Chapter 4: Gold Eyes

(Damon's POV)

"You're not listening to me."

"I'm listening."

"You're not. Your face does this thing when you're not listening. It goes sort of slack, like a dog that heard a word it recognized but not the sentence around it."

"That's oddly specific."

"I've had two years to study it." Valerie dropped onto the couch beside me, tucking her legs underneath her, close enough that her perfume crowded out every other smell in the room. "I was saying the bonfire's tomorrow. Lydia wants us there early, apparently there's some kind of homecoming thing."

"What homecoming thing?"

"I don't know, some pack healer's daughter finally finished her fancy city degree. Everyone's very excited." She rolled her eyes in a way that was supposed to look bored and instead looked like something sharper underneath. "Anyway. Early. Seven."

I didn't answer right away. Something had gone tight behind my sternum, a sensation I didn't have a name for yet, like a held breath I hadn't noticed I was holding.

"Damon?"

"Seven. Got it."

"You're doing the face again."

"I'm tired."

"You're always tired lately." She studied me a bit too long, the way she did when she suspected something and hadn't decided yet whether to say it out loud. "You've been weird all week."

"Define weird."

"Distracted. Short with me. Staring at nothing for ten minutes at a time like you're waiting for the house to catch fire." She reached over, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, a gesture that used to mean something and now just felt like static. "Everything okay at the garage?"

"The garage is fine."

"Your dad?"

"Dad's fine." He wasn't, not really, the cough had gotten worse, and my mother's face had that particular tightness lately that meant she was worried and not saying so but that wasn't what had my chest doing this. I didn't know what was doing this. Just a low hum underneath my skin, like a string pulled taut somewhere I couldn't see.

"Then what is it?"

"Nothing, Valerie. I'm tired. That's all."

She didn't push further, but I felt her watching me for the rest of the night the way you watch a pot you suspect is about to boil over.

"You know," she said later, already half-asleep, voice gone soft around the edges, "sometimes I think you're not all the way here. Even when you're right next to me."

"That's not fair."

"I didn't say it was unfair. I said it because it's true." She pressed her face into my shoulder before I could answer, and I lay there a long time afterward, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out if she was wrong.

I didn't find an answer I liked.

I didn't sleep well. I never slept well, not really, not in two years, but that night was worse, restless, half-formed dreams I couldn't hold onto past waking, a sensation like something pulling at my ribs from the inside.

By the time I got to the bonfire clearing the next evening, beer in hand, Valerie glued to my side the way she always was at pack gatherings, a picture, everyone said, the soon-to-be Alpha and his girl, the pull hadn't let up. If anything it had gotten worse, a low electric current running just under my skin.

"You okay?" Lydia asked, passing by with a tray of something that smelled like her mother's cooking. "You look pale."

"I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I'm fine, Lydia."

She gave me a look that said she didn't believe me and didn't have time to argue about it, and moved on toward the fire.

"and then he said he'd never seen anyone shift that fast, can you believe it?" Valerie's voice cut through, tugging at my arm. "Damon. Are you even listening?"

"Sorry. What?"

"Nothing. Never mind." Her mouth flattened, the particular shape it made when she was annoyed and tried not to show it. "You've been somewhere else all night."

"I'm right here."

"You're really not."

I opened my mouth to argue, and that was the exact moment it happened, a wave of something electric and enormous slammed into my chest and stole the air clean out of my lungs. The bottle slipped out of my hand. I didn't feel it shatter against the rocks. I didn't feel anything except my own heartbeat, suddenly too loud, suddenly screaming one word I hadn't heard my own body say in five years.

Mate.

"Damon?" Valerie's voice had gone sharp, distant, like she was speaking from the other end of a long hallway. "Damon, what is wrong with you?"

I couldn't answer. I couldn't do anything except turn toward the tree line, toward the dirt path that led down from the main road, because every cell in my body had locked onto that exact direction like a compass finding north after years of spinning uselessly.

"Is someone coming?" Lydia asked, following my stare.

"I don't..."

And then she walked into the clearing, and the entire world went quiet.

Five years. I'd told myself, over and over, that memory lied that absence sanded the rough edges off a person until you remembered something better than they'd actually been, something your own loneliness had invented to torture you with.

I was wrong. I had never once in my life been more completely, devastatingly wrong.

She stood at the edge of the firelight in jeans and a soft grey sweater, dark hair loose around her shoulders, flanked by her parents and that purple-haired menace of a friend she'd had since childhood. She wasn't dressed up. Hadn't tried. And somehow that made it worse, because she didn't need to try, had never needed to, and I'd spent two years convincing myself otherwise.

"Who is that?" Valerie's voice, close to my ear now, edged with something I didn't have the bandwidth to identify.

I couldn't answer. Amara's eyes were moving across the clearing, searching, and I knew the way you know a storm is coming before the first drop falls that she hadn't found me yet, and that the second she did, nothing in either of our lives was going to be simple again.

"Damon." Valerie's hand closed around my forearm. "Who. Is. That."

Her eyes found mine.

The clearing disappeared. The fire, the voices, Valerie's grip on my arm, Lydia's half-finished sentence about the pie she'd brought all of it dissolved into nothing, because for one suspended, terrible second there was only her, only the bond that had never once actually stopped screaming no matter how hard I'd worked to convince myself it had gone quiet.

I watched recognition land on her face. Watched her lips part. Watched hope flood into her expression so fast and so bright it was like watching someone strike a match in a dark room.

Then I watched her gaze slide an inch to the left. To Valerie's hand, still locked around my arm.

I watched the hope die. Slowly. Completely. A light going out behind her eyes in real time, replaced by something that looked like understanding arriving a half-second too late to stop the damage.

"Damon." Valerie's claws found the thin skin of my forearm, four sharp points pressing in like a warning. "I asked you a question. Who is she?"

Amara's mother said something to her, oblivious, turning her gently toward the crowd of well-wishers already converging. I watched Amara let herself be steered away, shoulders squared, chin lifted, a mask sliding into place over whatever had just cracked open on her face.

"Damon." Valerie's voice had dropped low, dangerous. "Who. Is. She."

My throat had gone to sandpaper. Every instinct in my body was screaming at me to cross the clearing, to take her face in my hands, to explain, I didn't know you were coming back tonight, I've thought about you every single day, none of this is what it looks like and I stood frozen instead, Valerie's grip tightening on my arm, half the pack watching to see what I'd do next.

"No one," I said.

The lie tasted like something rotting.

And twenty feet away, through a gap in the crowd, Amara's eyes found mine one last time just long enough for me to watch her hear it, watch the words land exactly as badly as I'd known they would, watch her turn fully away from me for what I understood, with total and sickening clarity, might be the last time she ever looked at me like I mattered at all.