Stand beside.

I take him to my office rather than the bare room I use for Roan, because some instinct I don't examine too closely refuses to let those two rooms mean the same thing. It's smaller. Warmer. A fire already dying down in the grate from earlier in the evening, before any of tonight happened.

He takes it in slowly, the way he takes in everything — unhurried, assessing, like he's cataloging exits and weaknesses and the exact number of steps to my desk without ever appearing to look for any of it.

"Sit," I say, "or don't. I don't particularly care which."

"Generous." He sits anyway, folding himself into the chair across from my desk with an ease that makes the furniture look like it was built for him instead of for me. "You hit hard, for someone your size."

"You'll want to remember that."

"Believe me." Something flickers behind the gold of his eyes, there and gone too fast to name. "I already have."

I sit across from him and make myself breathe evenly, because there's something about being this close to him that keeps snagging my attention in ways I don't have patience for tonight, a low, steady thrum of him, almost like a second heartbeat sitting just under my skin, faint enough that I could convince myself I'm imagining it if it weren't so persistent.

"You said you had something I wanted," I say. "Say it, or leave."

"You want to know what's killing your wolves." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, all trace of humor gone from his face now. "I do know. That part was true."

"And the rest of it?"

"The rest isn't information I'm giving away for free tonight." A faint, humorless smile. "Call it leverage. Or call it patience. I haven't decided which I prefer yet either."

"You're infuriating."

"I've been called worse. Usually by people who meant it as a compliment."

Despite myself, despite the hour and the exhaustion and the fury still simmering under my skin from the fist I put into his jaw twenty minutes ago, something in me almost wants to laugh. I don't let it show.

"Tell me what you know," I say instead. "About what's taking my wolves."

"An older hunger than either of our kinds like to admit still exists." His voice drops, quieter now, "Something that doesn't feed on flesh. It feeds on what's underneath it. Power, mostly. The kind your bloodline carries more of than it should."

My chest goes cold. "You know what I am."

"I knew what you were the moment I scented you in that clearing." He holds my gaze, steady and unblinking. "You're not the first Unbound it's hunted. You won't be the last, unless someone stops it first."

"And you intend to be that someone."

"I intend," he says, "to be standing next to whoever does it."

Before I can decide what to do with that, a knock lands hard against my office door, urgent enough that I'm on my feet before I've told myself to move.

"Alpha." One of the younger guards, breathless again, twice in one night now. "There's more wolves at the gate. Two of them. They're asking for you by name."

Every muscle in my body goes tight. "Who."

"They wouldn't say much. Just that one of them needs to see you. Says his name is Roan."

The sound of it lands somewhere low in my chest, an old, humiliating flicker of hope I have no business still feeling, and I hate — genuinely, thoroughly hate — how little control I still have over my own reaction to four letters spoken by a stranger at my gate.

"Of course he is," I mutter, mostly to myself.

The Lycan watches this happen across my own desk with open, unbothered interest, like I've just handed him a piece of information worth considerably more than anything he gave me tonight.

"Trouble?" he asks, entirely too pleased with himself.

"Stay here," I say, sharper than necessary. "Don't touch anything. Don't leave this room."

"Wouldn't dream of it, Alpha." That same infuriating almost-smile. "Go deal with your other complication. I'll be here when you're done."

I don't answer him. I'm already moving, already bracing myself against whatever's waiting at my gate this time, already furious at my own pulse for picking up speed before I've even laid eyes on him.