Chapter 5: What He Already Knows

I don't sleep.

Not because the room isn't good, nope. It's actually the nicest room I've ever been in, which is its own kind of disorienting, all low light and floor to ceiling glass and sheets that feel like they've never met a discount rack in their life. Not because I'm uncomfortable either. 

But because Thalrion Bloodryn is somewhere in this building and my wolf knows exactly where.

I can feel the direction of him like a pull in my sternum, faint but constant, the way you feel a sound more than hear it. My wolf has been tracking him through walls for the last hour without my permission, noting every shift, every time the distance changes, and I cannot turn it off no matter how hard I try.

This is what nobody tells you about bonds.

They don't ask.

I get up and go to the window and look at the city spread out below, all light and indifferent movement, and I press my palm flat against the glass and try to think clearly. It's difficult. His scent is still in this room even though he left an hour ago and my scent blocker gave up the fight somewhere between the elevator and here, which means I am standing in a strange room, completely unmasked, for the first time in three years.

It feels like being naked in a public street.

It feels like exhaling after holding my breath for eight years.

Both of those things are true at the same time and I don't know what to do with that.

I hear the door.

I don't spin around this time. I watch his reflection appear in the glass instead, tall and dark, and I keep my voice level. "You said the door wasn't locked, that's not the same as an open invitation."

"I need to show you something," he says. No apology. No preamble.

"It's two in the morning."

"I know what time it is."

I turn around. He's in the doorway, jacket gone, collar open, and he's holding a tablet with the kind of expression that makes my stomach tighten before I even know why. Not angry. Not cold. Something more careful than either of those things.

"What?" I ask.

He crosses the room and holds the tablet out to me.

I take it.

It's a photograph. A room, clinical and white, and in the center of it a man on a table, and I know immediately, before my brain catches up, that the man is an Omega. Male. Young. The equipment around him is medical but the room is not a hospital and the people in it are not doctors. There are no identifying markers on anything. No badges, no logos, no faces turned toward the camera.

Just the table. Just the man. Just the equipment monitoring something internal, something biological, something that my own body recognizes with a lurch of cold horror.

"Who is this?" I ask.

"Someone Noctyros Malvane found eight months ago." Thalrion's voice is even. "Another male Omega. He is from your bloodline, and does not have all your abilities, but he possesed enough. Enough to experiment on. Enough to try to understand what your bloodline can do and how to replicate it without you."

My mouth is dry. "And where is he now?"

Thalrion looks at me steadily. "He didn't survive the experiments."

The room is very quiet.

I look back at the photograph and I don't let myself feel it yet because if I feel it yet I won't be able to function and I need to function right now. I hand the tablet back. My hand is steady. I'm proud of that.

"You're showing me this to make sure I don't run," I say.

"I'm showing you this so you understand what runs toward you when you do." He sets the tablet down on the nearest surface and looks at me with those silver eyes and says, "Noctyros doesn't want you for what you are, Vaelis, he wants you for what you can produce. A child from your bloodline and an Alpha of his choosing would inherit abilities that don't exist anywhere else in this world. Strength that compounds. Dominance that doesn't dilute. Something that could dismantle every existing power structure in a single generation."

There it is.

Not just a child, a weapon built from my blood and someone else's ambition, and me on a table in a white room, kept alive only as long as I remain useful, and I have known for eight years that this was the shape of the danger without ever having it laid out this clearly.

"And you?" My voice comes out steady. Good. "What do you want from my bloodline?"

He is quiet for a moment.

"The same thing," he says. "And nothing like it."

"That's not an answer."

"No." He holds my gaze. "It's the truth, which is messier than an answer." He takes one step toward me and stops, like he's being careful about distance in a way I didn't expect from him. "I want what a bond produces naturally. Not engineered. Not forced. I want what exists between us to exist on its own terms."

My wolf presses forward so hard my breath catches.

"You don't believe in bonds," I say. "You told me that."

"I told you I didn't believe in fate." Something shifts in his expression, something complicated and unguarded and there before I can blink. "I believe in what's standing in front of me."

He reaches out slowly, the same way he did in the penthouse, giving me every opportunity to move, and his hand comes up to the side of my neck, not my jaw this time, my neck, his palm warm against my skin where the scent blocker patch used to be, where my pulse is doing something completely out of control, and his thumb traces the line of it once.

My wolf doesn't surge this time.

My wolf goes absolutely, devastatingly still.

Like something receiving what it has needed for a very long time.

"I can feel it failing," he says quietly, his eyes on mine. "Your blocker. I could feel it the moment I walked in."

"I know," I say.

"I can smell you, Vaelis."

Gosh.

Quiet, direct, and they hit me like a physical thing because he doesn't say it like it's information, he says it like it matters. Like what he's smelling is something he has been waiting for without knowing he was waiting, and his eyes are very dark and very close and his hand is warm on my neck and my entire body has made a unilateral decision to stay exactly here.

"This is a terrible idea," I tell him.

"Probably," he agrees.

He doesn't move his hand.

I don't move either.

Outside, the city burns with forty floors of indifferent light, and somewhere in this building Noctyros Malvane's photograph sits on a tablet screen, and Vaelis Nyther, who has not stood still long enough to want anything in eight years, is standing completely still.

Wanting something.

Thalrion's thumb moves against my pulse point one more time, slow and deliberate.

"Sleep," he says quietly. "While you still can."

He drops his hand and walks out and pulls the door closed behind him, and I stand in the dark with my pulse under my own fingers where his hand just was, and my wolf is still devastatingly still, and I understand with complete and terrible clarity that the thing Thalrion Bloodryn just said wasn't about tonight.

It was a warning about what is to come.