Chapter Two

Damien’s POV

I didn’t sleep.

That was typical. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep for three years… not since I had made the choice that cost me everything and made sure someone else didn’t have to pay that price. Sleep demanded a silent mind. It had been a long time since my mind was not quiet.

But that night was different. I lay on top of the sheets, in the dark, staring at the ceiling at a woman named Mara who didn’t know how to lie about her own name.

That’s the first thing that threw me. When they were terrified, most humans lied immediately. A reflex. Sarah. Emma. I’m not telling you. Something to create distance. She’d looked at me with those dark, tired eyes — the eyes of someone who had been holding shit together by herself for too long and she’d told me the truth without appearing to wobble.

“Mara.”

I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and looked up at the ceiling more intently.

I was the Coldridge Pack Alpha. Forty-seven wolves. Twelve thousand acres of land. A reputation that caused other Alphas to consider their words more carefully in the presence of me. Everything I did to shape that was through control – an absolute, unyielding, total control of every impulse, every reaction, every craving that my nature sent at me.

I had been controlling myself since I was nineteen years old.

So it was human, thankfully human, panting, halting, bloodied, smelling of rain and something softer beneath the surface……something that had grabbed at my chest and sucked… and I stared down like a soldier thrust into pack duty who had never learned to march.

My second, Rhen, knocked once, then barged in. He'd been at it for eight years. I had given up objecting.

He stared at me on the bed, completely clothed, at 4 in the morning, and he was silent for a moment.

Then: “You ran the perimeter again tonight.”

“I run it every night.”

“Did you run it four times?” He was propped up against the doorframe, arms folded, those dark, unreadable eyes studying my face with an uncanny ability that also made him one of the best and most frustrating people to work with,

“You came back with someone’s scent on you.”

I couldn’t do much with the ceiling.

“Human,” he said. Not a question.

“Her car broke down on the Route 9.” She was lost out looking for signal.” My voice was neutral. Informational. The voice I used in meetings my voice was the voice I used when I stood on border towns and all the places that needed me to be The Leader, and not just some guy working there.

Rhen was silent for precisely three seconds.

“Damien.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“You’re about to.”

He came in and sat on the chair opposite the bed, his elbows resting on his knees, and he looked at me the way only someone who had spent the better part of ten years with you could… as if he could see the places you were trying hardest to hide.

He said softly, “What did she smell like?”

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s an answer,” he said.

It was. We were both aware of that. A wolf who had smelled that nothing turned silent as a door shutting. I had gone quiet as a door closing, locking, and the key being swallowed.

"I don’t care what she scented like,” I said. “She’s human. She has no place in our world. She was in the area by mistake and I gave her directions to the road. That’s the end of it.”

Rhen regarded me for a long moment. “You sent her your number.”

I slowly turned my head toward him.

He raised both hands. “Connor was on east perimeter watch. He saw you on your phone after she left.” He paused. “He said you stood there for about twelve minutes after she was gone.”

I was going to try to get Connor out of there and on to something really nasty.

I was sitting up, putting my feet on the floor and looking at my hands — the hands I had barely moved at my sides even as I’d wanted to step forward, to come between her and the dark, to make sure she got all the way back to the road and then stay there and then…

“Control”

“There’s something stirring in the eastern territory that’s not one of ours,” I said. “Something that isn’t ours. I’ve been tracking it for two weeks.” I looked at Rhen directly. “It pulled toward the road last night. Toward where she was.”

The ease was gone from his eyes.

“That’s why I sent the number,” I said. “Information. Not… “ I stopped.

“Not what?” he asked gently.

I rose to my feet. “Double the eastern patrol. I want track reports every six hours. Whatever is moving out there, I want to find out what it is before it decides to move again.”

Rhen stood, again reading my face. “And the woman?” he asked.

I moved toward the window. Dawn was just beginning to grey the edge of the treeline, dim and drawn out, the forest succulent from its middle-of-the-night form to its morning shape. Somewhere beyond those trees was a road. And somewhere on that road was a woman who had said I’m fine with the automatic certainty of someone who’d had to be fine for so long she’d forgotten what the alternative was.

“She won’t listen to the warning,” I said.

“How do you know?”

I thought of how she had looked at me. Not in the fear that most people had when they were in front of me in the dark. Something else. Something that had stood its ground even when her hands were less than steady.

“Because she’s that kind of person,” I said.

Rhen was quiet.

“Let me handle it,” I said.

“By handle it, you mean…”

“I mean I’m going to keep her safe, and I’m going to keep her away from the territory until I know what the hell we’re dealing with.” I turned from the window. “That’s all I mean.”

He nodded once, slowly, with the expression of a man who carried much unspoken thought.

Smart man.

He left.

I checked the phone on the nightstand. No reply to my text. It had been four hours. She was either sleeping or staring at it the same way I had stared at the ceiling with the particular intensity of someone who was trying to talk to herself out of a thing her mind had already made up to do.

I knew that feeling well. I dialed the phone. Typed. Deleted it. Typed again. Deleted it again.

Sat down on the edge of the bed and held the phone and thought about pale flashlight beams and rain and a woman who walked into the dark woods alone and was somehow, inexplicably, the most unafraid person I had met in years.

My phone buzzed. I looked down.

Unknown… no, not unknown anymore. She had saved the number. There were three words on the preview before I even unlocked the screen.

“Who are you.”

Not a question. No question mark. How to say something when you already know that the answer is going to be complicated.

I stared at the three words for a long time. Then I typed back.

“A person who knows this forest better than you do. What’s up with the tire?”

This time the response was quicker. Thirty seconds.

“Fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine.”

Three fines. Interesting. I almost smiled. I didn’t… I’ had stopped doing that easily a long time ago but the shape of one moved through me like something remembering how.

“You should know,” I typed, “that people who are actually fine don’t say it three times.”

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Then: “You should know that strangers in the woods who have my number before I gave it to them don’t get to analyze me.”

This time I did almost smile.

“Fair,” I sent back. “Don’t take Route 9 alone today.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“No,” I typed. “I’m asking.”

A long pause.

“Why.”

One question. The most real question under all of the other questions. Not who are you or how did you get my number… just why. Why do you care. Why does this matter. So why are you still here in the outer reaches of my life when you should have been that odd thing that happened once and then dissipated in the light of day?

I studied the question for a long time. I wrote the only truthful response I could.

“I don’t fully know yet. But somewhere in those woods, last night, something was right in front of you. Be careful until I know what it is."

Pause again. I put the phone down. Stood up. I returned to the window and stared at the trees, now with golden tips as the sun had finally chosen to get up.

My phone buzzed once more. I picked it up.

“Okay.”

One word. That from a woman who didn’t seek help, who didn’t trust very easily and who probably had spent the whole night telling herself to dismiss the message.

“Okay.”

It shouldn’t have landed like that. It dropped like something being laid down after traveling a long distance. I slipped the phone in my pocket and went to look for Rhen, not wondering why my steps felt a little less heavy than they had yesterday.

Control, I reminded myself. "Total control."

The trouble was… and I was starting to get that with the gradual, unstoppable realization of someone watching a tide roll in… that control was just not meant to grasp some things.

And apparently, one of them had dark eyes, said I’m fine like a shield, and texted back in single words that somehow said everything.