Chapter 2 - What the Wolf Knows

Damien’s POV

I don’t decide to stop them. That’s the part I can’t explain afterward, not to my father, not to anyone who asks why the Alpha-heir got involved in an omega scuffle that wasn’t his business. My wolf decides, I just catch up to my own mouth already saying the words.

That’s enough.

By the time I’m standing in the yard I’ve already run the calculation I run every single time someone gets near her, the one I’ve been running since I was thirteen and first noticed my chest doing something violent whenever Marlena’s pack of friends got within ten feet of Cambria Moonfall. It isn’t a calculation that ends anywhere good. It ends in me clearing a training yard with two words, and a face that probably looks like my father’s when he’s about to ruin someone’s life.

I don’t like looking like my father.

I’ve seen what that face does, up close, exactly once. I was maybe nine, watching from a window I wasn’t supposed to be at, while a Beta who’d argued too long about a border dispute learned why nobody argues with Dexter Devonshire twice. I don’t remember what was said. I remember the stillness after, and how the whole house seemed to exhale at once when my father finally walked away. I’ve spent eleven years trying not to be the reason a room exhales like that. Today I was that reason, and the worst part is I’d do it again without blinking.

She’s on her feet before I can decide whether offering a hand would help or make it worse, which tells me something about how many times she’s had to get herself up off the ground without one. There’s blood at the corner of her mouth. My wolf doesn’t growl, it does something quieter and worse, a kind of low, constant hum under my skin, the sound a held breath would make if a held breath had a sound.

“You’re bleeding,” I say, like an idiot, like she might not know.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. It’s blood.”

She doesn’t answer that. She looks at a spot somewhere just past my left ear, which she’s done since we were maybe fifteen, and I used to think it meant she found me boring. It took me years to understand it’s the opposite, that looking at me straight on costs her something she doesn’t have a surplus of to spend.

I let her walk away. That’s the second thing I can’t explain to anyone, not the stopping, the letting go. Every instinct I have wants to follow her back to wherever she’s going, make sure nobody finishes what Marlena started, stand outside her door like a lunatic until the bleeding stops. I don’t do any of it. I stand in the empty yard with four wolves’ worth of fear-scent still hanging in the air and force my hands to unclench.

I’m due at the training centre by mid-morning regardless, there’s a council briefing on the spring border rotations first, then the junior assessments I’m meant to be observing for my father, then whatever’s left of the afternoon spent listening to envoys from three lesser packs angle for trade terms Snowdon doesn’t actually need to give them. That’s the job. Rank, sort, measure, decide who gets what and who goes without. Snowdon doesn’t ask for alliances. Other packs ask Snowdon, because we’re wealthy enough and old enough that asking is the only option left to them. I used to be proud of that. Today it just feels like one more thing I didn’t choose and can’t put down.

My father finds me twenty minutes later, which is either a coincidence or it isn’t, because nothing involving my father is ever a coincidence.

“I heard you cleared the south yard,” he says.  It's not a question, no... Dexter Devonshire doesn’t ask things he already knows.

“Four of them were putting an omega in the dirt.”

“Four of them were doing what packs do to the weak omega's, Damien. It keeps the others sharp and lets them know their place.” He says it the way you’d explain that water is wet. “Which omega?”

I know better than to answer that honestly, but I do it anyway, because lying to my father has never once worked out for me, and the truth comes out of my mouth before I can stop it.

“The Moonfall girl.”

Something moves behind his eyes. It’s there and gone so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it. Interest, careful and quick, filed away somewhere I’m not invited to look. “The rogue-find,” he says. “I didn’t know you paid attention to her.”

“I happened to be passing by.”

It’s a bad lie. I know it’s a bad lie while it’s still leaving my mouth, the kind of lie that doesn’t even bother trying to be convincing because some part of me wants him to catch it. He doesn’t take the bait. He just watches me say it, the way you’d watch a child explain away a broken vase, patient and faintly amused, and lets the silence do the work of telling me he knows exactly how thin it is.

I have paid attention to her since I was thirteen years old and my wolf first decided, without consulting me, that she was the only interesting thing in a room full of people I was supposed to be ranking, sorting, measuring for usefulness the way my father taught me to measure everyone. I don’t tell him that. I just stand there, lying badly, hating that he’s right not to believe me.

He doesn’t push it. He just smiles the smile he uses on council members he’s about to outmaneuver, and changes the subject to something about the upcoming alliance season. I spend the rest of the conversation with my pulse doing something it has no business doing over a smile that wasn’t even aimed at me.

That night my wolf won’t settle. I lie awake running the same loop I’ve run for six years. She’s prey, she’s prey, why does prey make you feel like this, and underneath that loop, quieter, a thought I’ve never let myself finish before tonight.

What if she isn’t.

I don’t know what I’d even be looking for if I went looking. I just know that tomorrow, I’m going to find an excuse to talk to her, and I already know it’s a terrible idea, but I’m doing it anyway.