5

I lifted my head, and I forgot what I had been about to say.

He was tall. That was the first thing, the sheer height of him against the headlamps, in a dark suit gone damp at the shoulders and a long black coat that hung open as though he had not bothered to button it. He had black hair pushed back from a hard, handsome face and a jaw that looked as if it had never relaxed in its life. But it was his eyes that held me. In the glare of the lights they were silver, a bright, molten silver, as if the moon had decided to live inside a person.

"I said get up," he repeated, quieter this time. He was frowning. He was also, I realized with a hot flush, sniffing the air. He was reading me the way every wolf reads a stranger, from the blood on my hands down to the river water still dripping from my hair.

"Sir." Another voice from the driver's seat. It was flat and dry and had no wasted words. "That's a Silverwood omega."

"I can smell that, Gideon."

"Their Alpha will call it an incident."

"Let him."

Gideon, whoever he was, said nothing more. I tried to rise and managed to prop myself on one trembling hand before the world tilted sideways. The stranger crouched without a sound and caught my chin between two cool fingers. His touch was careful. It should have frightened me.

"Name," he said.

"Sage." My teeth were chattering so hard I bit my tongue. "I'm not here to cause trouble. I'm leaving. I only need a minute."

"Sage what?"

"Nobody." The word cracked. "Not anymore."

Something shifted in his face. He looked at the wet hair plastered to my cheeks, at the scratches down my arms, at the river mud streaked across my dress. His nostrils flared again, and his expression went very still.

"You smell like a broken bond," he said.

I couldn't answer. My eyes stung. I turned my face away, humiliated, as fresh tears slid into the rain, and I hated that he could smell it. I hated that it was written all over me like a brand, where any stranger could read it.

He did not say another word. He slid one arm beneath my knees and the other behind my back and picked me up as if I weighed nothing at all.

"What are you doing?" I managed. "Put me down. I can walk."

"You can't."

"I don't even know who you are."

"Kaelen." He lowered me into the back seat, into warm leather and a smell like cedar, and pulled a heavy coat from somewhere to wrap around my shoulders. "You're welcome to hate me in the morning. Tonight you're not going to freeze on my road."

The car purred away from the curb. Warm air blew over my numb hands. The city slid past the windows in long gold streaks, and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped being able to feel my fingers and started to feel everything else instead.

I noticed small things then, the way you do when your mind refuses to look at the big ones. The seat was warmer than any seat I had ever sat on. The car smelled faintly of leather and cedar and, underneath, of coffee gone cold in a paper cup. A phone lay face-down in the cup holder, buzzing quietly with messages that nobody picked up. Whoever this man was, he had been somewhere important tonight, and he had been interrupted by me.

"Sir," Gideon said once the doors had locked. He kept his voice low, which was pointless, since I could hear every word. "The pack council meets Thursday. If Vance has any sense, he'll want this settled quietly."

"Then he's welcome to ask me quietly."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Then he can ask the loud way." Kaelen's gaze found me in the mirror and his voice dropped a degree. "Turn the heat up. She's blue."

"I'm fine," I mumbled.

"You're not."

"I'm cold, that's all."

"That's what I said." His mouth twitched, just barely, before he smoothed it flat. "Are you hungry?"

"No."

"Gideon. Soup."

"It's two in the morning, sir."

"Then wake someone up."

I laughed. It came out thin and broken, and it startled all three of us. Kaelen turned his face to the window. Gideon coughed into his fist. And in my chest Wren stretched out, slow and warm, like she had just decided something.

He did not talk during the rest of the drive, and neither did Gideon. I watched Kaelen's reflection in the glass, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on the road, and I realized he was holding himself very carefully, like a man standing too close to a fire. His hands lay flat on his knees. Every so often his fingers curled, then straightened, as though he were reminding them of something.

The car slid into a private garage beneath a skyscraper that went up and up into the clouds. A private elevator whispered upward for what felt like a full minute. When the doors opened, I stepped out into a penthouse of black marble and glass that looked down on the whole city, and Kaelen put a mug of hot tea into my hands without asking.

It was very good tea. It tasted of honey and something smoky, and the steam fogged my eyelashes, and I sat on the edge of his enormous couch with the heavy coat still around my shoulders and tried to stop crying. I was bad at it.

"Who did this to you?" he asked at last. He stood by the window with his back to the lights, and his voice was quiet, and there was a blade somewhere inside it.

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters."

"Jaxon Vance." I said the name to my own knees. "He rejected me tonight, in front of everyone. He was supposed to be my mate."

The mug in Kaelen's hand cracked down the middle with a sound like ice breaking.