CHAPTER 3

POV Kristen 

I did the only reasonable thing a person could do when the Alpha King of all werewolves told her she was his.

I laughed in his face.

It came out wrong .... too high, too sharp at the edges, the kind of laugh that sounds like it's made of something other than humor and might tip into something else entirely if you're not careful with it. I took two large steps backwards and put a parking meter between us, which would not stop an Alpha King from doing anything he'd decided to do but gave my hands something to grip.

"I don't belong to anyone” ," I said. "I stopped belonging to anyone three years ago. I gave that up voluntarily and I have not regretted it once. So whatever this is .... whatever bond you think you're feeling .... I need you to go get it in some other place, because I am definitely the wrong person for it."

Dylan Cole watched me the way a man watches a puzzle he has already solved and is simply waiting patiently for the pieces to show you where they go.

It was annoying .

"Are you done?" he asked.

"I am very done. I am so thoroughly done. Please go home."

"I am home." He glanced around at Cedar Falls with that almost-expression I couldn't fully read ..."Or I will be, shortly."

I glance at him. "You cannot be serious."

"I've been tracking you for six weeks, Kristen ." He said it the way you state a fact that doesn't require emphasis because it is simply true. "I left my entire territory in the hands of my second to come here. I am serious."

Six weeks. Six weeks. He had been working his way toward this moment for six weeks, and here he stood, looking at me like he had nowhere else in the world to be.

Mira was vibrating inside me .... a low, constant thrum of yes, yes, yes that I was trying very hard to treat as background noise.

I thought about Eli. His dark curls against his pillow at six-thirty this morning, his face soft with the last of sleep.

I did not have room for this.

"I have a son," I said. Flat. Direct. Let it land wherever it needed to. "Derrik's son. A three year old who is your nephew. Does that change your thinking of this situation?"

Something moved across his face then .... not disgust, not retreat, not the careful recalculation of a man revising his interest. 

"I know about the boy," he said.

"Then you know I'm not in a position to.... "

"What I know," he said, stepping forward with a deliberateness that I somehow didn't counter with a step back, "is that my brother had you .... had a mate who was loyal and capable and good .... and treated you like a convenience that had stopped being convenient. I know you walked out of that pack at midnight with a canvas bag and your mother's scarf and a secret you were carrying alone. I know you have been rebuilding yourself for three years in a city that isn't yours, working shifts that leave you on four hours of sleep, holding together a life and a child and yourself with everything you have."

He paused. His voice, still low, still unhurried, dropped half a register.

"I know you're tired, Kristen ."

My throat closed without my permission.

Don't. I could not cry in front of this man. I would not let those words find the crack they were clearly aimed at. I would not let anyone .... not even someone who had somehow, impossibly, arrived at the most accurate summary of the last three years anyone had ever offered me .... see what those words did.

"You don't know me," I managed. It came out less steady than I needed it to be.

"Not yet," he said simply. Not a challenge. Not a promise he was performing for effect. Just a fact he was comfortable with.

He said it so simply, like it was just a matter of time and patience and Mira threw herself against my ribs with such conviction that I had to press my hand flat against my sternum.

Dylan 's eyes tracked the movement immediately. 

"Your wolf."

"It is none of your business."

"She recognizes me."

"She's been silent for three years and she's confused. She has no idea what she's recognizing."

"Wolves don't get confused about this." He tilted his head slightly. "What's her name?"

I opened my mouth to tell him that it was absolutely none of his business, that this conversation was over. 

"Mira," I said instead.

I hated myself immediately.

Something shifted in his face. "Mine is Cain."

"I don't care," I said, which I knew was not true. 

"Cain had been silent for eleven years," he said. "Since my first mate died."

That stopped me entirely.

I looked at him properly then .... the way I'd been carefully avoiding looking. Underneath the controlled stillness and the Alpha authority and the unhurried certainty of a man who had never once doubted his own place in any room. Something old and heavy that he wore the way people wear old injuries .... not displayed, not hidden.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I'm not telling you for your sympathy," "I'm telling you because I want you to understand that I know what it is to seal your wolf away to survive. I know what it costs you .... not just the silence, but what you give up, what you stop being able to feel, what you start accepting as normal because you forget there was something else." His eyes were fixed on mine. "I'm not asking you to trust me today. I'm not asking for anything today."

"Then what are you asking?"

"Coffee." "There's a diner two blocks from here. I'd like to buy you coffee and sit across from you in a public place in broad daylight and give you the opportunity to look at me and decide what you think."

I stared at him.

Dylan Cole .... Alpha King, most feared wolf in four territories, the man Derrik had spoken of like a bad weather system that had finally passed .... was asking me for coffee.

"You tracked me for six weeks," I said, slowly, "crossed three territories, came to a human city where you have no standing or authority, to ask me for coffee."

"I tracked you for six weeks to find you," he said. "The coffee is simply where I'd like to begin."

My heart was doing something too fast and too complicated.

Mira was whispering yes, yes, yes like a prayer.

"One coffee," I said, before the sensible part of my brain could organize a proper argument. "One. You're not coming anywhere near my son .... not yet, not until I've decided what I think about all of this. And this is not a.... " I searched for what I meant. "This is two people talking. That's all."

"Of course," he said.

He was too agreeable. It made me more suspicious, not less.

But I was already walking toward the diner, and he was walking beside me, maintaining a careful and deliberate distance, and Mira was so fully awake inside me that I could feel it in my fingertips .... 

And I was more frightened than I had been in three years.

Not of him.

Of how much I didn't want to run.