His Move

I felt his eyes on me for the rest of the ceremony.

Not constantly he was too controlled for that. But in the gaps between speeches, between the formal exchanges of pack allegiances and the droning procedural language of interpack law, I would feel it. A weight. A pressure at the side of my face that had nothing to do with the room and everything to do with the man at the head of it.

I didn't look back.

Looking back would mean acknowledging it. Acknowledging it would mean admitting that the thing I had felt when our eyes first met was real and I had spent five years becoming someone who did not entertain things she couldn't afford.

Isla fell asleep against my arm halfway through the third speaker.

I shifted her carefully, letting her head rest in my lap, and kept my eyes fixed on the front of the room with the focused blankness of someone who was absolutely, completely fine.

The ceremony ended at dusk.

Wolves dispersed in clusters toward the guest quarters temporary accommodations the Ashlen Pack had arranged across three of their larger pack houses. I gathered Isla without waking her, hoisting her against my shoulder the way I had done a thousand times, her small weight familiar and grounding.

"Zara."

I stopped.

The voice came from behind me low, even, carrying the particular quality of someone who had never once needed to raise it to be heard. The room had mostly emptied. The wolves still present went very still in the way prey animals go still when something larger enters their awareness.

I turned around slowly.

Kael Drevon stood ten feet away.

Up close he was worse. Taller than he had seemed at the head of the room, broader in the shoulders, with eyes that were a shade of dark grey I had no name for. He had dismissed his guards or they had simply known to make themselves absent and he stood alone in the emptying hall with his hands loose at his sides and his gaze fixed on me with an attention that felt like a physical thing.

Isla stirred against my shoulder. Settled again.

"You were going to leave without speaking to me," he said.

"I don't know you," I replied.

"No." Something moved through his expression not quite amusement, not quite anything I could categorize. "You felt it, though."

It wasn't a question. I didn't treat it like one.

"You must have me confused with someone else." I kept my voice even and my grip on Isla steady. "I'm just an Ashlen bloodline wolf here for a mandatory summit. I have no business with the Lycan King."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then his gaze moved briefly, deliberately to Isla.

Something shifted in his face that I couldn't read.

"Whose child?" he asked.

Every protective instinct I had snapped to attention simultaneously. My wolf pressed forward, hackles raised, a warning growl building at the base of my throat that I suppressed through sheer will.

"Mine," I said.

"I didn't ask whose she is to you." His voice was still even. "I asked whose child."

"The answer is the same." I held his gaze and did not flinch. "She is mine. That's all that's relevant."

The silence between us had texture. He was reading me the same way I was reading him cataloguing, assessing, looking for the edges of things. I got the impression he was very good at finding them.

"You're afraid," he said finally. Not cruel. Just observational.

"I'm cautious," I corrected. "There's a difference."

"Is there."

"Yes. Fear is reactive. Caution is a choice." I shifted Isla's weight against my shoulder. "I choose my battles carefully, Your Highness. This isn't one of them."

I turned to leave.

"Zara Ashlen."

My name in his mouth was a different thing than it had any right to be. I stopped walking but didn't turn around.

"You feel it," he said quietly, from behind me. "The same way I do. And it isn't going away."

I said nothing.

"I'm not Damon Wells," he added. Softer. Like he knew exactly what he was saying and had chosen it with care. "I won't pretend otherwise to make you comfortable. But I'm also not what you're afraid of."

My jaw tightened.

"Goodnight, Your Highness," I said.

And I walked away before he could see that my hands were shaking.

He knew Damon's name.

That was what kept me awake long after Isla was tucked into the narrow guest bed, her stuffed wolf under one arm and her breathing deep and even. I lay on the cot beside her and stared at the ceiling and turned that detail over and over.

He knew Damon's name. He knew mine. He knew about the rejection or suspected enough to reference it and he had looked at my daughter with an expression I couldn't decode but couldn't stop thinking about.

Lycan Kings had intelligence networks. Everyone knew that. Eight territories, hundreds of packs, thousands of wolves you didn't hold all of that without knowing things. It was possible he simply knew about every wolf summoned to this summit.

It was possible.

I didn't believe it.

I pressed the back of my hand against my sternum, where the bond had been quietly rioting since the moment I'd walked into that hall. It felt nothing like the bond with Damon. That had been warmth sudden, sweet, fragile. This was something older. Like bedrock shifting. Like gravity deciding to change direction.

He's not going away, my wolf said.

I know, I told her.

He's going to come back tomorrow.

I know.

She was quiet for a moment.

What are we going to do?

I looked at Isla's sleeping face. The soft curve of her cheek. The dark lashes against her skin. The child who had her father's eyes and absolutely none of his cruelty, and blood in her veins that made old wolves go quiet in ways I had never fully understood.

Whatever was happening between me and the Lycan King whatever the bond wanted, whatever he intended Isla came first. She had always come first.

We're going to be careful, I told my wolf.

But even as I thought it, I knew careful was getting harder.

Because Kael Drevon had looked at me like I was something he had been waiting for.

And the worst part the part I would not say aloud, not even to myself in the dark was that some broken, stubborn, treacherous piece of me had felt exactly the same way.