Chapter 3: Things I should not have done 

Evander's POV

I should not have stopped.

I knew it the moment my feet slowed. That half second of clarity you get before your hand reaches for something shouldn't be that small, useless window where you can still choose differently. I had walked a different route to the war room every night for three days. Three days of deliberate detours and carefully mapped corridors specifically designed to keep me away from the lower cells.

Tonight something had overridden all of it.

And now I was standing at my war room window staring at a forest I wasn't seeing with a pair of brown eyes burned into the back of my mind like I'd looked directly at the sun.

My wolf was insufferably smug about it. He'd been pacing for three days restless and snarling, throwing himself against the walls of my control with increasing desperation. I had given him every reasonable explanation. The Duskfang border raids. The war council. The pressure building on three sides of our territory simultaneously. Reasonable, rational explanations that he had rejected completely, because my wolf had never once in his life been reasonable or rational.

Then I walked past that cell.

One moment. That was all it took.

She had stood on her toes and looked through those bars like she owned them. Chin up. Eyes steady. Not a single trace of the fear that every other human I had ever encountered wore like a second skin in my presence. She had looked at me like I was something she was trying to figure out like I was a puzzle she fully intended to solve.

My wolf had gone completely silent.

Not calm. Silent. The way a storm stills at its eye.

I turned from the window and pressed both fists on the table.

Four years. Four years of building myself into something that did not feel, did not want, did not reach for anything that could be taken away. It had not been difficult. After what happened to Selene, after what I had done in the three days following her death, after the Moon Goddess had looked down at the wreckage I had made of everything and spoken her sentence feeling had seemed like the most dangerous thing in the world. So I had stopped.

I had become a wall. The pack needed a wall and so that was what I gave them.

It had worked.

Right up until a captive human woman with steady eyes cracked it without even trying.

A knock at the door.

"Enter."

Daxton came in the way he always did smooth, unhurried, comfortable in his own authority. Six years with my Beta. He knew my war room the way he knew his own reflection. He closed the door, looked at me once, and put on his careful face. The one that meant he had something to say that he expected resistance on.

"She's awake," he said. "Cole's been in there talking to her."

"Cole talks to everyone."

"She's different." He said it flatly. Not a compliment. "She's not panicking. Not crying. She's watching everything. Asking specific questions. Filing answers away." He paused. "She's going to be a problem, Evander."

I said nothing.

"I want to move her to the east block. More isolated. Less foot traffic past her door." His voice was even. Reasonable. "Better for containment."

"No."

The word came out before I'd finished deciding to say it. Daxton went still that particular stillness of his that meant he was recalibrating.

"Evander "

"She stays where she is." I met his eyes. "That's final."

Something moved behind his gaze. Quick and layered and gone before I could read it. He nodded once, smooth as always.

"As you say," he said, and left.

I stood alone in my war room for a long time after that.

The honest reason I had refused was something I wasn't prepared to examine directly. So I didn't. I buried it under Duskfang strategy reports and border maps and told myself firmly that keeping the human in a known location was simply better tactics.

My wolf called me a coward.

I told him to shut up.

Sleep was a negotiation I lost most nights.

Since the curse it had been that way two or three hours bargained for in the early morning hours, never enough, never fully restful. Tonight was worse than usual. Every time I closed my eyes the silence pressed in and my wolf pressed back, restless and certain in a way that made my skull ache.

At some point I stopped trying.

I dressed and walked the keep the way I sometimes did when the walls felt too close through the empty upper corridors, past the war room, down toward the training yard where the night air came in sharp and cold through the open archways. The pack was quiet. I could feel them through the bond three hundred wolves, sleeping or on patrol, each one a thread connected to something at the center of my chest. The weight of them was constant. I had stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a scar.

My feet took me toward the lower corridor without asking my permission.

I stopped at the far end and stood in the dark.

The cell was twenty feet away. The torchlight had dimmed to almost nothing at this hour. The keep was utterly still.

Turn around, I told myself. Go back. Walk away right now while you still can.

My wolf said nothing. He didn't need to. He was already facing forward with the immovable certainty of something that had made its decision long before I had caught up with it.

She is ours, he said.

She is human.

She is ours.

My mark will kill her. My jaw tightened. I am not doing this.

A long pause. Then quieter than I had ever heard him, almost gentle:

Then we protect her. Even from ourselves.

I stood in that dark corridor for longer than I would ever admit.

And then as if the universe had decided I hadn't suffered enough tonight her voice came through the iron door. Low and unhurried, talking to the walls or to herself or simply to the dark. Like silence had never intimidated her.

"I will get out of here," she said quietly. "I don't know when. I don't know how. But I will. And when I do, I'm burning those headphones."

Despite everything ,Despite the curse and the silence and four years of building myself into something that didn't crack something moved in my chest. Unexpected and swift and completely unwelcome.

It took me a moment to recognize it.

It was the closest thing to amusement I had felt in four years.

I turned around and walked back to my chambers before I could do something unforgivable like smile.

I sat in the dark. Pressed my hands against my face. And made myself a promise in the silence of that room.

Stay away from her, Evander.

Whatever she is , whatever this is, stay away.

I already knew I was going to break it.