Chapter 9

Renault's POV

The booth at Red Moon smelled like aged whiskey and whatever Darius had ordered that came in a glass the size of his face.

"I'm just saying," Felix said, leaning back with his arms spread across the top of the booth like he owned the whole section, "I had her wrong. First time I saw her I thought, okay, human girl, white hair, green eyes, hanging around Renault. Obviously she's working an angle."

"Obviously," Cain agreed.

"And then I watched her for like twenty minutes and realized she wasn't working anything. She was just."

Felix paused, searching for the word.

"There. Like she actually wanted to be there."

"That's the part that doesn't make sense to me," Darius said. "She doesn't ask for anything. Have you noticed that? She never asks for anything."

"Yeah, that doesn't make sense."Cain pointed at him. "I've seen girls work Renault before. They all have a system. There's always a system. She doesn't have a system. She's just."

He made a vague gesture with his glass that somehow communicated exactly what he meant.

"Nice to him. For no reason. Genuinely, annoyingly, what-is-wrong-with-you nice."

"And she's gorgeous," Felix added, like this was a separate offense.

"That almost makes it worse," Cain said. "If she was ordinary-looking you could explain it. But she's not, so now there's no explanation at all."

"I'll tell you what she is," Theo said.

He dropped his boots off the table, leaned forward, and pointed at me with the easy confidence of someone about to say something he'd been sitting on for a while.

"She's a stray cat that chose its own owner."

Nobody disagreed.

The whole table laughed, and the thing was, it wasn't mean.

I looked at my glass and said nothing, and somewhere in the back of the noise I found myself back in the moment I first saw her.

Green eyes.

Just the eyes, already looking back at me when I found them, steady in a way that had no business being steady given what I was and what she wasn't.

My breath stopped.

My pulse dropped out from under me for exactly one beat, and then everything hit at once.

It wasn't subtle.

It was never subtle, from what I understood of it, the way the old texts described it, the way wolves who'd found their Fated Mate described it afterward in language that had always seemed excessive to me until that exact moment.

The air changed.

My lungs forgot what they were doing.

Rin slammed forward in my chest like he'd been waiting his whole life for this specific second, and the recognition that moved through me was so complete and so violent that for one unguarded moment I had no defenses against it at all.

Every nerve ending I had said her. Said there. Said finally, in a register so deep it had nothing to do with thought.

And then I looked at her properly.

No wolf.

No answering scent beneath the surface of hers, none of the layered complexity that marked a shifter, nothing that should have triggered any of this.

Just a human girl, warm-blooded and entirely ordinary in every way that mattered, who had somehow just detonated something in the center of my chest like she had every right to.

The fury came fast and it came clean.

Something had misfired.

It was not biologically possible.

I was an Alpha of Obsidian Pack, and my Fated Mate was not going to be a human girl.

And then she stepped closer.

Too easy.

Too willing.

I'd been approached by enough of them to recognize the architecture of it, the calculated softness, the timing.

She'd seen whatan Alpha was worth and made a decision, and the pull I'd felt was just proximity and bad luck and Rin being an idiot about a pretty face.

I leaned down and told her exactly what I was offering.

"No Mark," I said. "No claim. You won't be introduced, you won't be acknowledged, and you won't ask for either. What I'm offering is private, and it stays that way. If that works for you, say so."

She looked at me for a moment.

Just a moment, not long enough to mean anything, and then the corner of her mouth moved in a way that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not one.

"Sure," she said. "That works."

So I'd taken her home instead.

A year later I was still finding her in every room I walked into and I had stopped asking myself why I hadn't ended it.

"You know what," Felix said, leaning forward with the particular energy of someone who had just had a terrible idea and was fully committed to it, "you should call her. Right now. We want to say hi."

"Call her," Darius said. "Right now. Let her hear your voice and watch what happens."

I looked at them for a moment. Then I took out my phone and dialed.

It rang.

Nobody at the table said anything.

The background noise of the club kept going, bass moving through the floor, glass against glass somewhere behind us, but inside the booth it had gone quiet in a specific way, the kind of quiet that has weight to it.

The call went to voicemail.

I hung up and dialed again.

Rang again.

Voicemail again.

The laughter that had been building around the table didn't quite arrive.

Cain cleared his throat.

Someone reached for the bottle.

My wolf, Rin, had gone very still somewhere in the back of my chest.

A low sound moved through him, not quite a growl, more like the warning pressure before one, the kind that meant I don't like this without being specific about what this was.

I knew what it was.

I didn't let it show.

I looked at the far wall.

There was a painting there I'd never bothered to look at before, abstract, all dark blues and one streak of something pale cutting through the middle of it.

She always picks up.

Every time.

One ring, maybe two, and then her voice, a little careful the way it always was.

My breath came out slower than it went in.

Five calls. Nothing.

I finished what was in my glass and set it down without hurry, and the booth was so quiet you could hear the ice settle.

Nobody was laughing anymore.

I didn't say anything.

I knew what I was putting into the air.

The scent had weight when it went that direction, a particular kind of pressure that settled over a room like weather, the kind that made every wolf in the vicinity suddenly very interested in being smaller and quieter and further away from the source of it.

I could have pulled it back.

It wasn't difficult. I did it every day, in meetings, in negotiations, in every room where I needed people to think clearly instead of just comply.

It was a simple enough thing to manage when I wanted to manage it.

I didn't want to manage it right now.

So I let it sit in the air.

And nobody at the table said a word.

The screen lit up.

Eve.

Theo saw it.

"Hey, that's her. That's, uh." He cleared his throat. "That's her calling back."

I looked at the screen.

Five calls.

No answer.

And now she wanted to fix it on her own timeline, the moment it was convenient for her, the moment she'd finished whatever she'd decided was more important.

That was not how this worked.

She didn't get to set the terms of when this ended.

She didn't get to decide she was ready and have that mean anything.

I turned it face-down on the table.