Alone

Elara's POV 

Kael found me by the old training ring an hour later, exactly where Damon would have told him to look if Damon had been speaking to me, which he currently wasn't. 

My brother had gone quiet after the long hall, the specific quiet that meant he was furious at himself and needed space to be furious in, so I'd left him to it and come here instead  the one place in this pack that had never asked anything of me. Nobody trained the girl who couldn't shift. I used to just sit on the fence and watch.

"You come here a lot," Kael said, from behind me. Not a question.

"How would you know that?"

"The fence post." He nodded at it as he came around into view. "It's worn smooth on one side. Only happens from repeated use." He almost smiled. "Also, your brother told me, when I asked him where to find you and he decided being unhelpful wasn't worth the argument."

"That sounds like him."

"He's protective of you."

"He's a lot of things," I said, "protective is just the one he leads with."

Kael didn't sit. He leaned against the fence a few feet down from me, close enough to talk without shouting, far enough that it didn't feel like he was crowding me, which I appreciated more than I wanted to admit. In daylight, without an audience, without the ceremony and the torches and two hundred people holding their breath, he looked different. Younger, maybe. Or just less like a rumor and more like a person.

"I meant what I said in there," he said.

 

"About apologizing. I've spent a lot of years being the person people talk around instead of to. I didn't expect to do the same thing to someone else without noticing."

"Is that an apology or an observation?"

"Can it be both?"

Despite myself, I almost smiled. "I suppose."

We sat with that for a minute.

 

Somewhere past the tree line a bird was doing something complicated and showy with its call, and I found myself grateful for the noise, for something to listen to that wasn't the silence stretching out between us, thick with everything neither of us had said yet.

"Can I ask you something?" I said finally.

 

"And will you actually answer, instead of doing the thing you did in the hall where you say four true things and none of them are the one I asked?"

That got an actual laugh out of him  short, surprised, like it hadn't been particularly welcome. "That's fair. Ask."

"What does it feel like? The claiming. From your side."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer after all. When he did, his voice had lost the careful, deliberate edge from the long hall. It sounded almost young.

"Like being certain of something for the first time in my life," he said. "I've never been an uncertain person, Elara. Ask anyone. I make a decision and I make it once. But everything about last night should have made me doubt it, no scent, no verification, nothing my instincts have ever been trained to trust  and instead it was the opposite. It was the only thing I've ever been sure of without needing a reason." 

He looked at me sideways. "I don't know how to explain that in a way that doesn't sound insane."

"Try me. I've had a strange week."

"It's like..." He exhaled, frustrated with himself in a way that felt oddly endearing.

"You know how you can walk into a room and know, immediately, that you've been there before, even if you haven't?

Not memory. Just certainty, arriving before the reasoning does." His eyes met mine. "That. Except the room was you."

My chest did something complicated and unfair. I looked away first, down at my hands, because it was easier than looking at him while my pulse did that.

"I don't have anything to give that," I said quietly. "Whatever your wolf is responding to  I don't feel it the way you're describing. I feel something. A pull, low, here." I pressed a hand briefly to my chest. "But I don't know what it is.

I've never felt anything like it before and I don't have nineteen years of instinct to compare it to. I can't shift. I've never been able to. So whatever's happening to you right now, at least you have a framework for it. I'm just standing in the middle of it hoping someone tells me what I'm supposed to feel."

Kael went very still.

"You've never shifted," he repeated. Not a question, again, but different this time, careful, like he was setting a fragile thing down slowly instead of dropping it.

"Not once. Not as a kid, not now. I'm nineteen. Most wolves shift for the first time before they're seven." I kept my eyes on the training ring, on the worn dirt where generations of pack kids had learned to fight in fur they'd had since before they could walk.

"So. No scent. No shift. No idea what I actually am, apparently, according to your Alpha's very reassuring speech in there this morning."

"Thorne knows something."

"Thorne knows more than something. So does Damon. Everybody in my life seems to know more about what's wrong with me than I do, which is a fun way to spend nineteen years, let me tell you."

I hadn't meant for that to come out as raw as it did. Kael didn't say anything for a moment, and when I finally looked over at him, he wasn't looking at me with pity, which is what I'd braced for. He was looking at me like he was recalculating something, the same way Sable had looked at Damon in the hall.

"There's nothing wrong with you," he said.

"You don't know that."

"I don't," he agreed. "But I know what my wolf did last night, and it didn't claim a flaw, Elara. It claimed something, fully, without hesitation, in front of two hundred witnesses and every political consequence that comes with it.

Whatever you are, my instincts don't seem to think it's a problem. I'd start weighting that opinion above whatever fear everyone else in your life has been carrying around for nineteen years."

I didn't have an answer for that. It was, annoyingly, the first thing anyone had said to me in days that made the tight place in my chest ease even slightly.

"You're very sure of yourself," I said instead, because it was easier than saying thank you.

"I told you. I make a decision once."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It's efficient." A real smile, this time, small and a little crooked, nothing like the composed mask he'd worn in the long hall. "Can I ask you something now?"

"Seems fair."

"The nightmares." His voice shifted, gentler, and I felt my stomach drop, because I hadn't told him about the nightmares. I hadn't told anyone about the nightmares.

"Damon mentioned you hadn't been sleeping. He didn't say why. I'm not asking him to betray anything else, I just..." He hesitated, and for the first time since I'd met him, Kael Draven looked uncertain. "I want to know if it's about me. Last night, when I looked at you, right before you said your name  for half a second, you looked at me like you already knew what I was going to do to you. Not what I did. What I was going to do."

The bird had stopped calling. The training ring was silent, and the pull under my ribs had gone very still, very attentive, like it was listening too.

"I don't know how to answer that," I said, honestly, "without sounding like I've lost my mind."

"Try me," he said, echoing my own words back to me, gently. "I've had a strange week too."

So... for the first time since it started, years ago, long before I'd ever heard his name  I told someone about the dream.

The one where I'm on the ground, and there's blood, and a man is standing over me whose face I never used to be able to see clearly.

I watched Kael's face change as I described it. Watched him go very, very still in a way that had nothing to do with composure and everything to do with the fact that he already knew, before I finished, exactly whose face I was about to describe.