Chapter 6 Sleeping Together

Patricia

"No!" Louella detonates behind my sternum the instant Julius's meaning registers. "He wants to mark you! NONONONONONONONO!"

I don't answer her. I answer him instead. "Let me get my things."

I walk into the guest room, pull my clothes from the wardrobe in three armloads, and stack them into the box I never fully unpacked. There isn't much. I carry the box out into the hallway. Julius is still standing exactly where I left him, as though he hasn't moved a single degree, and I walk past him without stopping. His shadow follows mine down the corridor under the overhead lights.

The master bedroom is white. I knew this already. I'd seen it briefly during the first walkthrough of Blackrock, but standing in the center of it now, the whiteness feels more absolute than I remembered. White walls, cool grey bedding, lines so clean they seem engineered rather than chosen. The bedside tables are bare. Not minimalist. Bare. I think of what I thought on the first day I moved in: that a place called Blackrock containing almost nothing black was a total cold joke.

Julius moves past me toward the walk-in closet without a word. I don't deliberately watch him, but my peripheral vision catches the sequence anyway: jacket removed and hung in one motion, cufflinks placed on the tray, watch set beside them. The intervals between each step are nearly identical. In the past month, he's never slept here. How can he still execute each step with nearly identical intervals between them?

I've seen that same quality of repetition exactly once before, and it was in myself. In the lab, we drill time-sensitive reagent protocols until the muscle memory is absolute, because a deviation of even a few seconds will corrupt the data.

"Because you're analyzing him," Louella announces, not angry now. "You only get that focused on subjects you find interesting. Don't let him fool you. Don't let him mark you."

"He's not fooling me." I set the box down near the closet entrance and begin transferring my clothes onto the empty hangers on the left side. "And he's not going to mark me tonight. There's a ceremony already scheduled."

"That's not what I'm worried about."

I don't ask what she means. I already know.

"You want to shower first, or should I?" Julius asks from behind me.

"I showered at the lab." I don't turn around. "Go ahead. I'll finish this."

"Sleep when you're done."

He goes into the bathroom. The water starts. I hang the last of my shirts and close the closet panel, then change into my sleep clothes and sit on the edge of the bed, on the right side, which seems like the reasonable choice given that he appears to have a left-side preference based on which nightstand has the phone charger.

What if he decides to mark you in the middle of the night? Louella asks.

"He's a Lycan." I pull back the covers and lie down. "His physiological control is categorically beyond what a standard werewolf can manage. Proximity isn't going to make him lose his head."

"Then explain your heart rate."

"It's normal."

"It's not."

"It is." I close my eyes and shut the line between us.

The bathroom light disappears from under the door. The room goes completely dark, and then the mattress shifts on the other side. A single, controlled depression of weight. He lies down and goes still. It's the most efficient way I've ever seen anyone get into bed.

Then I smell it.

Not the Alpha Lycan pressure. Something underneath that. Cedar and cold rain and something I don't have a laboratory category for. My body responds before my brain finishes identifying the stimulus. Attraction.

My breath catches.

"Don't," Louella says, and I think the same.

"Get some rest." His voice comes out of the dark without inflection.

Then silence.

The attraction dissipates as quickly as it arrived, like a pressure front moving through. I turn onto my side, face toward the window, and begin the deliberate work of regulating my breathing back to baseline. His body heat reaches me through the bedding, heavier than I anticipated, and nothing like the charged proximity of a moment ago. It's simply warmth.

I lie there and watch the darkness outside the white curtains shift from black to deep blue to grey, and somewhere in the grey I finally lose consciousness.

My internal clock brings me up when the first light presses through the curtains.

The other side of the bed is empty. The covers are folded back precisely like no one had been sleeping beside me last night. I brush my teeth and wash my face in the master bathroom, and when I catch my own reflection, my eyes drop to my left hand. The ring sits there, metal cold and quiet, as though it witnessed nothing last night and has no intention of commenting.

I set the toothbrush back and go downstairs.

The front door opens as I reach the bottom step.

Julius comes in from outside. Running clothes. He's already pulling off his shoes in the mudroom, and for a moment the visual simply doesn't process correctly. The same person, the same quality of absolute self-containment, but in a completely different register.

He looks up. "Up already?"

"Yeah. Where did you wash up?"

"Guest bathroom. I didn't want to disturb you." He straightens. "You're up earlier than I expected."

There are two ways to read that. He intended to be back before I woke. Or he deliberately used the guest bathroom to preserve my space, expecting I might want the master to myself. I decide not to spend time on it. Neither interpretation changes anything actionable.

He goes upstairs to change. I go to the dining room, where Helen has already arranged breakfast, the kind of spread that appears without being requested, which I still haven't entirely adjusted to. I sit on one side of the wide table. Julius comes down a few minutes later and takes the seat across from me. The table between us is large enough that two people could have an entire conversation.

We eat in silence for a while. He reviews something on his phone. I drink my coffee.

"What's your schedule today?" he asks, without looking up.

"The lab has a rest day. I'm supposed to be at home."

He sets the phone face-down. "Then rest."

"Will do."

He nods, finishes his coffee, and leaves for the office before eight. I watch the car disappear through the front window and then stand in the quiet of the house for a moment, aware that I have an entire unstructured day ahead of me and no particular feelings about it either way.

I take my second cup of coffee to the sitting room. I have a journal article open on my tablet for about two hours before my phone finally lights up.

Salvation. But when I see it, it's not.

It's a message from Sera.

Three lines of escalating capitals:

PATRICIA GREYSON

I NEED YOU RIGHT NOW

THIS IS A LEVEL FIVE EMERGENCY