Chapter 9: The Space Between Walls

Dinner was lamb chops and roasted vegetables and a conversation between Victor and my mother that filled the room the way warmth filled a cold space. Gradual. Steady. The kind of comfortable that came from two people who had decided on each other and weren't second-guessing it.

I watched them without meaning to.

Victor refilled my mother's glass before she asked. She passed him the bread without being told he wanted it. Small things. The language of people who had learned each other quietly, in the margins of ordinary evenings, until knowing became automatic.

I hadn't seen my mother look like that in years. Maybe ever.

Across the table, Jaxon ate and said nothing and looked at his plate with the focused attention of someone who had decided that dinner was a task to be completed rather than a meal to be shared. He answered when Victor addressed him directly. He was perfectly polite. He was also entirely absent in the way that people were absent when they were thinking about something they weren't going to mention.

I wasn't going to think about what that something was.

I was absolutely thinking about what that something was.

"Selene." Victor's voice pulled me back. He was looking at me with that particular warmth he always had, unhurried and genuine. "How was school today?"

Beside me I felt Jaxon go very still. Not visibly. Just a subtle shift in the quality of his stillness.

"Fine," I said. "Settling in."

"Good." Victor nodded, satisfied. "It takes time. New territory always does." He glanced between us. "Jaxon, you've been showing her around?"

"She knows where her classes are," Jaxon said.

Victor gave him a look. The specific look of a father who had raised a son long enough to translate everything he didn't say. "That wasn't what I asked."

A beat. "I've been around," Jaxon said.

Which was, I thought, possibly the most accurate and least informative answer he could have given.

My mother smiled at me across the table, warm and oblivious to the eleven layers of subtext currently operating underneath the dinner conversation. "I'm glad you have someone looking out for you."

I smiled back and said nothing and very carefully did not look at Jaxon.

After dinner my mother and Victor moved to the sitting room. I carried plates to the kitchen because it felt wrong not to, and because standing still gave my thoughts too much room.

I was rinsing the second plate when I heard him come in.

I didn't turn around. "You don't have to help."

"I know." He opened a cabinet and pulled out the storage containers without being asked where they were. Started portioning the leftover vegetables with the efficient, practiced movements of someone who had done this a thousand times in this kitchen.

We worked in silence for a while. The kind of silence that had stopped being uncomfortable sometime between dinner and now, somewhere in the space of an *I should have moved her hand* and an *okay* and two people looking at their plates until the food was gone.

"Victor's going to ask me to take you to school tomorrow," Jaxon said.

"You don't have to."

"That's not what I said."

I turned to look at him. He was sealing a container, eyes on what he was doing. His jaw was set in that way it was set when he was approaching something sideways because approaching it directly wasn't something he had decided to do yet.

"Are you going to?" I asked.

"Probably." He set the container in the refrigerator. Closed it. Leaned back against the counter with his arms crossed and looked at me properly for the first time since the hallway that morning. "Damien came back today."

The plate stilled in my hands. "What?"

"After sixth period. Parking lot." His voice was even. "He didn't approach you. He was watching."

The cold came back. That specific cold that had nothing to do with temperature. "How long?"

"Long enough." His eyes stayed on mine. "He's not done. You already knew that."

"I knew that," I agreed quietly.

"Then you know that whatever yesterday was, it's not resolved. He's going to regroup and come back differently." He paused. "He's an Alpha. Losing in front of an audience is something they don't recover from quietly."

I set the plate down and turned to face him fully. "What are you saying?"

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved in his expression, that thing that kept almost becoming readable and then deciding against it. "I'm saying don't go anywhere alone. Not the parking lot. Not late hallways. Not anywhere that isn't populated."

"Jaxon"

"I'm not asking," he said quietly. "I'm telling you."

There it was. The line he kept walking, the one between protective and possessive and something that didn't have a clean name yet. I looked at him in the kitchen light, arms crossed, jaw set, green eyes steady on mine, and I tried to find the thing underneath the instruction.

"Why do you care?" I asked. Honestly. Not as a challenge. Just as the question it was.

He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer.

"I don't know," he said finally. Low. Almost to himself. "That's the problem."

The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere in the sitting room my mother laughed at something Victor said. The ordinary evening continued around us, indifferent to the two of us standing in a kitchen with something unnamed taking up all the available space between us.

I should have said something practical. Something that closed the moment cleanly and left us both somewhere easier to stand.

Instead I said, "Your wolf."