discussion. He laughed at something the sub-alpha said — a deep, rumbling sound that I felt in my sternum from twenty feet away and which my traitorous stomach responded to with a somersault that I found both predictable and infuriating. I ignored that too. I was a rock. Mountains did not experience somersaults.

He glanced over. I maintained eye contact with the wood-paneling knot.

What I needed, I had decided, was for Silas to look across the mess hall and see not the woman who had dipped her elbow into a champagne chain reaction and soaked Councillor Bram's entire left side, not the woman who had accidentally confessed her restructure recommendations while holding a glass like evidence — but a woman of mystery. Of stillness. Of the kind of quiet authority that made people wonder what she was thinking and feel vaguely unsettled by their own inability to tell.

I reached for my toast without looking, maintaining my carefully curated expression of serene inscrutability. Eyes forward. Chin level. The unblinking gaze of a woman who contained multitudes and was not currently at all concerned about breakfast logistics.

I felt the satisfying clink of toast hitting ceramic. I dragged it through what I assumed was the butter dish. I took a confident, crunchy bite and stared at the wood paneling with the composure of someone who had never, in her life, made a single social error.

A sound erupted from the table to my left. A muffled, strangled, very poorly suppressed cough.

I turned my head — the only movement I'd made in twenty minutes — and came face to face with the reality of my situation.

I had not been reaching for the butter dish. The butter dish was, I now understood, on my right, where it had always been, where it would always be, sitting exactly where I would have found it immediately if I had used my eyes like a functional adult. What I had been reaching for, and dipping my toast into, and eating with the serene confidence of an inscrutable elder wolf, was the bowl of hot, creamy leek soup belonging to Old Man Jenkins, who was sitting to my left, and who was now watching me with an expression of profound, barely-contained delight.

The toast in my hand was a catastrophe. It was limp. It was soggy. It was trailing a slow, dignified drip of leek broth onto the table between us, and Jenkins — who was seventy-three years old and had survived the territorial restructure of 2004 and was widely regarded as the most unflappable wolf in the eastern pack — was vibrating with suppressed laughter.

"Is that a new culinary technique, Elara?" he asked, his voice trembling with the effort of containing what was clearly the happiest moment of his week.

I did not blink. This was important. The entire protocol rested on not blinking.

I took another bite of the soup-soaked toast. I chewed it. I maintained eye contact with Jenkins at a level that I intended to communicate serene authority and which I suspected, from the way his face was going slightly red, was communicating something else entirely.

"It is an efficiency method, Jenkins," I said. "You wouldn't understand."

He made a sound like a man swallowing an entire laugh whole. It was not a dignified sound. I respected him enormously for the attempt.

My heart, meanwhile, was doing something frantic and percussive behind my ribs — the rhythm of someone who had just done something completely unhinged in front of the most powerful man in four territories and was still, technically, committed to the bit. I did not look at Silas. Looking at Silas was not part of the protocol. The protocol involved being looked at, observed, noted — not doing the noting myself.

But I felt it. The shift in attention, the particular quality of being watched by someone whose attention had weight to it, and every single hair on the back of my neck stood up in sequence like a very small, very orderly audience getting to their feet.

I looked. I couldn't help it. I was only human. Well — wolf. The point stood.

Silas was watching me. He wasn't laughing — Silas never laughed outright, I was learning, he treated laughter the way other people treated formal currency, dispensed rarely and with intention — but the corner of his mouth was doing the thing. The twitching thing. The thing where the full force of his amusement was pressing against his composure like water against a dam and his composure was, admirably, holding, but only just.

He was finding this entertaining. He was sitting at the head table in the middle of a serious operational discussion and he was finding the spectacle of me eating Jenkins's soup with the unflinching eye contact of a woman having a spiritual experience to be the most entertaining thing that had happened to him all week.

I filed this information under: *Relevant. Handle carefully. Do not examine too closely right now.*

I stood up. The chair scraped against the stone floor with a sound like a dying banshee — so much for inscrutability — and I gathered what remained of my dignity, which was not much but was more than nothing, and I held it carefully.

"I have pack business to attend to," I announced, to no one in particular and everyone in earshot, which was most of the mess hall because the dying-banshee chair had done its work. My voice cracked only slightly on the word "business," which I decided didn't count.

I marched out of the mess hall. I marched with purpose. I marched like a woman who had intended every single thing that had just happened, who had chosen the soup-dipping as a deliberate statement, who was leaving now because she had other places to be and not because she needed to stand in a corridor for a moment and breathe.

Behind me, I heard Jenkins finally lose his battle with composure. His laugh followed me into the hallway — warm, genuine, the laugh of a man who had been given a truly excellent story to tell at pack gatherings for years to come.

I stood in the corridor. I looked at the ceiling. I catalogued the situation with the clinical detachment I had been practicing: I had eaten another wolf's soup with unblinking eye contact. I had announced efficiency methods to an elder. I had made a scraping sound with my chair that would probably be described, in future retellings, as ominous. I had, in the process of attempting to appear mysterious and unreadable, become the most readable person in the room.

And Silas Vael had watched all of it with that almost-smile, the one I was beginning to understand meant that I had his attention in a way that was not entirely professional.

I pressed my back against the corridor wall and stared at the ceiling for a long moment.

My wolf, who had been watching the whole performance with what I could only describe as pained solidarity, exhaled slowly.

"I know," I told her. "We regroup. We adapt. We do not, under any circumstances, tell Jax about the soup."

She gave me a look that suggested she thought this was an optimistic position.

She was probably right.

I pushed off the wall, straightened my jacket, and walked in the direction of somewhere Jax was not, which was unfortunately going to require a map, because Jax had the supernatural ability to be exactly where you least wanted him to be whenever you had done something that merited his commentary.

Behind me, through the mess hall doors, I could hear the low rumble of resumed conversation. The operational discussion, back on track. The ordinary morning of the pack house, reassembling around the brief, spectacular interruption that was my breakfast.

I was doing it, I told myself. I was becoming an Alpha's partner. I was also, quite possibly, the most embarrassing creature to ever walk this earth, but I had his attention, and I had Jenkins's eternal loyalty, and I had, somewhere in the protocol's wreckage, managed not to blink.

That had to count for something.