Caught by my enemy

"What the hell do I do?"

I was upright before I'd finished the thought, one hand pressed to my temple where a migraine was already forming its opening argument. I moved carefully, quietly, every instinct focused on not waking the man still sleeping beside me.

I knew I should just go. Every rational part of me said go.

But I looked anyway.

He was enormous, tall enough that his feet probably reached the end of this bed with nothing to spare, built like someone who had never once in his life been told he couldn't do something. Dark hair tousled against the pillow. Tan skin marked with tattoos that I hadn't had the presence of mind to properly appreciate last night. Even unconscious and rumpled, he looked like something that shouldn't exist in the same world as me.

Athena made a small, involuntary sound somewhere in my head.

I know, I told her silently. I know. We're still leaving.

I gathered my clothes from the floor quickly, avoiding looking at him again because I already knew I'd regret it if I did. I spotted the stack of cash on the nightstand, several bills fanned out carelessly, the way people leave money when they have enough of it that a few bills missing wouldn't register. I hesitated for exactly one second, thought about the cab fare I needed to get back to a pack that owned every dollar I'd ever had access to, and took one.

Survival, I told myself. Not theft. Just survival. I'd been practising that particular distinction for years.

I slipped out of the penthouse and found my way to the street, flagging down a cab before the morning could get any brighter or my headache any louder.

"Hyacinth Estate," I told the driver, and settled back as he pulled away.

To humans, the estate looked like an extended-family compound, gated, residential, quietly self-contained. The kind of place that explained itself without needing to. It was a comfortable enough cover. Right now, all I needed it to be was close.

"We're here, ma'am."

I handed him fifty dollars and didn't wait for his expression to finish forming. Whatever he thought I was, he wasn't entirely wrong about the kind of night I'd had, and I'd stopped caring about strangers' opinions somewhere around my sixteenth birthday.

I stood at the estate entrance and assessed the situation.

"If you want to get inside successfully," Athena said, "stop standing on the road like a lost idiot and move."

I startled so hard I nearly tripped over my own feet.

She hadn't spoken to me, not really, not like this, since the rejection. I'd grown so accustomed to her silence that her voice arriving now felt like a door opening in a wall I'd forgotten had a door. I wanted to stop and ask her a hundred questions.

Instead, I moved, because she was right, and because understanding Athena could wait until I was safely inside.

I made it across the grounds without triggering the patrol. Pressed my forehead against the pack house door when I finally closed it behind me, breathing slowly, letting my heart rate negotiate its way back to something reasonable.

"Well. You look exactly like one of those street hookers."

Of course.

I turned around.

Veronica stood in the corridor in an ebony dress absolutely covered in sequins, both hands on her hips, radiating the specific energy of someone who had been awake since dawn, specifically to ruin my morning. I looked at the dress. I looked at the sequins. I looked at the way the fabric was losing a structural argument with her figure in every direction simultaneously.

I pressed my lips together very firmly.

Not now, Selene. Not worth it.

"I went to pick up groceries," I said.

Even I winced at that one.

"In that dress." She looked me up and down. "At this hour." She let the pause breathe. "Where are the groceries?"

"I'm sorry," I said instead, which was not an answer but was the only thing I had. "Can you please just let me go?"

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she started laughing, properly, holding her stomach laughing, the kind that suggested she found the situation genuinely delightful.

I had no idea what was funny. I waited.

"The great sarcastic Selene," she gasped between laughs, "is begging."

I continued waiting.

She collected herself eventually, smoothed her sequined disaster of a dress, and looked at me with the expression of someone about to offer terms.

"My laundry. My room. The whole week." She examined her nails. "And don't touch my things."

"Done," I said immediately. "Please don't tell anyone."

"I know what you did yesterday, and I am yet to report you."

She rolled her eyes and walked away, which I chose to interpret as agreement.

I stood there for a moment after she'd gone.

Atlas would have been so much worse.

The thought arrived with a cold clarity that I didn't linger on. A week of Veronica's laundry was nothing. A week of Veronica's laundry was practically a gift.

I made it to my room, stripped, and went straight to the bathroom.

I didn't want to wash his scent off. That was the truth of it, the pine and woodsy warmth of him had settled somewhere in my chest, and I was in no hurry to lose it. Even Athena was quiet in a contented way rather than her usual wounded way, nose turned faintly toward whatever traces of him still clung to my skin.

But Atlas's senses were sharp, and his suspicion was sharper. If he caught even a thread of an unfamiliar male scent on me, the consequences would be swift, and I already had enough bruises from last week.

I scrubbed carefully and tried not to mourn it too much.

Afterwards, I lay on my bed and let the flashbacks come, the bar, the dancing, the man who'd appeared out of nowhere and looked at me like I was worth being careful with. I couldn't remember his name. I wasn't certain I'd ever known it. But I remembered his laugh, and the way he'd kept checking on me, and the fact that I'd woken up this morning feeling like something rather than nothing.

I was still thinking about it when I heard footsteps.

His scent or hers?

I catalogued automatically, the way you learn to do when it matters.

Hers.

"Are you getting up, or do I have to drag you out?" Veronica's voice preceded her arrival by approximately three seconds. "Chores don't do themselves, hooker."

"Coming," I called, and was already moving.

The pack house took several hours and every bit of concentration I had.

Veronica followed me from room to room like a sequined shadow, finding things to criticise with the dedication of someone who had no other hobbies. I tuned her out after the first twenty minutes and lost myself in the work instead, the satisfying geometry of clean floors, the particular quiet of a room after you'd brought it back to order. The pack pups ran through twice, and I let them, redirecting them around the wet patches with the patience I reserved exclusively for people in this house who hadn't done anything wrong yet.

It wasn't happiness exactly. But it was something to do with my hands, and sometimes that was enough.

"Someone's working hard today," Veronica said, in the particular tone she used when she wanted to imply something without saying it directly. "Almost like you're trying to make up for something."

"Thank you for the encouragement," I said pleasantly.

She scowled.

"Who cleaned this house?"

The Luna's voice came from the doorway of the main room. She stood there looking around with an expression I didn't immediately recognise on her face because I so rarely saw it directed anywhere near me.

Approval.

"The omega did it," Veronica said, before I could speak. I noted, with some surprise, that she didn't try to take the credit. Small mercies. A camaraderie.

The Luna looked at me directly. "You've done well today. Finish the dishes and take the rest of the evening off."

I kept my face composed until she'd turned away.

Even Atlas can't override a Luna's direct command.

The thought landed like a small, quiet miracle. I held it carefully.

"Thank you, Luna," I said, in the smallest voice I owned.

The dishes took another hour. Veronica stood at the counter for most of it, delivering a steady stream of commentary that I allowed to wash over me like background noise, the way I'd learned to process most things in this house, present enough to respond if necessary, absent enough to stay sane.

By the time I set the last dish on the rack, I was exhausted in the good way. The kind of tired that came from actually doing something rather than just enduring.

"Looks like I'm done here." I dried my hands and turned to face her. "My services are no longer needed." I paused. "Sleep well, Veronica."

I blew her a kiss on my way out the door.

The growl that followed me down the corridor was deeply satisfying. I held onto it all the way to my room.

Then I lay down and thought about him, and the satisfaction quietly dissolved.

Dark hair. Warm hands. A laugh I couldn't quite reconstruct, no matter how hard I tried. I didn't even get his name.

It's for the best, I decided, staring at the ceiling.

I'm probably just another girl he won't remember by Tuesday. And if he does remember me, a girl who snuck out before dawn and took his cash. He wouldn't be wrong about what that looks like.

I closed my eyes before I could finish the thought.

Some things were better left in the dark where they happened.