His Rejected Queen

6

Chapter 6

Five am looked like darkness and felt like a dare.

I was at the training grounds before anyone else. Not because I was eager, though I was, but because I refused to give Luca Thorne a single reason to look at me like I did not belong here. I had been looked at that way my entire life and I was done with it.

The grounds were lit by floodlights that carved hard white light out of the dark morning. A wide dirt field, obstacle structures along the far edge, a track running the perimeter, and a weapons rack along the near wall that held more than Silver Creek had owned in total. I stood in the middle of it in borrowed training clothes, a grey fitted top and black pants that were slightly too long, and I stretched and I waited.

They came in groups. Twos and threes, Black Ridge wolves rolling in with the easy physicality of people who did this every day and were good at it. They were bigger than Silver Creek wolves. Faster looking, even standing still. They assessed me the way trained wolves assess anything new, quickly and without warmth, and then most of them looked away and got on with their own warm ups.

One did not look away.

He was tall, built like a wall, with light brown hair and a jaw that had clearly been broken at least once and healed slightly wrong. He walked straight up to me with the confidence of someone who had never once considered that his approach might not be welcome.

“You are the Silver Creek girl,” he said.

“I am Aria.”

“Damon.” He looked me over without apology. “You actually going to train or is this a watch and observe situation.”

“I am going to train.”

“You are an Omega.”

“I was an Omega,” I said. “Rank does not transfer when you leave a pack. Right now I am nothing, which means I have nothing to lose, which means I will train harder than anyone on this field.” I held his gaze. “Is that going to be a problem for you?”

Damon stared at me for a second. Then he laughed, sudden and genuine, the kind of laugh that comes out of surprise.

“No,” he said. “I think I am going to enjoy this.”

He walked away. I filed him under not a threat and turned back to my stretching.

Then the temperature of the field changed.

Luca walked out of the dark at the edge of the floodlights and every wolf on the field adjusted without being told to. Not dramatically. Just that subtle shift of bodies orienting toward their Alpha the way plants orient toward light, automatic and instinctive. He was in black training gear, his hair pushed back from his face, the scar along his jaw catching the hard white light.

His eyes found me immediately.

They stayed for exactly two seconds and then he moved to the edge of the field and the session began.

The warm up alone nearly killed me.

Not because I was unfit. I had trained my whole life, in the margins of Silver Creek’s sessions, alone in the woods when no one was watching, pushing myself against a standard no one had ever bothered to set for me. I was fit. I was fast. I was not, however, prepared for the pace that Black Ridge wolves considered a warm up.

I kept up. Barely. My lungs were screaming by the end of the first mile and my legs were burning through the drills and I made approximately four errors in the combat sequence that told me very clearly how large the gap was between what I knew and what these wolves knew.

But I kept up.

And I did not stop.

Damon was paired with me for the combat drills. He was good, genuinely good, fast and technical and not inclined to go easy on me just because I was new. The first time he took me down I hit the dirt hard enough to knock the breath from my body. I lay there for one second staring up at the dark sky with the floodlights burning at the edges of my vision.

I got up.

He took me down a second time. Slightly less hard. I got up again.

The third time, I did not go down.

I read his movement two beats early, shifted my weight, redirected his momentum using his own size against him the way you learn to when you spend years being smaller than everyone around you, and Damon went into the dirt instead.

The field went quiet for a half second.

Damon looked up at me from the ground with an expression that moved through surprise and landed somewhere that looked a lot like respect.

“Again,” he said.

We went again.

I felt Luca watching. I had felt it the entire session, that particular quality of attention that was different from the general observation of a trainer watching his pack. More focused. More still. I did not look at him. I kept my eyes on Damon and my mind on the drills and I let whatever he was seeing land however it landed.

The session ended at seven. Wolves began moving off the field in groups, breathing hard, already talking. I bent over with my hands on my knees and pulled air into my lungs and let my body register what it had just been put through.

“Aria.”

I straightened.

Luca was standing ten feet away. The field was emptying around us and in two minutes we were going to be alone out here in the early morning half dark and my body was already making decisions about that before my mind had weighed in.

I walked over to him.

He was looking at me with that careful assessing expression, the one that gave nothing away but took everything in, and he waited until the last wolf had left the field before he spoke.

“Where did you learn to redirect like that,” he said. “That move on Damon.”

“I taught myself.”

“No one showed you.”

“No one at Silver Creek was interested in showing me anything.”

He was quiet for a moment. We were standing close, closer than was strictly necessary in a large empty field, and he smelled of sweat and pine and that darker warmer thing underneath and my wolf was paying extremely close attention.

“You have gaps,” he said.

“I know.”

“Big ones.”

“I know that too.”

“I can fix them.” He said it simply, without drama, a statement of capability rather than an offer. “If you are willing to work.”

“I have been working my entire life,” I said. “The difference is that here someone might actually be watching.”

Something shifted in his expression. That loosening again, brief and almost hidden, there and gone.

He reached out and his hand closed around my wrist, not like Cole’s hand last night, nothing like that, but with a firm certainty as he turned my arm slightly and looked at a spot just below my elbow where Damon had caught me in the second round and a bruise was already rising purple against my skin.

He looked at it for a moment.

His thumb moved. Just once, just the softest possible press against the edge of the bruise, not enough to hurt, barely enough to feel, and yet I felt it everywhere.

He released my wrist.

“Ice that,” he said.

He walked off the field.

I stood alone in the empty training ground in the early morning light with my wrist held against my chest and my heart doing something catastrophic and I understood with total clarity that I was not going to survive this man.

Not because he was dangerous.

Because he was careful.

And no one had ever been careful with me before.

I looked down at my wrist.

Then I looked up at the packhouse and in the window of the office on the second floor, Luca Thorne was standing looking down at the training ground.

At me.

He did not move away when I saw him.

He just stood there, and looked, and let me see him looking.

And that was somehow the most overwhelming thing that had happened to me in two days of overwhelming things.