Chapter 8:Things about werewolves

Isadora pov:

The room was nicer than the cell. That was the most charitable thing I could say about it. Warm with a real bed and a working fireplace and a window that showed forest instead of stone. Sonja had deposited me here two hours ago with a curt instruction to rest and present myself at the Alpha's study by eight and left before I could argue with any part of that.

I had not rested.

I had sat on the edge of the bed and thought about Ruth and Danny and Marcus and the Thursday deliveries and my landlord who would start wondering about rent in exactly eleven days. I had built the whole picture of my life like a mosaic so I could look at it and remember exactly what I was fighting to get back to.

Then I had gone to the window. Third floor. Twelve meters down. Courtyard below with two guard posts. Outer wall forty meters away. Forest beyond that, dark and deep and familiar. I memorized every detail.

I was still at the window watching the last light leave the sky when someone knocked. 

"Come in."

A young maid opened the door. Barely seventeen, round faced, with the energy of someone delivering news they would rather not.

"The Alpha requests your presence at his study. Right away."

I turned back to the window. "No thank you.".

"I am sorry?"

"I said no." I kept my voice pleasant. "Tell him I would like to go home. That is my request. He can have his study."

The maid made a soft panicked sound and pulled the door shut. I turned back to the forest and waited.

Evander pov:

The maid came back alone.

I looked at her from behind my desk and she looked at the floor and delivered her message in a voice barely loud enough to cross the room.

"She said no, Alpha. She said she wants to go home."

The study went very quiet. Daxton standing to my left made a sound I chose to ignore. I set down the document I was holding with the careful precision of someone keeping their hands busy so they do not do something else.

"She said no," I repeated.

"Yes, Alpha."

I stood up.

"Evander," Daxton said.

"Stay here," I said. I walked out.

I heard him coming before the door opened.

Those footsteps. Slow and deliberate, carrying the full weight of someone who had never once been told no and accepted it. The door opened without a knock and he walked in and filled the room the way he always did, completely and without effort, like the space had simply been waiting.

I did not turn around.

"You were summoned," he said.

"I know," I said to the window.

"You refused."

"I did."

The temperature dropped. I heard him move until he was close enough that I felt the presence of him behind me like a weather change. I kept my eyes on the trees.

"Look at me," he said.

"I am looking at the forest."

"Isadora." My name in his voice was a warning wrapped in something that could have been silk. "Look at me."

I turned.

He was right there, closer than I expected. The expression on his face was the most controlled terrifying thing I had seen since a man turned into a wolf in a moonlit clearing. Not rage. Something colder than rage, refined by years into something far more dangerous.

I looked directly at it and did not flinch.

"I want to go home," I said.

"That is not an option."

"Then we have a problem." My voice stayed level. "I am not following your schedule and presenting myself at your study on command like something you own. I have people who need to know I am alive. I have a life falling apart sixty miles south of here." I held his gaze. "So tell me clearly. What are you. What is this place. What are all of you."

Something moved in his face beneath the cold fury. There and gone.

"You know what we are," he said.

"I saw men become wolves," I said. "I want to hear you say it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Werewolves," he said. Flat and simple, like the word cost him nothing.

"How," I said.

"We are born this way. It is not a curse or a disease." His jaw shifted. "It is what we are. What we have always been."

"And the pack. The structure. All of it."

"Order," he said. "Without it we are only animals."

The muscle in his jaw moved once. "Something that is trying," he said quietly, "to keep you alive."

The words landed differently than I expected. Not like a threat. Like something that weighed more than that.

I looked at him the way I had been looking since that first night through iron bars, past the cold and the authority and the blankness and coldness he wore like armor. Something was wrong with him. Not wrong like dangerous, though he was certainly that. Wrong like broken. Like a man carrying something crushing for so long he had forgotten what it felt like without it.

"What happened to you?" I asked quietly.

The question landed somewhere I was not ready for.

Not an accusation. Not cruelty. She said it the way you ask about a scar, simply and directly, with the kind of honesty that leaves nowhere to hide.

My wolf surged.

He had been pressing against my control since I walked in and the closer I stood the worse it became, that pull beneath rational thought, ancient and merciless and absolutely without pity. He wanted to close the distance. He wanted to reach for her. He knew exactly what she was to us.

I remembered the curse.

I stepped back. One step then another until there was enough space to breathe. Her eyes followed me, confused and searching and completely unafraid, and that was almost worse than everything else. Every person in this building feared me.

She looked at me like I was a question she intended to answer whether I agreed to it or not.

"Get some rest," I said after a lot of resisting and calming my wolf . "You will come to my study tomorrow. That is not a request."

I walked to the door.

"Evander."

I stopped. Hand on the frame.

"You did not answer my question," she said.

Three full seconds. My back to her. My wolf clawing. The weight of something nameless sitting between us in the warm quiet room.

"No," I said. "I did not."

I left before she could say anything else.

I sat behind my desk and stared at the wall for a long time.

She had asked what happened to me.

Four years ago 

Not one person had asked me that.

Not one.