The King's Wolf

The first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes was that I had no idea where I was.

The ceiling above me was made of dark wood with thick beams running across it, old and solid, nothing like anything in the Silverstone packhouse. The bed underneath me was clean and firm, and the room smelled of pine and something else, something deeper and unfamiliar, a pack scent I had never encountered before.

I sat up fast and immediately regretted it. The room tilted and my head swam and I had to grab the edge of the mattress with both hands and hold on until everything settled. My body ached in a way that told me I had pushed it well past its limits at some point recently.

Then I remembered everything. The ceremony. The rejection. The Darkwood.

The rain and the cold and my knees in the dirt. The silver eyes in the dark between the trees.

I looked around the room carefully. It was small and clean, with a single window letting in pale daylight, a wooden table beside the bed with a cup of water on it, and a door standing slightly open onto a dim hallway. My bag was on the floor beside the bed, and someone had changed my clothes while I was unconscious. I was wearing a plain grey shirt and loose trousers that were slightly too big for me.

I was reaching for the water when I realized there was someone in the doorway.

He was leaning against the frame with his arms folded across his chest, watching me with an expression that was calm and unhurried, like he had been standing there for a while and had no particular problem with continuing to do so. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, with close-cropped dark hair and eyes that caught the pale light coming through the window and reflected it back as a bright, clear silver.

I stared at him. He stared back at me without any apparent embarrassment about being caught watching a stranger wake up.

"You're awake," he said. His voice was flat and even, like he was noting a simple fact.

"Where am I?" I asked. My voice came out rough and scraped, like I had been crying for a long time, which I had.

"Nightfall Pack territory," he said simply.

I felt my stomach drop at those words.

Nightfall Pack was not somewhere Silverstone wolves talked about casually. It sat at the edge of the known territories, bordered by the Darkwood on three sides, and its Alpha had a reputation that made experienced warriors go quiet when his name came up in conversation. I had walked straight into the most feared territory on the continent while half dead in the rain.

"How did I get here?" I asked, though I had a feeling I already knew the answer.

"Our border patrol found you," he said. "In the Darkwood. On your knees. You were not in great condition."

I pulled the blanket back and looked at my arms. The cuts from pushing through the Darkwood undergrowth were closing over cleanly, the edges pink and fresh, much further along than they should have been after what felt like one night. I frowned at them and pushed the blanket back down.

"I need to leave," I said, and started to swing my legs over the side of the bed.

"You're welcome to try," he said. "You couldn't stand up twenty minutes ago."

I put both feet on the floor anyway and tested my own weight carefully. My legs held, barely, but they held, and I counted that as enough. I looked back at the man in the doorway and he was watching me with something at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile but was shaped like one.

"Our Alpha wants to see you," he said.

"I don't want to see your Alpha," I said.

"I know," he said, with the easy calm of someone who was entirely unsurprised by this response.

"Then we agree," I said. "You can tell him thank you for the bed and I'll be on my way."

That almost-smile flickered again at the corner of his mouth. He straightened from the doorframe and disappeared into the hallway without another word, and I heard his footsteps move away down the corridor. I let out a slow breath and reached for the water on the table, drinking half of it in one go and trying to put my thoughts in some kind of order.

I needed to find out which direction took me furthest from Silverstone territory. I needed to figure out where I was going to go and how I was going to get there. I needed to do all of that before whoever this Alpha was decided to come and find me himself.

I was still working through my options when I heard the footsteps in the hallway again.

They were different this time. Heavier.

Slower. Each one placed with a kind of deliberate certainty that the lighter tread of the silver-eyed warrior had not had. I felt the change in the air before I saw the change in the doorway, that particular shift that happens when someone with real authority enters a space, the way everything around them seems to adjust and make room without being asked.

He filled the entire doorframe.

There was no other way to describe it. He was tall and broad across the shoulders in a way that made the doorframe look like it had been built slightly too small, and he moved through it with the unhurried ease of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by the effect his presence had on a room. A scar ran from his left jaw down to the edge of his collar, pale and old, settled into his skin like it had always been there. His hair was dark and close cut, his jaw was set, and his expression gave away absolutely nothing at all.

He stepped into the room and stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at me.

I looked back at him, because I was not going to be the first one to look away, even though everything in me was suggesting very strongly that I should find something else to focus on. His eyes were dark and completely steady and fixed on my face with the kind of full, unhurried attention that made my skin prickle and my hand tighten around the water cup without me deciding to do it.

He looked at me for a long moment without speaking, and the room was very quiet around us.

Then he spoke. His voice was low and even and did not need to raise itself to fill the space completely.

"You smell like the Moon Goddess," he said.

I blinked at him. Of everything I had expected him to say, that was genuinely not it.

"Who are you?" he asked.

It was a simple question. Four words. The kind of question any person could answer without thinking, automatically, before they were even fully awake. I opened my mouth to respond.

And nothing came out.

The question sat inside me and searched for an answer and found nothing clean waiting. I was Aria Reyes of Silverstone Pack, except I was not anymore because I had been cast out before dawn. I was Caden's mate, except I was not that either because he had stood at an altar and chosen someone else. I was the girl who had loved one man for six years and built her entire sense of herself around that love, and now that love was gone and I was sitting in a stranger's pack with nothing but one bag and a dead mother's photograph and a rejection bond that was still aching through my chest.

Who was I?

I genuinely, completely did not know.

The man at the foot of the bed was still watching me, patient and still, waiting for an answer I could not give him. And for the first time in my twenty one years of living, I realized that I had absolutely no idea who I really was.