Chapter Three

ELI'S POV 

I wore a grey suit to dinner. Drea picked it out, technically, she appeared at my apartment forty minutes before I needed to leave, assessed my open wardrobe with the expression of someone defusing something, and pulled the grey suit from the back where I keep the things I wear when I need to feel like armor.

"Good choice," I said.

"I made the choice," she said. "You were standing there in a towel looking at your shoes."

This was accurate.

She straightened my collar, stepped back, looked at me the way she does when she's checking something that isn't about the clothes. "You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You've said four words since I got here."

"I'm conserving."

She handed me my keys. "He's going to be there and it's going to be terrible and you're going to be completely composed and it's going to cost you something. Just — know that I know that."

I took the keys. "I'll be fine, Drea."

"I know you will," she said. "I just wanted to say it."

*******************

The house was Sienna's, warm, well-kept, the kind of home that had been lived in by someone who understood that space should feel like something. Flowers on the table that weren't from a grocery store. Good candles. Music low enough to be felt rather than heard.

I noticed all of it the way I notice things in depositions, cataloguing, filing, keeping my hands from doing anything they shouldn't.

My father hugged me at the door too long and too hard, the way guilty people hug. I let him.

Sienna came around the corner and I understood immediately why my father had married her. She had warmth the way some people have height — structural, built in, not performed. She took my hands when she introduced herself and looked at me directly and said she was so glad I'd come, and meant it so genuinely that for one difficult second I didn't know what to do with it.

"This is my home," she said. "I hope it can be yours too."

I said thank you. It was the truest thing I could manage.

Then she turned toward the hallway and called his name.

The jaw, the shoulders, the way he fills a room before he speaks — those things I had braced for because they were in photographs, in the pack registry, in the three years of legal research I had done on his territory. I knew what Kieran Voss looked like.

What I had not prepared for was the way he looked at his mother.

He came around the corner and Sienna touched his arm and his entire face did something that I had no file for — something open and unguarded, something that lasted exactly one second before he composed himself and turned to the room and became Alpha again. One second. I catalogued it the way I catalogue everything and then put it somewhere I wasn't planning to look at again.

He saw me.

The room didn't change. His face didn't change. He was very good.

So was I.

We shook hands like strangers, because we were strangers — everything else was ancient history and ancient history does not count as knowing someone. His hand was warm. The handshake lasted exactly as long as it should have.

"Eli," he said.

"Kieran," I said.

My father watched us from across the room and said absolutely nothing, which told me everything about how long he had known this was coming.

Dinner was — fine.

That's the only word for it. It was fine in the way that a room can be fine when several people in it are working very hard to make it fine, and the effort is invisible to everyone except the people making it.

Sienna talked about the house, about the neighborhood, about a garden she was planning in the spring. My father asked about my cases in the vague way he always does — enough to seem interested, not enough to actually know anything. I answered in the vague way I always do.

Kieran spoke when addressed. He was attentive to his mother, measured with my father, and with me he was — careful. That was the word. Not cold. Not hostile. Careful, the way you are with something that could break, or with something that could break you, and I wasn't sure which one he thought I was.

There is a unique particular torture in sitting across from someone who knows your history and pretending you don't know theirs. It is different from lying. It is more like holding your breath for an extended period and telling yourself that's just breathing.

I held my breath all the way through the main course.

Then Sienna stood to clear plates and my father stood to help her and for approximately ninety seconds Kieran and I were alone at the table.

Silence.

I refilled my water. He turned his glass in his hand.

Then, quietly, without looking at me: "I know about the filing."

"I know you do."

"And you know about—" He stopped.

"The dinner?" I said. "Yes. I knew before I came."

He finally looked at me then. Directly, for the first time all evening, which meant we were done pretending the room was fine.

"Why did you come?" he asked.

I looked back at him. "Why did you?"

He didn't answer before our parents came back.

He didn't answer all the way through dessert, or through the goodbyes, or through the specific theater of a family evening arriving at its natural end. Sienna hugged me at the door and told me to come back soon and meant it, and my father patted my shoulder, and I walked to my car and sat in it for a moment before starting the engine.

My phone buzzed. Drea.

“How bad.”

I looked up through the windshield at the lit windows of Sienna's house.

“He asked me why I came”, I typed back.

Three dots. Then:

"What did you say?"