Chapter 4: What He Knows

The apartment is everything the building promises and nothing like what I expected.

Not cold. Not the deliberate performance of wealth I braced for. Just... large and dark and quiet and real, like a place that belongs to someone rather than being owned by them, and looks out at the city through the floor to ceiling windows.

Makes me try hard to remember what thinking clearly feels like.

I sleep for six hours.

Which is remarkable because I have not slept six consecutive hours since I was approximately seventeen years old. My body has been running on four hours and hypervigilance for so long that sleeping in a strange place should be impossible, my nervous system doesn't know how to do it, and yet I wake up in Thalrion Bloodryn's guest room at seven in the morning having slept like something that doesn't have problems.

My wolf is very comfortable.

My wolf has been comfortable since we got here and he would like me to acknowledge that.

I get up and find the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror and have a quiet word with the person looking back at me. That person slept in the Alpha King's apartment after being engineered into a party on the wrong floor and sitting across from him in the low light and taking a pastry from his hand like a person who wanted a pastry and was given one by someone who noticed.

That person needs to get it together.

I splash water on my face and go looking for coffee.

The kitchen is at the end of the main corridor and it is large and real and has a very good machine and I am figuring out how to use it when I hear him behind me.

"Third button," he says.

I press the third button.

I do not turn around yet because I woke up six minutes ago and I am in yesterday's clothes and he is probably in whatever the Alpha King wears in the morning and I need a moment before I deal with whatever that looks like.

The machine starts.

I turn around.

He is in dark trousers and a shirt that is not fully buttoned and his hair is slightly different from last night, less arranged, more just, his, and he looks like a person in the morning who happens to also look like that and I need to go back to the mirror and have a stronger word with myself.

"You stayed," he says.

"I said I would," I reply.

"You also have a history of leaving before morning," he says. "I checked."

"You checked," I repeat.

"I told you. I know a great many things about you."

I look at him. "That's... unsettling."

"Probably," he agrees. He crosses to the counter and pours two cups when the machine finishes and sets one in front of me and wraps his hands around the other and looks at me across the counter and I think about how this is a very domestic scene for two people who met last night under circumstances that were engineered by one of them.

"I imagined we'd talk properly," I say.

"Yes."

"In the morning."

"Yes."

"It's morning," I say.

"It is," he replies. He is looking at me with those silver eyes over his coffee and the morning light is coming in gold through the kitchen window and his shirt is not fully buttoned and I am having a crisis.

I drink my coffee.

He reaches past me to get something from the cabinet behind me.

He has to lean slightly to do it, his arm passing close, and for a moment he is right there, his chest near my shoulder, his scent at full proximity, and my wolf surges up with everything he has and I grab the counter edge with one hand and look at the window and breathe.

He pulls back with whatever he got from the cabinet.

He looks at me.

I look at the window.

"Vaelis," he says.

"I'm fine," I say.

"You're holding the counter."

I let go of the counter. "I wasn't holding it."

He looks at me for a moment and something in his expression is very specific and very warm and very much aware of exactly what just happened, which is mortifying, and I pick up my coffee and drink it and look at the city through the window and try to remember what composure feels like.

"The man who has been hunting you," he says, giving me the topic shift like a lifeline, and I could genuinely kiss him for it. "As I'd said, his name is Noctyros Malvane. We spoke about him last night but I want to show you something this morning."

He looks at me for a moment.

Then he crosses to the sitting area and opens a laptop and turns it toward me and the screen shows a photograph, a room, clinical and white, a man on a table in the center of it surrounded by equipment that is medical but in a room that is not a hospital and with people who are not doctors.

I know what I'm looking at before my brain catches up.

Another Omega.

Male.

"Who is this?" I ask quietly.

"Someone who was found before we could get to him," he replies. "Eight months ago. He wasn't your bloodline, not your specific abilities, but close enough to be useful for preliminary research." His jaw tightens slightly. "He didn't survive the research."

The room is very quiet.

I look at the photograph and I don't let myself feel it yet because feeling it requires a stillness I don't have access to right now.

"The people in the parking garage work for the same man," Thalrion says. "He has been hunting you specifically for years. What he wants from you is not what he wanted from this man." He closes the laptop. "He wants what your bloodline can produce. An heir. A child born from a Nyther Omega and an Alpha of his choosing that would inherit abilities from both parents at double potency. Every current existing power structure is below it."

I stare at him. "What are you saying?" 

"Thalrion stares back. "Noctyros doesn't want to experiment on you. He wants the benefits your bloodline offers. A child from a Nyther Omega doesn't just inherit traits from both parents, it amplifies them. Strength doubled. Ability doubled. Something that could dismantle every power structure in this world in a single generation." His voice is very even. "He wants an heir. Engineered through you. That he controls."

I put my coffee down.

I look at the window.

"You know about the bloodline," I say.

"I know everything about the bloodline," he replies. "I've been looking for you for two years."

I look back at him. "Why?"

He holds my gaze. Silent.

"Why do you care?" I ask. And my voice comes out quieter than I intend, younger somehow.

He looks at me for a long moment.

And I think about eight years of running and the shape of what I was running from and how I understood maybe half of it and Thalrion just handed me the other half over morning coffee in a kitchen with his shirt not fully buttoned and I don't know what to do with any of it.

"Vaelis," he says.

I look at him.

His expression is doing something careful and specific and he is close, the counter between us and nothing else, and his eyes are on mine and the bond is right there, warm and open, and he says, "You're not running from this alone anymore."

My throat does something.

I look away first.

Because if I keep looking at him while he says things like that in that voice I am going to do something that embarrasses both of us and it is seven in the morning and I have known this man for less than twelve hours.

"I need to make a call," I say.

"Of course," he says.

I take my coffee and walk away.