She Belongs To The Beast

The scent hit me before I even laid eyes on the gruesome scene. That was the cruelest part. My own wolf, dormant and useless as everyone loved to remind me, still managed to pick up the scent of another woman on my mate the moment I stepped into the corridor outside his room. Something sweet, foreign, and wrong layered underneath the familiar smell of Damon's skin, making my stomach turn. I told myself I was imagining it, but I pushed the door open anyway. The first thing I saw was her luscious blonde hair. Dark and loose across Damon's pillow, she spread out like she belonged there. Like she had been there before and she planned to be there again. Damon saw me first. His body went rigid, but he didn't move. He didn't scramble up or reach for me or say my name with any urgency. He just looked at me with those grey eyes I had spent two years believing in and said absolutely nothing. Just stared, like I was the problem. Like I was the one who had walked into the wrong room. The girl turned her head slowly. Her jade-colored eyes ran over me with a bored expression on her face. She didn't look embarrassed, which was somehow worse than anything else she could have done. I recognized her. It was Elena, the beta's daughter. The girl who had called me "wolfless" to my face every year since we were children had laughed the loudest when my wolf never came. She smiled at me, slow and deliberate, and smashed her lips on Damon’s. I immediately felt like vomiting. I don't remember deciding to run. My feet just moved, carrying me down the corridor and out of the pack house and into the cold night air before my brain had fully processed what my eyes had just seen. Two years. Two years of standing beside him at pack gatherings while people whispered about my dormant wolf, and he squeezed my hand and said it didn't matter. Two years of believing I had found the one person who saw something in me worth choosing. I ran until the packhouse lights disappeared behind the tree line and the forest swallowed me whole, and the only sounds were my own ragged breathing and the wet slap of my feet against the ground. I stopped when my lungs gave out, pressing my back against the nearest tree and sliding down until I was sitting on the cold ground with my knees pulled to my chest. My feet were numb. I looked down at them, pale against the dark earth. Then I realized where I was. The trees here were older, the kind that had been growing for centuries before our pack existed. They pressed close together and blocked out almost all the moonlight, leaving the forest floor in total darkness. There were no pack markers on the bark. No territorial boundaries or signs that said ‘turn back,’ which was itself the biggest sign of all, because the absence of markers meant this wasn't Silverpine territory anymore. Three days ago our Alpha had knelt before the Blackstone pack without a single wolf raised in resistance. I was on Blackstone land. I scrambled to my feet and spun to find the direction I had come from, but the trees all looked identical in the dark and my heart was hammering so loudly I couldn't think straight. I took one step back toward where I thought the border was and then froze completely. I heard boots, multiple pairs, moving through the undergrowth with a disciplined quiet that no Silverpine wolf had ever managed. They were coming from the north, spreading out in a wide arc, and they were going to pass directly through the clearing I was standing in. I dropped behind the root system of the largest oak I could find, pressing myself flat against the damp earth, and stopped breathing. They assembled in the clearing. Seven, maybe eight wolves, all standing with the rigid posture of soldiers waiting for instruction. The silence between them was taut and practiced. Then someone spoke. "Report." The air shifted the moment it left his mouth. Every wolf in that clearing went absolutely still, and even I, tucked behind my roots with my cheek against wet bark, felt the authority in it like a physical pressure against my sternum. I had heard our Alpha give commands my entire life. I had heard beta wolves bark orders across training grounds. I had never heard anything like this. I pressed myself flatter and listened to things I was never supposed to hear. It was border assignments and patrol rotations. His voice moved through it all with cold efficiency, no hesitation, no softening, just one decision after another delivered like sentences carved in stone. Then: "Leave." The boots retreated without a word. One by one they disappeared into the undergrowth until the clearing was empty and the only sounds were the wind moving through the high branches and the distant call of something nocturnal and the furious hammering of my own pulse. I stayed completely still. If I didn't move, didn't breathe, and didn't exist any louder than I already was, he would leave, and I would slip back through the tree line, and this night would become something I survived. A full minute passed. I started to exhale. "You can come out now." His voice was quiet. It made it more frightening than if he had shouted. I still didn't move. "I've known you were there since before my men arrived." A pause. "You have until the count of three before I come in after you. I'd rather not ruin my boots on the roots." My legs were shaking so hard I could feel my knees knocking together as I pushed myself upright and stepped out from behind the oak. The clearing felt enormous suddenly, exposed and bright under the moon. He was standing at the far edge with his back to the moonlight, and I could see the shape of him before I could see his face. His height and broad shoulders emanated strength and power. He turned his head, and the moonlight reached his face. I had expected cold. I had expected the flat predatory expression of a man who had just caught a trespasser on his land and was already calculating the cost. What I had not expected was the strange, lurching sensation in the deepest part of my chest. Like something waking up. Something that had never moved before in nineteen years of trying and waiting and being told nothing was there. My wolf. Just a flicker. Barely a breath and it was gone almost before I could register it. But it had been there. I was sure of it. He was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read, his gaze moving over me once with a slowness that suggested he was noticing everything and filing it away somewhere I would never have access to. "A wolfless girl from the Silverpine pack," he said slowly. "Standing alone on my territory in the middle of the night." He tilted his head. "Explain."