🗡️Chapter 06🗡️

Zelda's POV

The room was something in between.

Not a bedroom or a cell. Just four stone walls and a narrow bed and a window that looked out over the settlement like it was taunting me with the fact that I couldn't go anywhere. Dust sat in the corners like it had been there for years and had no plans to leave. I understood the feeling.

I had been pacing for what felt like forever.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. the same ten steps in each direction, over and over, because if I stopped moving I would have to sit with everything that had happened in the last twenty four hours and I was not ready to do that. My mind could not go there yet. My mind needed something to do or it would eat me alive.

They had been taking me to the Alpha. That had been the plan, walk in, play the lost packless wolf, get in front of the current Alpha and figure out what my next move was.

Simple. Clean.

Except I had walked into a werewolf pack with a hunting knife tucked visibly against my jacket like I had completely forgotten where I was going. They searched me at the entrance standard, I should have expected it, I did expect it and somehow still managed to be caught off guard, and the moment their hands found the blade the whole plan shifted sideways.

I should have ditched it before I crossed the border. Should have buried it in the forest and come in clean and unarmed and completely harmless looking.

Instead I had walked into vordheim armed, which was either brave or catastrophically stupid.

Stupid, I told myself, for the fourteenth time. Genuinely, impressively stupid.

So now I was here. Pacing holes into the floor of a room that couldn't decide what it was, in a pack that didn't know who I was, in a kingdom built on a name that had destroyed my entire life overnight.

I pressed my palm flat against the cold stone wall and breathed.

Think, Zelda. Think.

I needed to get in front of the alpha, I needed to look him in the eye and read them the way my four years of forensic criminology had taught me to read people, the micro-expressions, the tells, the things the body says when the mouth is lying. I needed answers and answers were not going to come to me through a locked door in a dusty in-between room.

I needed...

The door clicked.

I stopped pacing.

The handle turned.

I straightened up, rolled my shoulders back, and arranged my face into something that gave absolutely nothing away.

The door swung open.

---

Damir's POV

I swung the door open.

And it hit me like a wall.

The scent. Full force, straight into my chest like something that had been waiting for exactly this moment to detonate. Warm and sweet and underneath it something that had no business existing in a world as cold as mine.

The peach scent again.

My eyes found her immediately. They didn't look anywhere else. Didn't need to.

She was the source.

She was standing in the middle of the room like she'd been waiting, her spine straight, her chin up, her face giving me absolutely nothing. And I Damir Mordak, Alpha of the bloodmoon pack, a man who had not been speechless a single day in his adult life...

Said nothing.

Zion clawed at the surface of my mind, restless and loud and completely done being ignored.

Mate, he said.

Just that. Over and over like he needed to make sure I'd heard him the first time.

Mate. Mate. Mate.

I had told myself for years that I didn't care. The day of the scents had come and gone when I turned eighteen and there had been nothing, no pull, no recognition, no girl across a room that my wolf lost his mind over. My mother had panicked. The elders had panicked. And somewhere in all that panic Seraphine had appeared with her perfect hair and her scheming eyes and a contract her family had signed before anyone thought to ask me.

I had accepted it the way I accepted most things that annoyed me.

Quietly. Completely. With the full intention of making it everyone else's problem.

But this.

This girl.

I had seen beautiful women. I was not a man who lacked for them. But standing in this dusty nothing room, she was without question the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Dark wavy brown hair tucked behind one ear. A face that could have been sculpted by someone who took the job very seriously, heart shaped lips, blue eyes that were currently looking at me so innocently. A figure that made it very difficult to remember that I was supposed to be interrogating her.

I tilted my head.

Zion clawed harder.

I felt heat move through me, insistent, It had nothing to do with the temperature of the room and everything to do with the girl standing six feet away from me.

I studied her face.

She looked completely unbothered.

Cool eyes. Steady hands. Not a single thing on her face that suggested she felt any of what was currently happening inside my chest.

I wondered, for just a moment, if I was wrong.

If the bond was one sided.

If the moon goddess had a sense of humour dark enough to hand me a mate who felt absolutely nothing.

----

Zelda's POV

I stared at him.

Okay fine. He was fine. Annoyingly, infuriatingly fine, this kind of face shouldn't have business existing on someone I was supposed to hate. But I didn't care. I filed it away under irrelevant and kept my face exactly where it was.

What I did care about was the fact that he hadn't said a single word yet.

He was just, looking at me. That dark gaze moving over my face like he was reading something written there that I hadn't given him permission to read. Like I was a problem he was turning over in his hands.

I waited.

He kept looking.

I almost laughed.

This again.

Back in the UK, it had been the same story. Boys who forgot how to form sentences the moment I walked into a room. Girls who stopped being my friends because their boyfriends couldn't stop staring. I had walked through four years of university in a bubble of my own making, not by choice, just by existing in a way that apparently made people stupid.

I had learned to use it.

A slow thought moved through my mind.

Maybe I could use it here too.

Get close. Let him think whatever he wanted to think. Let him look at me the way he was looking at me right now, like I was the most interesting thing that had walked into his life in a long time. And then, when he least expected it, when his guard was down and his chest was open and there was nothing between me and the answer to everything...

I would finish what I came here to do.

Carve his heart out while it was still beating.

Walk away.

Board a plane to somewhere far and quiet and never look back.

It could work, the cold part of my mind said. It could absolutely work.

He finally moved.

One hand raised, a single lazy gesture, and the men behind him peeled away from the door without a word.

Their footsteps faded down the corridor. The door stayed open but we were,effectively, pointedly alone.

His eyes came back to mine.