Chapter Six — The Third Button

"Come in."

His voice came through two inches of oak and the Mark at my neck jumped like a struck nerve.

Beta Cole opened the door for me and did not follow me through it. He wouldn't look at me either, which told me most of what I needed to know about how this had been described to him.

The Alpha's office is the oldest room in the Pack House. Stone floor, no rug. The cold came up through my shoes inside of ten seconds.

Damien stood at the far window with his back to me. His Scent reached me before he turned — wet pine and hot iron, the same as it has been since I was seventeen years old and had no idea what it meant.

Breathe out slow, Nyx said. Say nothing about them. Not one word, Aria, not if he takes the room apart.

"Alpha."

"Sit."

"I'll stand."

He turned around. Three weeks had not been kind to him, which I noted the way you note weather.

"Sit down, Aria."

I sat. My hands went automatically to my cuff, where the button had come loose that morning, and I spent a stupid amount of the next minute trying to push it through a hole that had shrunk in the wash.

Damien watched me do it. I made myself stop.

"Twice since the eleventh," he said, "something has gone through me that wasn't mine."

The room got very quiet.

"The first was that night. Half past eleven, or near it. I was in the north yard and I had to put my hand on a post."

"That sounds unpleasant."

"Don't."

"You asked me here to describe your evening?"

"I asked you here because a bond I ended in front of three hundred witnesses reached across four miles and took the wind out of me." His voice stayed level. "A marked wolf senses their Mate's strongest feelings. That's the rule. So I'll ask it. What happened to you at half past eleven on the night of the eleventh?"

"Wren Halloway ran the Council's blood test on me," I said. "The Silver one. Nobody warned me it was coming and it went in deeper than I expected."

Every word of that was true.

"The test," Damien said.

"The test."

"Cole tells me the result was filed as inconclusive."

"Then you know more about it than I do."

"What did she tell you it meant?"

"That she'd been wrong before and would rather look like a coward than a liar."

Something went across his mouth, very fast, that might have been the ghost of amusement, and then he was the Alpha again.

"And the second one," he said.

There it was.

"Two weeks ago yesterday. About four in the afternoon."

He came around the desk. Not fast, and he didn't lean over me — he stopped a careful four feet away, and even four feet was too close.

"That one wasn't grief and it wasn't fear," he said. "I've had two weeks to find a word for it, and the closest I can get is that something in you sat down."

The Mate Pull came up under my ribs like water finding a crack, and my whole traitor body leaned about half an inch toward him before I caught it.

"I was at Wren's," I said. "I've been at Wren's a great deal. I'm the woman the Council is sitting on in eight days, Alpha. I don't have many places to be."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the one I have."

He looked at me for slightly too long.

"Take your collar down."

"No."

"Aria."

"You gave me back," I said. "You don't get to look at my neck."

"I need to see it."

"Why?"

"Because if it's gray then this is a thing that will pass, and I can stop—" He stopped. Started again. "Because I need to see it."

I turned my head and pulled the collar down two inches and held it there and looked at the wall.

He didn't make a sound. The silence went on long enough that I knew exactly what he was seeing.

"It's red," he said at last.

"Yes."

"It should have gone gray the first night."

"Yes."

"Then why hasn't it?"

"You'd have to ask the Moon Goddess. I only live here."

I let go of the collar. He walked back to the window and stood with his hands behind him, and I did not enjoy how much I wanted to know what his face was doing.

"There's something in your Scent," he said.

The floor went a long way away and came back.

"It's changed. Not much. I noticed it in the corridor before you came in and I've been trying to put a name to it since, and I can't."

"Fear, probably."

"It isn't fear. I know what you smell like afraid."

"Then I don't know what to tell you."

"Tell me about the Silver Ridge man on Hollis's porch."

I turned my head. He was still facing the window.

"You know about him."

"I know he ran Bellamy off my ground and never looked at you once. I'd like to hear you say the rest."

"He was counting your rotation," I said. "Ames at the culvert, one in the trees, one on the tailgate. He sat on that rail for forty minutes and he never once looked at me, and I walked twenty yards down that road before I understood I had the shape of it backwards."

"And you're telling me this now."

"I'm telling you," I said, "because you asked me a question about my Scent, and I would very much rather talk about Kai Ashford."

He heard it. He was tired and he was frightened of something and he still heard it, and his voice dropped into the register that has nothing to do with volume.

"Aria. Tell me what you're hiding."

Alpha Command went through the room like a change in pressure. The window glass hummed. Somewhere below us in the Pack House a door slammed as somebody's hand obeyed a thing that had not been said to them.

It came into me and slid off, the way rain slides off oilcloth. Nothing in me even wobbled.

Fall, Nyx snarled. Fall now or we're finished.

So I fell.

I dropped my eyes and let my shoulders come down and my knees go loose and my breath go ragged, and I gave him the whole performance of a woman whose body had just been taken out of her hands, and then I said the truest small thing I had.

"I'm frightened of the Council," I said, "and I don't know what's happening to me."

Damien let out a breath and stepped back like a man setting down something heavy.

"Goddess," he muttered. "I shouldn't have used that."

"No."

"I don't—" He rubbed his face. "I've done a great many things to you in three weeks. I'd rather not add that one."

He apologized. To a woman he had just failed to command, for a thing that had not worked, and he did not know it had not worked, and I sat in that chair with my heart going and understood that I had just been handed the only card I own.

I stood up. My legs were fine, which was its own problem, so I made them slow.

"Why were your hands shaking?" I asked. "On the stone. Where everyone could see."

He did not answer.

He stood in the cold gray light from the window with his jaw set, and while he wasn't answering I looked at his shirt. At the third button down, where a loose white thread had swung the whole time he was ending me in front of three hundred wolves.

The thread was gone.

Somebody had cut it off clean and sewn the button back on in black. Badly. Too many stitches, and a knot you could feel through the cloth, the way a man does it himself at two in the morning when he cannot sleep.

I looked at that button for a second and a half too long, and something in my chest came unlatched that I had spent three weeks bolting shut.

That is when he put the paper on the desk.

He did it without any ceremony at all. One sheet, turned round with two fingers so it faced me.

A leaf out of Hollis's ledger, torn along the fold, in the old man's careful hand.

"Rice. Eggs. Two loaves. Four cans." Damien did not sit down. "Twice a week for three weeks. Always cash. Always the same list."

"Your Deltas are on that road. I'd rather not walk it twice."

"Then look at me while you say it."

I looked at him.

And because I have never in my life been able to do two things at the same time, my hand came off the arm of the chair and went flat against my stomach and stayed there. Low. Spread. The way a woman holds a thing she is guarding.

I watched him see it.

I watched all of it arrive in him — the Scent he couldn't name, the bond that wouldn't die, four cans twice a week, and a woman with her hand where her hand had no reason to be.

Damien Kane, Alpha of the Blood Moon Pack, took one step back from me as though I had hit him.

Then he crossed the room, and he did not touch me. His hand came up between us and stopped at the height of my ribs and stayed there, shaking, exactly the way it had shaken on that stone in front of three hundred wolves.

"How long," he said, "have you been carrying my child?"