Chapter 4 - The Spark

Damien’s POV

I tell myself I’m not looking for her. I tell myself that for about four minutes, which is roughly how long it takes me to find an excuse. A delivery to the eastern stores that absolutely does not require the Alpha heir to carry it personally but does puts me on the exact path she takes back from drills every single day, a fact I am deeply unwilling to examine too closely.

The crate’s heavier than it needs to be, full of grain sacks I could’ve sent a runner for. I carry it anyway, down the long track that cuts along the lower ridge, past the training fields, the smokehouse, and the row of cottages where the older warriors keep their families, because it’s the only route that puts me where I want to be without having to admit out loud that I wanted to be there. The path drops below the treeline for the last stretch, where the ground turns to loose slate and the stream that feeds the lower lake runs close enough to hear before you see it, cutting a thin silver line through bracken that’s still wet from last night. It’s the kind of ground that punishes anyone not paying attention, and I know it well enough to walk it without looking down, which leaves me nothing to do with my eyes except watch the bend in the track where she always appears. Mist sitting low over the valley floor, the ridgeline catching the first real light, and the whole pack is waking up around me in its ordinary rhythm. Wolves I’ve known my whole life nod as I pass. None of them ask why the Alpha heir is hauling grain sacks like a junior. I’m grateful for that, today of all days.

She sees me before I fully commit to pretending I haven’t been waiting. Her whole body changes the second she does: shoulders up, chin down, the particular stillness of something that’s already calculated three different routes away from me and doesn’t love any of them.

“Brie.”

Nobody calls her that. I don’t know where I picked it up, maybe Mabel, maybe just years of hearing it in my own head when I had no business thinking about her at all. Bbut it comes out before I can stop it, and something flickers across her face that isn’t quite surprise.

“Alpha heir.”

“Damien,” I say. “You don’t have to—“

“I know what I have to do.” Her voice isn’t sharp exactly. It’s careful, the kind of careful that’s been practiced on people much worse than me. “Was there something you needed?”

There wasn’t. There still isn’t, not anything I can name out loud while standing here with a crate of supplies I don’t actually need to be carrying. What I need is something my wolf has wanted since I was thirteen, the year I watched her get cornered behind the kennels by three boys twice her size and felt something in my chest go off like a snapped bone: sharp, wrong, and entirely outside anything I understood about myself at that age. It’s never once let me put that into words, and it picks this exact moment, with her standing two feet away, looking everywhere except directly at me, to stop being patient about it.

“Your ribs,” I say instead. “Are they—“

“They’re fine.”

“You said that yesterday too.”

That gets something out of her. Not quite a laugh, but close. A small exhale through her nose that she looks immediately annoyed at herself for. It’s the most unguarded I’ve ever seen her, and I do something genuinely stupid in response to it. I reach out and take her wrist.

I don’t plan it. My hand is simply there, circling skin that’s cold from the morning air, and the world does something strange in the half-second after. Sound drops out first. The birds and the distant clang of the smithy go quiet all at once, like someone’s pulled a curtain across the morning. Then my own pulse, loud and wrong, hammering somewhere it has no business being this loud. Then her flinch, small and immediate. Then mine, a beat behind hers, like I’m only allowed to react once she’s reacted first. Neither of us lets go right away, which is somehow worse than if either of us had.

“What was that?” she says, and for the first time since I’ve known her, she’s looking straight at me. Not past my shoulder. Not at the ground. At me, wide-eyed, like I might have an answer that makes any sense at all.

I don’t. I have six years of watching her, one half-formed theory I’ve never said out loud, and a wolf that’s currently losing its mind in my head. And none of that is an answer I can hand her standing in the open path where anyone could see us.

“I don’t know,” I say, which is the truest thing I’ve told anyone in days.

She pulls her wrist back like it’s burned her. Maybe it has.

“Don’t,” she says, quietly, and I don’t know if she’s talking to me, to herself, or to whatever just happened between us. “Don’t make this a thing.”

“I’m not making it anything.”

“You’re standing there looking at your own hand like it betrayed you.” She isn’t wrong. I make myself stop. “I have deliveries,” she says, which isn’t an answer to anything, but we both let it stand in for one.

I let her go, and I watch her walk away faster than she needs to. I stand there with my hand still half-curled around the shape of her, trying to convince myself that whatever just happened was nothing.

I don’t manage it.

Across the courtyard, half-hidden by the council hall’s east wall, my father watches the entire thing happen without bothering to pretend he wasn’t.

I don’t notice him until I’m already turning to leave, and by then there’s no version of pretending I didn’t see him see it. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t call out. He just watches me watch her walk away with the same patient, cataloguing look he gives council members before he decides what to do with them, and something in my chest goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with the morning air.

I’ve spent my whole life being the one who watches her. It hasn’t once occurred to me, until this exact second, standing in an empty courtyard with my father’s eyes on my back, that someone could be watching me do it. I don’t know what unsettles me more: that he saw, or how long he might have been seeing it before today.