CHAPTER 3: THE WOMAN WHO KNEW

Sera's POV

I did not turn around immediately.

When you grew up the way I grew up you learned not to react fast to things coming up behind you. Fast reactions gave people information. They told whoever was watching how scared you were and where the fear lived and what they could do with it. I had learned to breathe first and react second and that habit had saved me more than once.

I breathed.

Then I turned around.

She was old. Not in the way that was easy to look at and dismiss. Old in the way that made you pay attention, the kind of age that had been earned through things that would have finished most people before they got there. White hair pulled back. Small frame. Dressed plainly in dark clothing that had seen better years. She was standing two feet behind me and she had moved across gravel in the dark without making a sound I heard and I had been listening.

Her eyes were on my wrist.

I pulled my coat sleeve down.

She looked up at my face without any reaction to me covering it. Like she had already seen what she needed to see.

I have been looking for you for a long time, she said again. Same tone. Patient and flat. The tone of someone delivering a fact they had carried for years and were finally putting down.

Who are you, I said.

Dassa. She said it like the name explained something. It did not explain anything to me. My name is Dassa and I knew your mother and you need to get up off the ground because the cold out here is not good for what is happening inside your chest right now.

I stared at her.

She did not move. Did not reach out to help me up. Just stood and waited.

I got up on my own. My legs were unsteady and I kept one hand pressed against my sternum where the tearing feeling had settled into a deep continuous ache. I straightened and looked at her straight.

You knew my mother, I said.

Yes.

She is dead.

I know that too.

Something about the way she said it. Not sorry. Not careful. Just acknowledging it the way you acknowledged weather. My mother had been gone for nine years and I had learned to talk about it without feeling it too much but the flatness in this woman's voice when she said it made the ache in my chest sharpen for a second before I pulled it back.

What do you want, I said.

To get you somewhere warm before the bond damage gets worse. She turned and started walking like the conversation was already settled. There is a road about a mile east. I have a car there. You can ask me everything else once you are sitting down and not about to fall over again.

I did not follow her immediately.

She stopped without turning around. I know you have no reason to come with me. I know you don't know me. But you are two miles from a pack that will send someone to collect you within the hour and you are in no condition to run and the mark on your wrist is going to start burning again in approximately ten minutes. She paused. Come or don't. But decide fast.

The mark burned.

Not ten minutes. Right then. A slow heat starting up from my wrist like it was agreeing with her timeline just to make a point and I pressed my palm over it through the coat sleeve and made a decision that was less about trusting her and more about the fact that she was right. I could not run. I could not go back. The options were this woman or the gravel.

I followed her.

The car was old and clean and smelled like pine and something herbal I did not have a name for. She drove without talking and I sat in the passenger seat with my coat still on and my hand still pressed over the mark and watched the dark road and said nothing.

The ache in my chest was changing.

Not getting worse exactly. Changing shape. The tearing feeling was settling into something lower and more constant, a weight sitting behind my sternum that had not been there this morning. I had heard the older Omegas talk about rejection. About what it did physically. I had listened but not paid close attention because it was not something I expected to need to understand.

I understood it now.

The forming mate bond. That was what they called it. A connection that began to exist between potential mates before either of them did anything to create it. You could not feel it while it was forming. You only felt it when it was cut.

Except I had felt it before it was cut.

I had felt it the moment I walked into that hall and closed the distance between us and the mark burned. I had felt something pull tight in my chest before his eyes went flat and he looked away. Before the three words.

That was the part I could not make sense of. The pull had been real. For one second before he shut it down I had felt it from both sides and that should not have been possible. That was not how Presentation worked. That was not how any of this worked.

I looked at the old woman driving.

What is the mark, I said.

She was quiet for long enough that I thought she was deciding how much to tell me.

Then she said, what did your mother tell you about it.

Nothing. Cover it and don't ask.

She nodded slowly like that confirmed something. Your mother was trying to protect you. She understood what it was and she knew that as long as it stayed covered and stayed sleeping, you had a chance at a normal life.

Sleeping, I said.

The mark is a seal, she said. Not a birthmark. A seal placed on you before you were born by people who needed what is underneath it to stay contained.

I looked at her. What is underneath it.

She turned off the main road onto a narrow track through trees and the headlights lit up the dark between the trunks and she drove another minute before she answered.

Something very old, she said. Something that has been waiting a long time for the right moment to wake up. She paused. The rejection tonight was not the end of something, Sera. She stopped the car in front of a small stone house at the end of the track and turned off the engine. It was the beginning of it. The seal cracked tonight when the bond formed. What is underneath it felt the crack and it is already moving.

I sat very still.

What does that mean, I said.

She got out of the car and walked to the front door of the house and unlocked it and pushed it open and light came out from inside, warm and yellow.

Come in, she said. There is a lot I need to tell you before morning.

She went inside.

I sat in the cold dark car and pressed my hand flat over the mark and felt it.

Felt the slow deep pulse of it. Steady and patient and completely unlike anything it had done before tonight. Not heat. Not pain.

A heartbeat.

Something underneath the seal breathing in long slow rhythms like a thing that had been asleep for a very long time and had just opened its eyes.

I got out of the car.