Claimed In The Dark

CHAPTER TWO: WHAT SHE WOKE UP TO

The first thing I noticed was the smell of pine.

Not the fake kind, the candle kind, the kind they sell at the grocery store next to the cinnamon ones. Real pine. Sharp and cold and a little bit sweet, like standing in the middle of a forest right after rain. It filled my nose before I even opened my eyes, before I even remembered I had a body to open my eyes with.

Then came the softness under me. A blanket, thick and warm, tucked up to my chin. A pillow that smelled like cedar wood. And under all of that, low voices, talking fast and quiet, the kind of talking people do when they don't want you to hear them but haven't quite worked out how far your ears can reach.

"—can't just keep her here, Julian, you know what happens if the council finds out—"

"The council isn't finding out anything. She's not leaving this house until I understand what I'm dealing with."

"What you're dealing with is a human girl who fainted in the middle of a crowded quad because you grabbed her wrist like an i***t—"

"I didn't grab her. I touched her. There's a difference and you know it."

I kept my eyes closed a second longer, my heart picking up speed, my mind racing to catch up with wherever my body had ended up. The last thing I remembered was the quad. Marcus. That word, low and rough, dropped out of Julian Cross's mouth like it belonged there.

Mine.

My eyes snapped open.

I was lying on a couch, a huge one, dark green and soft, in a room that did not look like anywhere I had ever been in my life. The ceiling above me had thick wooden beams running across it, old and dark, the kind that belonged in a cabin, not a house you'd find near a college campus. A stone fireplace took up most of one wall, unlit, cold ash still sitting at the bottom of it. Tall windows looked out onto a wall of pine trees so close and so dense that no daylight seemed able to get past the first few rows of trunks.

I sat up too fast and the room tilted sideways.

"Easy." A hand landed lightly on my shoulder, not holding me down, just steadying me, and I turned to find Julian crouched beside the couch, close enough that I could see, properly, for the first time, what he actually looked like.

He was older than I'd realized, in the quiet, settled way some men just are, even at twenty-something. His hair was dark, almost black, pushed back from a face that had too many sharp angles to be called soft — a strong jaw shadowed with stubble, a straight nose that looked like it had been broken once and healed slightly crooked, and eyes that were, up close, an ordinary brown. Warm brown. Nothing strange about them at all, which somehow unsettled me more than the gold I thought I'd seen in the quad. He wore a plain grey Henley, sleeves pushed up over forearms roped with muscle, the kind of build that came from actual physical work and not a gym membership. He smelled like the room did. Pine, and something underneath it, warm and low, like woodsmoke.

"Where am I?" My voice came out cracked.

"My family's land. You're safe." He said it simply, like it was obvious, like safety was a fact and not a feeling he had any doubt about.

Behind him, a second man stood near the fireplace, older, maybe fifty, silver threading through dark hair, arms crossed over a flannel shirt, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite place. Not unkind. Careful. Like he was doing math in his head and didn't love the answer he kept landing on.

"That's Marcus," Julian said, following my gaze, and I flinched at the name before he added, "Not the one from the quad. My uncle. Marcus Reid. He's going to want to ask you a few questions, and I'd rather you didn't lie to him. He's very good at knowing when people lie."

"I don't even know what question I'm supposed to answer," I said. "I don't know why I'm here. I don't know why I passed out. I don't know why you grabbed my wrist and said—"

I stopped. My face went hot just remembering it.

"Said what?" Julian asked, very quietly, like he already knew and wanted to hear if I'd say it out loud.

"Mine," I said. "You said mine. Like I was — I don't even know. A thing. Property."

Something flickered across his face, fast, there and gone, guilt maybe, or something close to it. "That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?"

He didn't answer right away. He glanced back at his uncle, who gave a small nod, the kind that looked like permission, or maybe like resignation, and when Julian looked back at me his jaw had gone tight in the same way it had in the quad, like he was holding something back with both hands.

"What do you know about werewolves?" he asked.

I actually laughed. One short, disbelieving sound. "What?"

"I'm serious."

"I know what everyone knows. Movies. Full moons. Silver bullets. None of that's real, obviously, it's just—"

"It's real," Julian said. "All of it, except the silver bullets, which is honestly insulting, and the full moon thing, which is mostly for show. The rest of it is real. I'm real. My uncle's real. This land you're lying on right now belongs to a pack, and I'm the one who leads it."

I stared at him. Waited for the joke. Waited for someone to laugh, for a camera to swing out from behind a curtain, for anything that made this make sense as a joke and not as the truth. Nobody laughed. His uncle's face hadn't moved an inch.

"You're insane," I said, but even as I said it, some part of me, the same part that had felt that pull in my chest back in the quad, was very quietly not surprised at all. "You need actual help. Like, a doctor."

"Ivy." My name in his mouth stopped me cold. I hadn't told him my name. I was certain of that. "I know things about you. I have no way of knowing unless what I'm telling you is true. I know your favorite color is the green they use on old glass bottles, not regular green, that exact one. I know you draw before you can sleep, every night, even when you're exhausted, because your hands don't feel finished until you do. I know none of that from watching you. I know it because of what happened between us in that quad, and I would give almost anything for it not to be happening, because trust me, Ivy, my life would be a hundred times simpler if you were just a stranger."

The room had been very quiet. Even the fire that wasn't lit seemed to be holding still.

"How," I said, my voice barely in a whisper? "Do you know that."

"Because you're my mate," he said. "Which means, whether either of us wanted it or not, something in me recognized something in you the second I saw you, and it isn't going away, and it isn't something I can explain with logic, and I have spent every hour since it happened trying to find a version of this where I get to walk away from you, and there isn't one. There's no version where I walk away."

My chest did that thing again. The pull. Sharper now, like it had been waiting for him to say the words out loud so it could finally stop pretending to be adrenaline.

"That's not possible," I said, even as every nerve in my body was quietly, furiously arguing with me.

"I know," Julian said. "Believe me. I know exactly how impossible it sounds. I also know it's true, and that's the part I can't fix no matter how much I want to."

His uncle shifted near the fireplace, clearing his throat in a way that clearly meant something in whatever silent language existed between them. "Julian. She needs to know the rest before someone else tells her first."

Julian's jaw tightened again. "Not yet."

"She's already involved whether you like it or not. Deanna’s people will have heard about the quad by now. You know how fast the word travels."

I looked between them, the pull in my chest twisting tighter with every word I didn't understand. "Who's Deanna?"

Julian's eyes came back to mine, and for the first time since I'd woken up on that couch, I saw something in them that looked almost like fear.

"Someone who is going to want you gone the second she finds out what you are to me," he said. "And I need you to trust me when I tell you that I am not going to let that happen. But first I need you to understand exactly what she's capable of, because she is already on her way here, and she is not coming to talk."

Behind him, through the tall windows, I saw it before he did — headlights, cutting through the dark line of pine trees, moving fast up a driveway I hadn't even known existed until that exact second, and Julian went rigid the moment he heard it too, turning toward the door with his whole body suddenly, terribly still, the same stillness I'd felt roll off him in the quad right before everything in my life stopped making sense.

"She's early," he said, so quiet I almost didn't catch it. And then, louder, to his uncle, already moving toward the door: "Get her upstairs. Now."