Claimed In The Dark

CHAPTER THREE: THE WOMAN AT THE DOOR

Marcus Reid had my arm before I'd even fully stood up, steering me toward a staircase tucked behind the fireplace, his grip firm but not rough, the grip of a man used to moving people quickly without frightening them.

"Up," he said. "Second door on the left. Stay away from the window."

"I'm not going anywhere until someone tells me what's happening," I said, even as my feet were already following him, some old animal instinct in me apparently more interested in survival than in getting answers.

"You will be told everything," Marcus said. "Just not with three seconds' notice and a Voss standing on the porch."

"A what?"

"Go," he said, and something in his voice made my legs finally listen.

I made it up four stairs before I stopped and looked back, because I am apparently the kind of person who cannot resist watching a disaster even when someone is actively trying to save me from it.

The front door was heavy wood, iron hinges, the kind of door that belonged on a house built to keep things out. Julian stood in front of it, shoulders squared, and even from the staircase I could see the change in him, the way his whole body had gone taut like a bowstring pulled back and held. He wasn't the same man who'd crouched beside the couch a few minutes ago, careful and quiet, checking if I was okay. This was someone else. Someone the word alpha actually meant something for.

He opened the door before whoever it was could knock.

She was not what I expected.

I don't know what I expected — something out of a movie maybe, someone snarling, something with claws already out. What stood on the porch instead was a woman who looked like she'd stepped off the cover of a magazine about winter. Tall, taller than me by a full head, with pale blonde hair pulled back so tightly it looked like it hurt, and skin so smooth and so cold-looking it seemed like she'd never once stood in direct sunlight. She wore a long black coat that probably cost more than a semester of my tuition, and she smiled when she saw Julian, a smile with absolutely nothing warm in it.

"Julian." Her voice was smooth, unhurried, the voice of someone who has never once had to raise it to get what she wants. "I heard the strangest thing today."

"Then you heard wrong," Julian said. "Whatever it was."

"Did I?" Her eyes moved past him, into the house, scanning the room with the kind of patience that made my skin crawl even from the staircase. "Because what I heard was that the Ashcroft alpha collapsed a human girl in the middle of a public quad and carried her off the property in front of half the campus. That doesn't sound like something I heard wrong. That sounds like something that's about to become very, very interesting to a lot of people who've been waiting a long time for you to slip."

"Nobody slipped."

"Mm." She stepped past him, into the house, without waiting to be invited, the way people do when they've never once in their life needed permission for anything. Her eyes swept the room again, slower this time, and I shrank back against the wall at the top of the stairs even though there was no way she could see me from where she stood. "You know what I find fascinating, Julian? In four years, you've never once looked twice at anyone. Not a pack girl, not an outsider, nobody. Four years of every single unmated wolf in three territories throwing themselves at the great and disciplined Alpha Cross, and nothing. And then, out of absolutely nowhere, on a random Tuesday, in front of a coffee cart, you go and find yourself a mate."

"This isn't your business, Denna."

"Everything that threatens the stability of this territory is my business," she said, and for the first time her voice lost its silk and turned into something harder underneath. "You know the law as well as I do. An unclaimed, bounded human mate is a liability. The second word gets out, and word is already out, Julian, it was the moment you carried her off that quad like a man who'd lost his mind. Every pack with a grudge against Ashcroft is going to see her as exactly what she is. A weakness. A way in."

"She's not a way into anything."

"She's an untrained human girl who fainted the moment the bond activated," Denna said. "She doesn't know what she is yet, does she? She doesn't know what's coming for her." Her head tilted, slow, almost curious. "You haven't even told her about the challenge rites."

Julian's whole body went rigid in a way that made my stomach drop straight along the floor.

"Get out of my house," he said, and his voice had changed too, gone low and rough in a way that didn't sound entirely human anymore.

Denna smiled again, unbothered, already turning back toward the door like she'd gotten exactly what she came for. "You have until the next full moon to formally claim her under pack law, or she becomes fair game to any wolf who wants to test your hold on this territory. That's not a threat, Julian. That's just how it works. I'd start explaining things to your little human, if I were you. She has a great deal to learn, and not very much time to learn it."

She left the way she'd arrived, unhurried, the porch light catching her pale hair as she walked back toward the car idling at the end of the drive, and the second, the door shut behind her. Julian stood there for a long moment with his hand still braced against the wood, his shoulders rising and falling too fast, like a man who had just barely stopped himself from doing something he couldn't take back.

Then he turned around and looked up the staircase, straight at me, and I realized with a cold, sinking feeling that he'd known I was standing there listening to every single word the entire time.

"How much of that did you hear," he said quietly.

"Enough," I said, my voice shaking. "What's a challenge, Julian? What happens to me if you don't do this claiming thing by the full moon?"

He didn't answer right away. And the way he looked at me, like man trying to figure out how much truth a person could survive hearing all at once, scared me more than anything Denna had said on that porch.

"Come downstairs," he finally said. "You're going to want to be sitting down for this.”