Chapter Two: The Wrong Kind of Attention

I tell myself I imagined it.

The smile. The way his eyes found me like he was looking for me specifically, like I was the thing in the room he had come to see. I tell myself it was nothing, the natural curiosity of a man arriving somewhere new, cataloguing faces the way Alphas do. It meant nothing. I meant nothing by standing there.

I am good at talking myself out of things.

I finish delivering the towels to the linen closet on the second floor and take the back stairs down to the kitchen, the long way, the way that does not pass through the entrance hall. I do not examine why I choose that route. I just walk it.

Reina is at the stove when I come in, stirring something that smells like garlic and slow heat. She glances up and then back down, which is her version of a greeting.

“They are earlier than expected,” I say, because someone has to say it.

“By two days.” She does not look up. “Alpha Voss runs on his own schedule, apparently. His coordinator sent word an hour ago. I had to pull the dinner forward.”

“How many in his party?”

“Six. Him and five others. Two of them look like sentinels, two I cannot place, and one—” She pauses. Something in the pause makes me look at her more carefully. “One of them is a woman. Very put together. She sat down at the dining table like she already owned it.”

I file that away without comment and reach for the evening schedule on the counter. Dinner at seven, which means I have just over an hour to finish the east wing, change, and make sure the table settings are correct. My handwriting is in the margins of the schedule from this morning, small and even. Someone has added a note beside the seating arrangement in different ink.

Alpha Voss requests the seat facing the door.

Of course he does.

Mara finds me in the east wing twenty minutes later, her eyes carrying the particular brightness they get when she has information she is about to pretend she stumbled into accidentally.

“He asked about you,” she says.

I do not stop smoothing the duvet. “Who did.”

“Voss.” She leans against the doorframe. “He asked Sentinel Greaves who the woman on the stairs was. Greaves told him you were the Alpha’s personal attendant and apparently Voss just nodded like that was an interesting answer.”

I keep my hands moving. Corner, fold, tuck.

“Greaves should mind what he shares with visiting Alphas.”

“Selene.”

“I heard you, Mara.”

“You are doing the thing where you go very still and very efficient when something bothers you.”

“I am making a bed.”

“You have smoothed that same corner four times.”

I stop. She is right. I press my palms flat against the duvet and breathe once through my nose, slow and deliberate, and then I step back from the bed and look at her.

“It does not matter that he asked,” I say. “I am staff. He is a guest. That is the full length of whatever this is.”

Mara looks at me for a long moment. She does not agree out loud, which is its own kind of answer.

Dinner is not part of my duties.

My job ends when the table is set, the food is confirmed with Reina, and the attending staff are briefed. I do not sit at the Alpha’s table. I do not pour wine or carry plates. There are others for that, younger pack members working their rotation through the house. My role is coordination, preparation, the invisible machinery that makes everything run without anyone noticing it is running.

I am good at being invisible.

I am standing in the corridor outside the dining room at five past seven, checking the evening log against the supply list from the kitchen, when the dining room doors open and a voice says, “You must be Selene.”

I look up.

He is closer than I expected. He must have come out quietly, or I was more absorbed in the log than I thought, because there are only a few feet between us now and he is looking at me with that same expression from the staircase. Open. Unhurried. Like he has nowhere else he would rather be.

“Alpha Voss,” I say. My voice comes out even. I am proud of that.

“Caden,” he says. “Please.” He tilts his head slightly, studying me in a way that is not unkind but is very direct. “Greaves told me you run the household.”

“I assist with it.”

“He made it sound like more than that.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “You arranged the east wing?”

“Yes.”

“It is well done. The heating especially. That room was cold when I stayed here two years ago.”

I blink. “You have been to Ironveil before.”

“Once. Briefly.” He says it simply, no performance in it. “Lucian and I go back further than most people know.”

I do not know what to do with that so I do not do anything with it. I close the log and hold it against my chest. “Is there something you need, Alpha? If dinner is not to your satisfaction I can speak with—”

“Dinner is excellent.” He pauses. “I came out because I wanted to speak to you.”

The corridor feels smaller than it did a minute ago.

“There is nothing I can help you with that one of the senior staff cannot—”

“It is not about the house.” His voice is easy, unhurried, but there is something careful underneath it, something measured. “I have heard things about Ironveil. About certain situations within the pack. I am not here only for the diplomatic visit, Selene. I want you to know that.”

I stare at him.

I do not know what he means. I do not know how much he knows, or thinks he knows, or what any of it has to do with me standing in a corridor with an evening log pressed to my chest like a shield.

What I do know is that the dining room door behind him is still open, and on the other side of it, at the head of the table, Lucian Blackthorn is looking directly at us.

Not at Voss.

At me.

And for the first time in three months, his face is not unreadable. Whatever he is feeling is sitting right there on the surface, raw and barely held, and it is the most dangerous thing I have seen since the day he tore us apart.

I look away first. I always do.

But my hands, pressed flat against the log, are no longer steady.