Chapter 6

Eve's POV

I moved.

I turned sideways, the way you do when you're reaching for something on the other side of a bed, casual and purposeful at once, and put the suitcase between us.

"You always think too much."

I said, and I kept my voice light, almost amused, the tone I used when I needed someone to believe I wasn't scared.

I folded the sweater I was holding and set it in the suitcase.

"You don't have to worry. I've been careful. Nobody associates me with Silverleaf Pack."

Victor didn't say anything.

"Whatever Renault and I are, it stays in his circle. It doesn't touch yours."

I said it cleanly. Even. Like I was offering him something reasonable.

"I get why you'd come up here," I said. "Honestly. You've been gone a year, and you come back and your human foster sister is shacked up with a rival Alpha. That's a headache. I understand the headache."

I picked up another shirt.

"But I can handle myself. And I'm not doing anything that reflects on this family."

The silence in the room had changed while I was talking.

I could feel it the way you feel weather shifting before the rain actually starts, that slight pressure change, the air going dense.

Victor's voice, when it finally came, was quiet.

"I don't care about the Pack's reputation right now."

I stopped folding.

"I don't like your scent carrying someone else's claim on it."

The shirt in my hands didn't move.

I made myself breathe at the same pace I'd been breathing at before.

I didn't let myself turn around.

There was something wrong with the quality of the silence behind me, something I couldn't have named if asked, just a low, formless unease sitting at the base of my sternum like a stone I hadn't noticed until just now.

He took a step forward.

I heard it, the soft shift of weight on old floorboards.

He didn't touch me this time.

He just closed the distance until I could feel the warmth of him at my back again, closer than before.

And then I heard it, that low voice, flat and deliberate, with something underneath it that I didn't want to name.

"You've been telling yourself that story for a year," he said. "And you're very good at it."

He didn't move.

And then he exhaled, slow and controlled, and I watched his shoulders drop by a fraction, the particular release of someone choosing to stop holding something back.

The air in the room didn't change.

I couldn't smell anything different, couldn't feel the shift the way a wolf would.

But I heard one of the household staff's footsteps stop mid-stride and then quietly, deliberately, reverse direction.

Alpha pheromones, a biological broadcast, territorial and declarative, laying claim to a space without needing to touch a single thing in it.

Pheromones as communication.

Scent as language.

A whole layer of information moving through this room right now that I was completely sealed off from, like trying to read a conversation happening just below the frequency your ears could process.

What is he saying.

That was the thought that lodged itself in my chest and wouldn't move.

Not fear, not yet.

Something more unsettled than that.

The specific discomfort of being in a room where everyone else can read the walls and you're the only one standing there with the letters blurred.

Victor stepped forward.

"Stop," I said.

My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.

He didn't stop.

I gripped the edge of the suitcase with both hands and did not move.

The door swung open.

Vera didn't knock.

She stood in the doorway and went completely still for a half second, the particular stillness of a wolf reading a scent-saturated room before the human face has time to arrange itself.

Her eyes swept the space once, sharp and quick, then landed on Victor.

Then on me.

Something moved through her expression that I'd never seen there before.

Not her usual contempt.

Something closer to alarm, and underneath that, something that looked almost like anger on my behalf, which was so unfamiliar coming from her that I almost didn't recognize it.

"Victor." Her voice was quiet.

Careful in a way Vera was almost never careful with anything.

He didn't look at her.

"Victor." Sharper this time.

He looked at her.

Vera stepped fully into the room and her voice dropped low.

"This whole room smells like you," she said. "She's your foster sister. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

The silence stretched.

"This isn't normal," Vera said, quieter now. "What you're doing right now is not normal. Whatever this is, whatever you've been telling yourself it is, it crossed a line a long time ago and you know it."

Victor's hand came away from the wall.

He didn't say anything to her.

He looked at me instead, one long, unreadable look, and I held it because I didn't know what else to do with my face.

There was something in his expression that I didn't have a word for.

Something else entirely, something that sat in the space behind his eyes like a weight he'd been carrying for a while and had briefly, just for a moment, stopped pretending wasn't there.

I didn't know what it meant.

"Bags," Vera said.

I blinked.

She was looking at me, not Victor, and her expression had snapped back to its default setting, clipped and impatient, like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened at all.

"Bags are done. Get out."

Victor's gaze didn't move from my face.

Vera's interruption hadn't touched him, hadn't shifted anything in his expression, like she'd spoken in a frequency he'd simply chosen not to receive.

He looked at me for a long time.

Then something in his face closed over.

Whatever had been sitting there, unguarded and nameless, pulled back beneath the surface, and what replaced it was quieter and colder and much more like the Victor who had sat at that dinner table all evening.

"Liar," he said.

Just that.No heat in it.No elaboration.

He turned and walked out, and the open door swayed slightly in his wake.