Rylan Blackwood

Kai's beta arrived eight days later, unannounced, which I was beginning to suspect was simply how Nightfang did everything.

"You're smaller than I expected," he said, by way of introduction, swinging down from his horse in the Voss courtyard like he owned the ground he landed on. "Kai talks about you like you're some kind of immovable object. I was picturing someone taller."

"I'm sorry to disappoint"

"You haven't yet. Give it time." He looked me over once, quick and assessing, the way I imagined he looked at everything, sorting threats from nuisances from things worth his attention. "Rylan Blackwood. Kai's beta, in case that wasn't obvious from the impressive amount of Nightfang grey I'm wearing."

"Selene Voss. In case that also wasn't obvious."

"Oh, it was obvious. You're the one who said no to my Alpha's son in front of half the Council." Something that have been approval flickered across his face before he tucked it away. "I've been dying to meet the woman with the nerve enough to do that."

"Did Kai sent you to assess whether I had more nerve than sense?"

"Kai sent me to assess whether Voss territory is stable enough to be worth the alliance he offered you." Rylan's tone shifted, just slightly, into something more careful. "Whether you have sense is apparently my problem to figure out on my own time."

"And what's your assessment so far?"

"Give me an hour." He glanced past me toward the Pack house, already sizing up grounds with the same quick, cataloguing attention he'd given me. "First impressions of a war council chamber usually tell you more than a week of formal meetings ever does."

"There's no war council meeting today."

"Then I'll make do with the kitchen staff. People talk more honestly over bread than they ever do in a map room."

I led him through the pack house, half tour and half interrogation, and found him easy enough to talk to in a way that surprised me. He asked sharp questions and didn't bother softening them, complained about the quality of Voss cooking within an hour of arriving, and made exactly the kind of jokes I remembered him making in my first life, before any of this, before I understood how much weight he carried behind the humor.

"You're doing better than the reports suggested," he said, as we walked the eastern wall where the watch had caught the scouting party days before. "Word reached Nightfang that Voss caught an incursion early. Unusually early."

"We got lucky."

"Kai doesn't believe in luck. Neither do I, generally, but I try to keep an open mind for his sake." He leaned against the wall, studying the tree line with the kind of attention that told me he took his job seriously even when his mouth didn't. "Word also reached us that the scouting party came from the east. Ashfall territory, unless someone's been sloppy about their borders."

"You know Ashfall?"

Something crossed his face at the name, there and gone so fast I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it, a tightness around his eyes that had nothing to do with the sun.

"Everyone knows Ashfall," he said, too easily, too quickly. "Minor Pack. Ambitious. Not usually worth Nightfang's attention."

"You said that like it costs you something to say it."

"Did I?" He pushed off the wall, already moving on, already changing the subject with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it before. "Tell me about your scouts instead. The one who flagged the eastern watch. I heard she argued for it in open council before your father agreed to widen it."

"Briar Vance. She has opinions and isn't shy about them."

"I like her already." He said lightly, but I still noticed he hadn't quite let go of whatever the mention of Ashfall had cost him, a stiffness in his shoulders that took another few steps along the wall to fully unwind. "Nightfang could use a few more people who say what they mean instead of what's politically convenient. It gets exhausting, being surrounded by people who only tell you what they think you want to hear."

"Is that what you think I do?"

"No." He said it without hesitation, which surprised me more than I expected it to. "That's the strange part. You don't do that at all. I've known you half a day and I already trust your no more that I trust most people's yes."

I let him redirect me, mostly because I didn't yet have a reason to push, but I turned the flinch over in my mind the rest of the afternoon, the way you turn over a stone that looks like it might be hiding something underneath. Rylan Blackwood didn't strike me as a person who flinched at minor Packs. He striked me as a man who'd learned, a long time ago, exactly how to make sure no one noticed when he did.

We finished that tour of the eastern grounds in easier conversation, and I found myself, against my better judgement, actually enjoying his company. He had a way of making everything feel briefly smaller, not by ignoring it, but by refusing to treat it with more reverence than it deserved.

"Kai's going to ask me a full report today," he said, as we turned back toward the pack house. "Word for word, probably, knowing him. He's meticulous like that. Drives the rest of us half mad."

"What will you tell him?."

"The Voss territory is stable, your father's competent is a little rattled, and his daughter has better instincts than half his war council combined." He said it easily, no flattery in it, just as an assessment delivered the same way he'd deliver a weather report. "I'll leave out the part where you make me nervous. That one's is between us."

"I make you nervous?"

"You ask questions like you already know the answers and you're just confirming them. It's unsettling In a woman who's supposedly never left Voss territory in her life." He caught my expression and laughed, short and genuine. "Relax I meant it as a compliment. Mostly."

By evening, he'd charmed half the household staff and insulted the other half so thoroughly they'd started laughing along with with him instead of at him, which I gathered was some kind of personal specialty. He caught me watching him hold court in the kitchen, trading barbs with a scullery girl who was clearly winning, and raised his cup toward me like we were sharing a private joke.

"Your Beta duties include terrorizing my kitchen staff?," I asked.

"My Beta duties include figuring out whether I like the people I might be dying next to someday." He said it lightly, but there was something underneath it, the same careful weight I'd caught on the wall. "I like your kitchen staff. Jury's still out on you."

"High praise."

"I don't hand it out cheap." He drained his cup and refiled it before I could point out that it wasn't his kitchen to refill form, entirely unbothered by the theft. "You should know, for what it's worth, Kai doesn't just send me to anyone. He trusts my read on people more than he trusts most of his own Council. If I go back and tell him Voss's solid, that carries weight."

"Is that a way of telling me you approve?"

"That's my way of telling you I haven't decided yet, and I wanted you to know that it mattered that I hadn't." He grinned, quick and easy, that seriousness gone as fast as it arrived. "Don't let it to your head. I approve of most people eventually. I'm told it's a character flaw."

"I'll try to contain my relief."

"See, that. That's the kind of thing that makes me nervous." He set his cup down, already gathering himself to leave, Nightfang business apparently done for the day. "I'll be back and forth for a while, I expect. Kai's not about to let this alliance run on good faith alone, no offense."

"None taken. I wouldn't either."

"Good. Smart women make my job easier." He paused at the door, and for one unguarded second, the easy humor dropped entirely, replaced by something more tired than I'd expected to see on him this early in whatever this alliance was going to become. " Do me a favor, though. Whatever Ashfall is to your border reports, leave it alone. Not everything worth investigating is worth the cost of investigating it."

He left before I could ask him what that meant, boots echoing down the corridor, and I stood there turning his warning over beside the flinch I'd already noticed, filing both away in the same place I kept everything i didn't understand yet but suspected I would need later. I had no way of knowing, not yet, that I'd just been handed the first thread of a secret that would eventually cost him almost everything.