His Rejected Queen

5

Chapter 5

The note had four words on it.

Breakfast. Then we talk.

No signature. He did not need one. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at those four words written in heavy, decisive handwriting on plain white paper and felt them rearrange something in the air around me.

Not a request. Not an invitation. A statement of what was going to happen, delivered under my door before dawn by a man who had been standing outside my room in the dark a few hours ago for reasons he did not know yet.

I got up. I washed my face in the attached bathroom, which was bigger than my old bedroom at Silver Creek and had hot water that actually stayed hot, and I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment. Dark circles. A faint redness around my eyes that was the only evidence of last night’s sixty seconds in the dirt. My hair was a mess.

I did my best with what I had, which was nothing except my own two hands and the small travel sized things someone had left on the bathroom shelf. I dressed in yesterday’s clothes because I had nothing else. I picked up the note, looked at it one more time, and put it in my bag.

I told myself I did not know why I kept it.

I knew exactly why I kept it.

The dining room was enormous and it was full. Long tables, natural light pouring in through tall windows, the noise and warmth of a large pack starting its morning. Wolves of every age, conversations running over each other, the smell of food so good it almost brought tears to my eyes because I had not eaten since yesterday afternoon.

Every head turned when I walked in.

Not all at once. In that rippling way, one person noticing and nudging the next, until the awareness of me had moved through the room like a wave. A stranger. An Omega from another pack. A rejected mate. They did not know all of that yet but they knew enough. They could smell the foreign pack on me and they could see that I did not belong.

I kept my chin up and I found an empty seat at the end of one of the tables and I sat down.

A plate appeared in front of me thirty seconds later. Eggs, toast, bacon, fruit. I looked up and found a young woman standing there, maybe seventeen, with a round face and curious dark eyes and absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that she was staring at me.

“Luca said to feed you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You are the rejected mate from Silver Creek.”

“Word travels fast.”

“It always does here.” She sat down across from me without being invited, propped her chin in her hand, and stared at me with the open fascination of someone who had not yet learned to pretend she was not interested. “I am Petra. I help in the kitchen. Was he awful about it? The rejection. Cole Rivers is supposed to be good looking but I always thought he had mean eyes.”

I picked up my fork. “Eat with me or go back to the kitchen, Petra. But if you stay, talk about something else.”

She blinked. Then she grinned. “I like you.”

She stayed. She talked about something else. She talked about three things at once actually, the way very young people do when they are comfortable, about the pack and the training schedule and a male wolf named Damon who she was furious at for reasons that shifted and expanded the longer she spoke about them.

I ate and I listened and I let her voice fill up the space around me and I was more grateful for it than she would ever know.

I was halfway through my plate when the room changed.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. It was the same ripple effect as when I had walked in, except this time it moved faster and the quality of the silence it left behind was different. Denser. More charged.

I did not need to look up to know why.

But I looked up anyway.

Luca walked into the dining room the way he did everything, like the space rearranged itself for him without being asked. He was in dark training clothes this morning, which was somehow worse than the dressed version of him from last night because there was less to hide behind, and his eyes moved through the room in one practiced sweep before they found me.

They stayed.

Petra made a very small sound beside me.

“He is looking at you,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“He never looks at anyone like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like he is making sure you are still there.”

I picked up my coffee cup and took a slow sip and kept my eyes on his for exactly long enough to be neither submissive nor challenging and then I looked back down at my plate.

Across the table, Petra looked like she might pass out from the tension of it.

He came to me ten minutes later, after he had moved through the room and spoken to three different people with the efficiency of a man who dealt with everything that needed dealing with before he allowed himself to get to what he actually wanted. He stopped at the end of my table and looked down at me and said nothing for a moment.

“You got the note,” he said.

“It was hard to miss.”

“Come with me.”

I followed him out of the dining room and down a corridor and into a large office at the back of the house. Dark wood, a wide desk, tall windows looking out over the training grounds where wolves were already moving through morning drills. He closed the door and turned to face me and leaned back against the desk with his arms crossed and looked at me with that unreadable black gaze.

“I have a proposal,” he said.

I waited.

“You need somewhere to land. Black Ridge can be that. You will have a room, meals, safety, and pack protection for as long as you need it.”

“In exchange for what,” I said. Because there was always an exchange.

Something moved in his expression. “Training. You will train with my pack every morning. Full participation, no special treatment.”

I stared at him. “You want to train me.”

“I want to see what you are capable of.”

“Why.”

He was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, wolves moved through drills in the early light, precise and powerful, nothing like the loose disorganized training sessions I had been permitted to half attend at Silver Creek.

“Because,” he said slowly, “when my patrol surrounded you last night in the Borderlands, you shifted back to human and you stood your ground. Four trained Black Ridge wolves in a loose formation at midnight and you stood your ground without flinching.”

I said nothing.

“Most wolves beg,” he said. “Or run. Or both.” His eyes moved over my face with that careful unhurried attention that did something to my breathing. “You did neither.”

The room was very quiet.

“So,” he said. “Do we have a deal?”

I thought about Silver Creek. I thought about twenty dollars and a one hour deadline and Cole’s voice telling me I would come back because there was nowhere else for me to go.

I thought about what it would mean to train in a pack like this. To learn what I was actually capable of under people who actually knew what they were doing.

I looked at Luca Thorne leaning against his desk watching me with black eyes that had not moved from my face since I walked in and I thought about a corridor at 3am and a while.

“One condition,” I said.

His eyebrow lifted slightly.

“I am not your Omega. I am not anyone’s Omega. Whatever I am here, I am not that.”

The silence stretched.

Then something happened to his expression that I had not seen on it before. Something that loosened the line of his jaw and changed the quality of the light in his eyes and was gone almost before I could be certain it had been there at all.

“Deal,” he said.

He pushed off the desk and moved past me toward the door and his arm brushed mine in the narrow space and the contact lasted less than a second and went through me like a current from my shoulder all the way down to my feet.

He opened the door.

“Training starts tomorrow at five,” he said. “Do not be late.”

He walked out.

I stood in his office alone and pressed my hand to the place on my arm where he had brushed past me and stared at the wall and understood with absolute clarity that I was in a very significant amount of trouble.

Not the dangerous kind.

The other kind.

The kind that starts with a brush of an arm in a quiet room and ends somewhere you never planned to be.

And the worst part, the truly devastating part, was that my wolf was not alarmed at all.

She was wagging.