His Rejected Queen

10

Chapter 10

The doors closed behind Cole and the room exhaled.

Damon said something low to the wolf beside him and they moved off down the corridor, the other Black Ridge wolves filtering out behind them with the quiet efficiency of people who understood when a situation required privacy. Sage caught my eye from across the hall and I gave her a small nod and she disappeared up the stairs, which I was grateful for because Sage’s face was currently doing approximately eleven things and I could not deal with any of them right now.

And then it was just Luca and me in the entrance hall.

I turned to face him.

He was already looking at me. He had not moved since Cole walked out, still standing with that controlled stillness that I was beginning to understand was not composure exactly but the thing beneath composure, the bedrock that composure was built on.

“What was that,” I said.

“Which part.”

“His back. Your hand. What was that.”

He held my gaze steadily. “You know what it was.”

“I want you to say it.”

“I was making a point.”

“To Cole.”

“To everyone in the room.”

I looked at him for a moment. My heart was doing the thing it had been doing with increasing frequency around this man, that unsteady accelerated thing that I was running out of explanations for.

“You do not get to do that without asking me first,” I said.

Something moved in his expression. Not offense. More like consideration, like a man recalibrating in real time.

“You are right,” he said. Simply. Directly. No defense, no qualification. Just you are right, and the weight of it landed differently than I expected because I had spent years surrounded by people who were constitutionally incapable of those three words.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

We stood there in the quiet hall and the afternoon light came through the high windows in long pale bars and I was acutely aware of how close we were standing, closer than the conversation required, closer than any practical reason justified.

“He saw it,” I said. “When you did that. Cole saw it and it did something to him.”

“Yes.”

“That is going to make him worse.”

“Probably.”

“You knew that when you did it.”

Luca looked at me for a moment. “Yes.”

I breathed out slowly. “So you made me a target to make a point.”

“I made him understand that you are not standing alone.” His voice dropped slightly, not softer exactly but more direct, stripped of its usual measured quality. “There is a difference.”

The hall was very quiet.

“Come here,” he said.

It was low and it was calm and it was not a command, not quite, but it had the gravity of one, and my body responded before my mind voted on it, closing the two steps between us until I was standing directly in front of him and had to tilt my face up to hold his eyes.

He reached up and pushed a strand of hair back from my face. Slowly. Watching what he was doing with a focus that made my skin feel like it had been turned up to a higher frequency. His fingertips traced the edge of my temple, barely touching, the way you touch something you are not entirely sure you are allowed to touch yet.

“You did not flinch,” he said quietly.

“When.”

“When he walked in. When he said your name. When Diana smiled at you like that.” His hand stilled at my jaw, cradling it with a gentleness that felt enormous coming from hands that could do what I had watched them do in training. “Anyone else would have flinched.”

“I told you. I am done being small.”

“I know.” Something in his voice had changed, a warmth underneath the usual control, careful and contained but there. “I know you did.”

His thumb moved along my cheekbone. My breath was doing something it needed to stop doing in a public corridor.

“Luca.” His name came out quiet and slightly unsteady.

“I know,” he said again. Like he could hear everything I was not saying. Like the same conversation was happening in him and he was just as aware of the timing being wrong and the situation being complicated and every reasonable argument against this.

He leaned down.

Slowly. Giving me every opportunity to step back, to turn away, to choose the sensible version of this moment. His forehead came to rest against mine and we stood there breathing the same air with his hand at my jaw and my hands which had somehow found his shirt without my permission, fingers curled into the fabric at his chest.

Not a kiss.

Almost.

The almost of it was its own kind of devastating.

“Four days,” he said against my forehead. Quietly. Like a reminder to himself as much as to me.

“Four days,” I agreed. My voice came out barely above a whisper.

He stayed there for one more breath. Two. His thumb still moving in that slow arc along my cheekbone, and I felt his exhale warm against my face and I felt the effort it cost him to straighten up, to put the careful inch of distance back between us, to let his hand drop.

He stepped back.

I released his shirt and looked at my own hands like they belonged to someone else.

“Cole will request a formal meeting tomorrow,” Luca said, his voice back to its regular register, controlled and even. “Neutral ground, pack law format. He will try to argue the membership claim.”

“And you will argue against it.”

“I will dismantle it.” The certainty in his voice was absolute and matter of fact and I believed him completely. “But I need you present. I need Cole to see you choosing to be there.”

“I will be there.”

He nodded. He turned toward the corridor and then stopped and turned back and the look on his face was one I had not seen before, something less guarded than his usual expression, something that had the quality of a door open a c***k wider than intended.

“For what it is worth,” he said. “What I did. With my hand. I would have asked you first.” A pause. “I should have. But the answer I would have hoped for is the same.”

I looked at him standing in the corridor light with his scar and his black eyes and the controlled warmth he kept contained just below the surface of everything and I felt something shift in my chest with a slow and irrevocable weight, like a foundation stone being laid.

“I know,” I said.

He left.

I stood in the entrance hall alone and pressed the back of my hand to my forehead where his had rested and stared at the ceiling and had a very serious conversation with myself about the situation I was in.

The conversation was not particularly effective.

Because thirty seconds later Sage came flying down the stairs with her eyes enormous and grabbed both my arms and said “I saw everything from the landing and Aria I need you to tell me every single thing that just happened right now.”

And for the first time since the ceremony hall four nights ago I laughed.

Really laughed, from somewhere genuine and unguarded, and Sage grabbed me into a hug and held on and I let her and it felt like something coming back to life.

But upstairs, I would later learn, in the guest room Cole had been given at the far end of the east corridor, my former mate stood at his window looking out over Black Ridge land with Diana’s hand on his arm and her voice in his ear.

And he was not listening to a word she said.

He was thinking about a strand of dark hair and grey eyes and the way I had looked standing beside Luca Thorne like I had always belonged there.

And he was thinking about how to take it apart.