Chapter 2 — What He Thinks He Found

I count one hundred and twelve steps from the great hall back to the Omega quarters.

I know because I counted them the first time, three years ago, when Alpha Caius called me forward at a different ceremony for a different humiliation, and I needed something to do with my brain that wasn't feeling things. One hundred and twelve. Never varies. I've checked.

Tonight it takes me longer.

My feet know the way. The rest of me is still in that hall, still standing against the left wall, still watching Caius's face do the thing it did — that open, unguarded confusion — while a hundred wolves turned to look at the thing he was looking at.

Me.

The Omega with nothing worth smelling.

I press the back of my hand to my mouth. Not distress. Thinking. There's a difference and I'm particular about it.

The Moonveil root should have worked. I took it twenty minutes before the ceremony. I've been taking it for two years and it has never — not once — failed to flatten my scent to background noise. Ash has been quiet through the whole walk home and her silence now is the kind that means she's decided something and isn't ready to tell me what.

I hate when she does that.

My room is the last door on the left in the east corridor. Smaller than a storage closet, which I know because it was a storage closet before they needed more Omegas and ran out of rooms. Someone left a nail in the wall where the previous occupant used to hang something and I've never removed it. It's the only decoration.

I sit on the edge of my cot.

The nail catches the torchlight from under the door. Just barely.

I think about Caius's face.

Here is what I know about Alpha Caius Voss: he is thirty-one years old, he took the title at twenty-five when his father's heart gave out during a border dispute, he has never taken a Luna despite three years of pack pressure, and he runs Ironveil with the particular efficiency of a man who learned early that caring about individuals is a structural weakness. He is not cruel. I've said this before and I mean it precisely — he is not cruel the way a wall is not cruel. The wall doesn't want to hurt you. The wall just doesn't move.

He has never looked at me before tonight.

No. That's not — I need to be accurate. He has looked at me. Past me. Through me. In the direction of the space I was occupying. Never at me specifically, never with — whatever that was. That confusion. Like he'd found a word he didn't have a language for.

Scent recognition.

The thought lands flat and certain.

He thinks I'm his mate.

I sit with that for a moment.

Then I almost laugh. I press my knuckle harder against my mouth and breathe through my nose and do not laugh because the walls in this corridor are thin and I have a policy about letting people hear things that could be used against me.

But. Genuinely. If I could —

An Alpha. Thinking his fated mate is an Omega. The lowest-ranked wolf in his own pack. The one who scrubs his training quarters at four in the morning so she can have a lock on a bathroom door.

Selene, if you exist, your sense of humor is catastrophic.

*He's wrong.*

Ash. Finally.

I wait. She doesn't add anything. Just those two words sitting in the space behind my sternum where she lives, flat and certain and — something else. Something underneath the certainty that I can't read.

"Wrong how," I say. Out loud. To my empty room.

She doesn't answer.

Of course she doesn't.

I lie back on the cot and stare at the ceiling. There's a crack in the plaster above me that I've traced so many times I could draw it from memory — branches left, main line right, small fork near the east wall where the damp got in two winters ago. I know this ceiling better than I know most people.

I'm still staring at it when I hear the footsteps.

Not the Omega corridor shuffle. Not the Beta stride I've learned to identify by weight and rhythm. These are — measured. Deliberate. The kind of steps that aren't going anywhere in particular because everywhere is already accounted for.

My back finds the wall before I've decided to move.

The footsteps stop outside my door.

Silence.

Then a knock. Three times. Not aggressive. Not hesitant. Just — informational. I am here. I am knocking. Your response is your own business.

I don't answer.

"I know you're awake." Male voice. Low. I don't recognize it, which means it's not pack. "Your light's on."

I look at the torchlight coming under the door. Which is, in fact, on.

Damn.

"That's not proof of consciousness," I say. "Torches don't care."

A pause. Long enough that I think he's left.

"No," he says. "They don't."

I open the door because I want to see who has a voice like that. That's the only reason. Not curiosity — assessment. There's a difference and I'm —

He's taller than I expected.

Dark skin, jaw sharp enough to be architectural, and eyes that catch the corridor torchlight and give back the wrong color. Not brown. Not black.

Gold.

The same amber-gold I saw in the market this morning when I passed the traveling merchant stalls and felt — nothing. I felt nothing. I walked past him and felt completely, totally nothing, and Ash went quiet for the first time in three days, and I filed it under irrelevant and kept walking.

I was wrong.

I know I was wrong because right now every part of me is very loudly cataloging exits and I only do that when something registers as threat.

He looks at me. Not at my rank-marks. Not at the Omega quarters door. At my face. Like he's checking something.

His nostrils don't move.

That's — strange. Every wolf scent-checks instinctively on first contact. It's involuntary. You can't not do it. Even I do it, even with the Moonveil root sitting in my system.

He doesn't.

"You left before he could speak to you," the stranger says.

I lean against the doorframe. Casual. Calculated casual, which is different from actual casual but produces the same visual result.

"The Alpha," I say. Not a question.

"Yes."

"And you're what. His messenger."

Something crosses his face. Goes so fast I almost miss it. Not offense — closer to something a person does when they find an unexpected answer to a question they've been asking for a long time.

"No," he says.

The torch at the end of the corridor flickers. Goes steady again. Somewhere in the east wing, a door closes and doesn't quite latch — it drifts open a finger's width, then settles.

I look at him.

He looks at me.

"You're not going to ask my name," he says. Flat. Like he's noting it.

"I'm going to find out anyway," I say. "Seemed inefficient to ask."

He doesn't smile.

But his eyes — just for a second — do something that isn't nothing.

He turns to leave.

"Your boots," I say.

He stops.

"Mud. From the northern ridge." I nod at his feet. Same soil type as the ravine past the tree line, dark red clay, only found in one place in Ironveil territory. "That's pack land. Restricted. You'd need Alpha clearance or you'd need to be very good at not being seen."

A pause.

"Which one," I ask.

He looks at me over his shoulder. Those gold eyes in the torchlight.

He doesn't answer.

He walks away.

I watch him until he turns the corner.

Ash is quiet.

Not the sleeping kind.

Not even the waiting kind.

The kind that happens when she already knows something I don't, and she's decided I need to figure it out myself.

I close the door.

The nail in the wall catches the light.

I stare at it for a long time.