Chapter 2

Dimitri's POV

The pull hits me before my boots even leave the car.

I go still with one hand still braced on the door, and for a second I think something is wrong with me, some old wound from the war with the Kessler pack finally catching up. Then it comes again, sharper, pulling from somewhere behind my sternum like a hook has found purchase in me and started to reel, and I understand what it is a breath before my wolf does.

I have never felt anything like this in my life.

My wolf comes forward fast and wild, faster than I can rein him in, and for a man who has spent every year since he was nineteen making sure nothing ever catches him off guard, that alone is enough to put my teeth on edge. Something in this building belongs to me. Something in this building is mine, and neither of us, man or wolf, knew to expect it tonight.

"Alpha." Carter's voice, low, careful. My Beta has been at my side long enough to know when to speak and when to shut up, and right now he's choosing his words like he's picking through broken glass. "You good?"

I don't answer him. I'm already walking.

The moment the doors open, every sense I have narrows down to one point in the room, a scent threading through a hundred others, cutting through perfume and wolfsbane and old money like none of it is even there. Warm. Soft in a way that has no business being this loud. Something under it that reminds me of home, if I still remembered what that word meant before I was old enough to bury the people who taught it to me.

A low sound builds in my chest as I move through the crowd, quiet enough that only the wolves closest to me will catch it, a rumble I haven't made since I was young enough for it to be forgivable. Carter and Reese, my Gamma, fall in behind me without a word, and I know without looking that they've felt it too, the shift in me, the way a room changes when its Alpha stops being predictable.

Then I see her.

She's across the room like the pull already told me she would be, like my body found her before my eyes caught up. Her hair is pulled back in a low knot, a few pieces loose around her face, and her neck is bare. No mark on it. No claim.

Good. It would be a waste to kill a man over a woman I haven't even properly met yet.

Something in my chest tightens at the sight of her in a way I don't have a name for and don't like not having a name for. I've built a life out of understanding exactly what I'm looking at before it becomes a problem. This is not that. This is a woman standing in gold light with her chin up like she owns the room, and my heart doing something it has never once done before, not for anyone, not even for the people I lost everything trying to avenge.

She goes still. I watch it happen, the exact second her body catches what mine already knows, and then her eyes find mine across the room.

Everyone else stops existing.

I don't know how long we stand there. Long enough that I feel Carter shift beside me, long enough that the noise of the ballroom starts to sound like it's coming from underwater. She doesn't look away first. Most people look away first. I decide, somewhere in that stretch of silence, that I like that about her more than I probably should this early.

Then a man moves toward her, and every good thing in my chest turns to something else entirely.

I don't remember crossing the room. One moment I am watching a stranger reach for what is mine and the next I am standing beside her, close enough that her scent wraps around me whole, and I feel her lean toward me before she's decided to, the smallest shift of her weight in my direction, like her body already knows what her mind hasn't caught up to yet.

That's all I need.

I put my hand at the small of her back and guide her against my side, slow enough that she has every chance to pull away and doesn't. The warmth of her skin moves through my palm and up my arm like something waking up after a long sleep, and I don't examine that too closely either, not with an audience.

"Next time, don't even think about invading my mate's personal space."

I don't raise my voice. I don't need to. The man in front of me, some pack heir who thought tonight was his to spend on her, goes pale in the particular way men go pale when they realize exactly how close they came to a mistake they wouldn't have walked away from.

A growl builds low in my throat anyway, a warning meant for him and every other wolf in the room still deciding whether to test what just happened.

Then a small hand presses flat against my chest, and the growl dies in my throat like someone poured water over a fire and put it out completely.

I look down at her hand before I look at her face. It doesn't make sense to me, the speed of it, the fact that something in me that hasn't gone quiet for anyone in fifteen years just did, on contact, without a fight. Whatever this woman is, whatever she has just done to a wolf that survived his own uncle's blade and half a decade of feral grief afterward, I don't have a word for it yet either.

Warmth spreads from her palm into my chest like it's found something in there that's been cold for a very long time and decided to sit with it anyway.

"Who are you?" I ask, my eyes never leaving hers, and neither does she break the contact.

"Athena King." Her voice is soft, laced with a quiet authority that doesn't ask to be believed, it simply is.

King. Silverwater Pack. I know the name the way everyone in our world knows it, the pack built on the bloodline of two Alphas who ruled it together until they were both gone within a year of each other, leaving a boy of eighteen to take a seat he wasn't ready for and a girl of fourteen standing beside him doing whatever it took to keep it from falling apart. I've heard the stories the way everyone has, secondhand and half exaggerated, a pack that should have splintered after losing both its heads and never did because the two who were left refused to let it. 

I have always respected the Kings, without even meeting them. Pureblood wolves, one of the oldest and most powerful bloodlines left standing, and yet they rule with justice and honesty instead of the fear most old blood relies on. I would have expected the family's only daughter to be arrogant, spoiled by a name that opens every door before she even reaches for it. The woman standing in front of me is nothing like that.

"Athena," I say, testing the shape of her name in my mouth for the first time, because someone nearby has already said it and I intend to know it better than they do.

Something flickers across her face, not fear, not the careful diplomacy I'd expect from a King. Something closer to a challenge, and my wolf, still simmering just beneath the surface, likes that more than I'm ready to admit out loud.

I don't know what I expected walking into this ballroom tonight. A political headache, probably. An excuse to leave early and let Carter handle the rest of the diplomacy I have no patience for. I did not expect to find the one thing I stopped believing in the year I killed a man with my own hands and told myself feelings were a luxury for wolves who hadn't buried both their parents before they were old enough to shave.

I look at her now and I understand, with the same certainty I've used to make every hard call of my life, that whatever this is, I am not walking away from it. My wolf already decided that the moment her scent hit me at the door. The rest of me is going to have to catch up whether it wants to or not.