Chapter 3: Not A Request

He says it like it's already decided.

That's going to change.

Four words and he delivers them like they're a fact he's simply informing me of, like my eight years of surviving alone, of burning identities and crossing borders and never once letting anyone close enough to matter, is a phase he's willing to wait out.

"You don't know me," I say.

"I know everything about you, everything I should know." He doesn't say it unkindly. He says it the way you state coordinates. Precise. "I know you present as human when you're not. I know your scent blockers are Varro brand, third generation, which are the best on the market but have a fifteen percent degradation rate in high Alpha environments." His eyes hold mine. "I know you've been feeling it fail for the last twenty minutes."

My stomach drops.

"I know the things you are capable of and I know what you are, Vaelis." Quieter now. "Male Omega. The Nyther bloodline. The last one."

The last one.

I hear those words and something cold moves through me from the inside out because nobody knows that. Nobody alive knows that. I have never said it, never written it, never let it exist anywhere outside my own head, and this man is sitting across from me in a penthouse forty floors above a city that would tear me apart with his hands relaxed and his voice even like he's reading from a file.

"How? How do you know all of that?"  I ask.

"Because I've been looking for you for two years." He reaches forward and turns the photograph face down, a small gesture, and I file it away the same way I file everything, quickly, for later. "And I found you before Noctyros Malvane did. Which means tonight is the best possible version of this conversation."

I don't know that name but something about the way he says it makes my skin tighten. "Who is that?" 

"Someone who also knows what you are." Thalrion's jaw tightens, barely, just enough to catch. "Someone who doesn't want to talk."

The room feels smaller than it did a minute ago.

I think about the last city. The feeling I'd had for two weeks before I left, low and crawling, something watching from a direction I couldn't locate. I'd called it paranoia. I'd packed anyway. And I'd told myself it was nothing, just my nerves, just eight years of running making me see threats that weren't there.

"You set me up tonight," I say. "Dex. The party downstairs."

"I created a situation." No apology. "You walked into it. That part was yours."

I stand up.

Both men at the edges of the room shift.

Thalrion raises one finger and they go still.

He looks up at me from his seat and doesn't move and doesn't raise his voice and somehow that is more commanding than anything physical could be.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he says.

"I've heard that before."

"Not from me."

"I don't know you."

"No." He stands, and God, he is a lot of person when he's fully upright, and my wolf does something completely unacceptable in my chest. "But your wolf does."

The silence after that is loud.

Because he's right and I hate that he's right and I have nothing to throw at it. My wolf has been turned toward this man since the second I crossed the threshold and he is still there, still down in reverence, still certain, and every smart exit I have mapped in this room has a body standing near it.

Thalrion steps around the table.

He stops in front of me, close, too close, close enough that breathing becomes something I have to consciously manage, and he looks down at me with those silver eyes and his voice when he speaks is the quietest it's been all night.

"Come with me," he says. "Not as a prisoner. Not as an acquisition." A pause. "As someone I am choosing to keep alive."

"That's not the comfort you think it is."

His mouth does that almost-smile. "It will be."

He turns toward the door and the men step aside and he walks through it like the conversation is finished, like the matter is settled, like I am already following him.

My wolf is already following him.

And God help me, my feet are moving.