Alpha Draco And His Omega Luna

Sofia

I had stopped counting the days somewhere around month three.

After that, time became something that happened to other people, people who had places to be, people who were expected home for dinner, people whose names hadn't been reduced to a number scrawled on a tag and fastened around their wrist. Mine said 07, that was all I was now.

The cell they kept us in before the auction smelled of damp stone and fear. Fourteen of us. Fourteen women who had, at some point, been someone's daughter, someone's friend, someone's whole world. Now we were merchandise, lined up and catalogued like items in a shop window, waiting to see whose hands we would pass into next.

I had made peace with a lot of things over four years. The cold, the hunger. The particular cruelty of men who had decided that power meant ownership. I had not made peace with this rhe idea of being sold. Of standing on a platform while strangers calculated my worth in dollars.

But here I was.

They came for the others first.

I stood at the back of the holding room and watched them go, one by one, each disappearance punching a small, quiet hole in my chest. Beatrice. Amara. The girl whose name I never learned but who used to hum to herself at night when she thought no one could hear, all gone.

Kara squeezed my hand before they took her. She was trying not to cry, and the effort of it made her face do something terrible this awful, brave crumpling that she immediately smoothed away.

"I'll be alright," she said. To me, or to herself. Maybe both.

I didn't say anything. I held her hand until they made me let go.

Lilly went next. She didn't look at me when they led her out. She kept her eyes forward, her small hands folded in front of her. Lilly had never needed words to say everything, a glance, a tilt of her chin, the careful stillness of her expression. But she couldn't look at me, and that told me more than any words could have.

She was terrified.

We all were. We just wore it differently.

When they came for me, the auction hall was already thick with smoke and the low murmur of men who had too much money and no conscience whatsoever.

I had expected something grimier. I don't know why perhaps because everything else about this life had been grim. But the room they led me into was almost elegant in a twisted, grotesque way. Crystal chandeliers threw fractured light across the walls. Men in tailored suits sat in tiered rows, their faces half-hidden in shadow. Candles burned on iron sconces, their flames casting long, restless shadows that made the whole place feel like the inside of a fever dream.

I walked onto the platform and I did not look down.

I had decided, somewhere in the past four years, that whatever they took from me, they would not take that. My eyes. My spine. The particular way I held my chin when I wanted the world to believe I wasn't afraid.

I was always afraid. But they didn't need to know that.

"Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed bidders, and honoured guests."

The auctioneer's voice sliced through the noise like something serrated. He was a small man with a large voice and the kind of smile that made your skin want to leave your body.

"We have the rare privilege of presenting to you Sofia Fletcher. A true treasure. A masterpiece of refinement. We expect fierce competition for her hand."

I stared at a fixed point on the back wall and breathed.

"Who will start the bidding at five hundred thousand dollars?"

The numbers meant nothing to me. They never had. I was not a number. I was not a treasure. I was Sofia Fletcher, daughter of Marcus Fletcher, Beta to the former Alpha King, and I was going to survive this the same way I had survived everything else by refusing, on some fundamental, bone-deep level, to break.

"Seven hundred and fifty thousand. Do I hear seven hundred and fifty thousand?"

I scanned the crowd without meaning to. Force of habit, four years of training myself to read every room for exits, for threats, for the specific quality of stillness that preceded violence. The faces in the rows were cold and calculating. Some curious, some bored in the way that only obscenely wealthy men could be bored, as though even their cruelty had become routine.

No one here was going to save me.

I had known that. I had accepted it. Still, something small and stupid in my chest kept looking anyway.

"One million dollars. Do I hear one million? Going once... going twice,"

The silence came first.

Not the polite, expectant silence of a room waiting for a number to be called. Something else entirely a sudden, total, suffocating absence of sound, as though the air itself had been instructed to stop moving. The auctioneer's mouth was still open. The men in the rows had gone very, very still.

Then I heard the footsteps.

It was slow and deliberate. The kind of footsteps that belonged to someone who had never once in their life needed to hurry, because the world had always waited for them.

I turned to look.

He was tall, very tall. That was the first thing the sheer, almost unreasonable height of him, the way he filled the doorway without trying, broad shoulders and a presence that seemed to extend several feet beyond his actual body. Dark hair, perfectly dishevelled. A jaw cut from something harder than bone. Eyes that were even from across the room, even in the candlelight, an impossible, electric shade of blue.

He was the most beautiful and most terrifying thing I had ever seen.

And every single person in that room had dropped their gaze to the floor.

The auctioneer. The bidders. The men in their tailored suits who had been calculating my worth in seven-figure increments thirty seconds ago. All of them heads bowed, eyes down, shoulders curved inward in an instinctive, animal submission that made the back of my neck prickle.

He didn't acknowledge any of them. He wasn't looking at them.

He was looking at me.

His gaze found mine across the room and held it, and I felt it physically felt it like a hand pressed flat against my sternum. Something electric and inexplicable and deeply, deeply inconvenient.

I did not look away.

I don't know what made me hold his gaze when every other person in that room had crumbled. Stubbornness, probably. Four years of training myself not to flinch. Some furious, irrational refusal to be the only one standing on a platform who couldn't manage basic eye contact.

He crossed the room toward me without breaking stride, and the crowd parted before him like water.

When he reached the platform, he looked up at me, and up close, the blueness of his eyes was almost violent, like staring into something that had no business existing in a human face.

He held out his hand.

"Let's go," he said.

His voice was low and unhurried, resonating somewhere in my ribcage, and I hated the way it moved through me like a frequency I hadn't known I could receive.

I looked at his hand. I looked at the crowd of bowed heads. I looked back at him.

"I don't know you," I said.

Something shifted in his expression not surprise, exactly. More like the faintest shift. As though he had expected resistance and was, despite himself, almost pleased by it.

"No," he agreed. "You don't."

"Then I'm not going anywhere with you."

I heard the ripple move through the room that collective, horrified intake of breath that told me I had just done something that people in this room did not do. Ever.

He didn't react the way I expected. No anger. No threat. He simply looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind those impossible eyes, and then before I could so much as step back, he reached up, closed his hand around my wrist, and lifted me clean off the platform as though I weighed nothing at all.

"Put me down!" I drove my fist into his back. Once, twice, but was like hitting a wall.

He walked, and I kept hitting him but he kept walking. The crowd kept their eyes on the floor, and not one of them, not one made a single move to intervene.

"Hey..." I shoved at his shoulder. "I said put me down. I don't know who you think you are, but you do not get to just.. "

"Draco."

A man stepped forward as we reached the door, dark-haired, younger, with a face that was warm where the man carrying me was cold. He was looking at Draco with an expression that might have been concern, or might have been the particular exhausted affection of someone who had been navigating this personality for a very long time.

"Take care of that Xavier," Draco said, without slowing.

The other man nodded once. His eyes cut briefly to mine something apologetic in them, and then he turned back toward the room.

I didn't understand what take care of that meant.

The car was obscene. Black and low and the kind of expensive that didn't need to announce itself. Draco opened the passenger door actually opened it, with his own hand, which struck me as absurd given that he had just abducted me placed me inside with a care that made no sense, fastened my seatbelt, closed the door, and walked around to the driver's side as though this were a perfectly ordinary evening.

I considered running. I did the maths quickly, unfamiliar territory, no money, no allies, nowhere to go. The maths were not in my favour. I stayed.

For now.

He got in. The car started with a sound like a controlled exhale. He pulled out of the lot without speaking.

I stared through the windscreen and tried to slow my heartbeat down to something less humiliating.

"Where are you taking me?" I asked.

"Home."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have right now."

I turned to look at him. In profile, he was even more absurdly constructed, the sharp angle of his jaw, the straight line of his nose, the way he held the wheel with one hand like the car itself was beneath his full attention. He smelled of something I couldn't name. Sandalwood and something darker, something older. Something that made the werewolf in me sit up and pay attention in a way I immediately resented.

"You didn't bid," I said.

"No."

"You just walked in and took me."

"Yes."

"And no one stopped you."

"No."

I let that settle for a moment. "Who are you?"

He glanced at me then just briefly, just a flicker of those blue eyes and something in his expression was almost careful.

"Someone who has been looking for you for a very long time," he said.

I didn't know what to do with that, so I looked back at the windscreen.

A few minutes later, an orange glow appeared in the side mirror. I turned. Behind us, against the dark sky, the building where I had spent the last hours of my captivity was engulfed in flame great churning columns of fire reaching upward, black smoke billowing into the night.

My breath stopped. Kara. Lilly. The others.

"My friends were in there," I said. My voice came out very quiet. Very controlled. The way it always did when I was about to lose it entirely.

He said nothing.

"My friends," I repeated, turning to him, "were in that building."

He kept his eyes on the road. His jaw was set. His expression gave me nothing.

Something cold and hard settled into my chest that familiar weight I had carried for four years. There is no one coming. There is no one who will help you. You are alone, and you have always been alone.

I turned back to the window.

I did not cry.

I had learned, a long time ago, that tears were a luxury I could not afford. So I pressed my lips together, and I breathed, and I watched the fire shrink in the mirror as we drove away into the dark away from everything I had known, toward something I couldn't name, sitting beside a man I didn't know, who smelled like danger and moved like a king and had, for reasons I couldn't fathom, decided that I belonged to him.

I didn't belong to anyone.

I was going to make sure he understood that.

Sofia

The estate appeared out of the dark like something from a dream I hadn't consented to having.

We had been driving for what felt like an hour long enough for the fire to disappear completely from the mirror, long enough for the city lights to thin out and give way to open road, long enough for the silence inside the car to settle into something almost textured. I had stopped trying to fill it. Draco clearly had no interest in conversation, and I had no interest in giving him the satisfaction of knowing how badly I wanted to demand answers.

So I watched the dark roll past the window instead, and I thought about Kara's face when they took her, and I thought about Lilly walking out with her hands folded like she was going to church, and I thought about the fire.

I thought about the fire a lot.

They were already gone before it started. That's what I told myself. That Xavier, the man with the apologetic eyes had done something before he lit the match. That there was a reason Draco had given that specific instruction in that specific tone, unhurried and certain, like a man who had already accounted for every variable.

I told myself that. I almost believed it.

Then the gates appeared enormous iron things flanked by stone pillars, swinging open without anyone touching them as the car approached and whatever I'd been about to think dissolved entirely.

Beyond the gates, a driveway curved through grounds so vast I couldn't see where they ended. Fountains caught the moonlight. Manicured gardens stretched in every direction, broken up by paths and hedgerows and structures I couldn't identify in the dark. And at the centre of it all, set back from everything else like it was keeping its distance on principle.

I had grown up in the Beta's house, which was large by any ordinary standard. I had spent four years in cells and slave quarters where the ceiling was low enough to touch. I was not, in other words, easily impressed by architecture.

But this, it rose against the night sky like something medieval and impossible turrets and towers and a stone facade that seemed to absorb the moonlight rather than reflect it. Every window was lit from within, warm gold bleeding through the glass, and the sheer scale of it pressed against something in my chest that I refused to identify as awe.

I was not going to be impressed by his house. That felt important.

Draco parked, got out, and opened my door before I'd finished deciding whether to open it myself. He offered his hand. I ignored it and stepped out on my own.

He didn't react. Just closed the door behind me and walked toward the entrance, apparently trusting that I would follow.

I followed. Not because I trusted him. Because I had nowhere else to go.

The doors opened before we reached them.

Two women stood in the entrance both in black dresses with white aprons, both with their heads slightly bowed. The one on the left had dark bobbed hair and a smile that reached her eyes. The one on the right was blonde, pretty in a sharp-edged way, and wearing an expression she was working very hard to make look neutral.

It wasn't neutral. I had spent four years reading people's faces for survival. That expression said why is he bringing her here and who does she think she is and several other things she had the good sense not to say out loud.

"Welcome back, Alpha," they said together.

Draco didn't acknowledge it. He was looking at me again that steady, assessing look that I was already beginning to find deeply aggravating, like being studied by something that hadn't decided yet whether you were interesting or inconvenient.

"Gracie," he said, to the dark-haired one. "Make sure she's comfortable. Whatever she needs."

"Of course, Alpha." Gracie's smile was genuine. I filed that away.

"Susan." His attention moved to the blonde. "Show her to her room."

Susan's smile didn't move. Her eyes did a quick, involuntary flick to me, then back to him. "Of course."

Draco looked at me one more time. Something moved in his expression that I couldn't read, and then he turned and walked deeper into the house, and just like that, I was standing in the entrance hall of a stranger's mansion with two women I'd never met and the particular hollow feeling of a person who has run out of things to fight against for the moment.

I looked around.

The entrance hall was well. It was something. A chandelier the size of a small car hung overhead, refracting light into a thousand tiny prisms across the walls. The floors were dark hardwood, covered in rugs that probably cost more than most people's houses. Artwork I didn't recognise but suspected was expensive. Curved staircases on either side, sweeping upward to a landing that overlooked the whole space.

"This way, please," Susan said, in a tone that made please sound like a formality she resented.

I followed her up the stairs.

The room was ridiculous.

I stood in the doorway and took it in the four-poster bed draped in silk the colour of blush roses, the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the moonlit grounds, the chandelier overhead casting everything in soft gold, the walls painted a deep, soothing shade of blue that should have felt cold but somehow didn't.

There was a dressing table with crystal perfume bottles arranged on it. An armchair by the window. A phone on the bedside table. Fresh flowers in a vase I was fairly certain was antique.

It was the most beautiful room I had ever been in.

I hated how much I noticed that.

"This is your room," Susan said, and left before I could respond which was fine, because I hadn't been planning to.

Gracie lingered. "Is there anything you need? Food, or.."

"No." I stepped into the room and turned to face her. "Thank you. You can go."

She hesitated, kindness and professionalism warring visibly on her face. "There's a phone on the table if you need anything. Just dial one."

"I won't need anything."

Another hesitation. Then she nodded, smiled with genuine warmth that I didn't know what to do with, and closed the door softly behind her.

I stood in the centre of the room and listened to the silence.

Then I sat down on the floor not the bed, the floor, because the floor felt honest in a way the silk and the chandelier and the crystal perfume bottles did not and I pulled my knees to my chest, and I let myself feel it.

All of it.

The grief hit first. Kara's brave, crumpling face. Lilly's careful hands. The fire in the mirror, orange and enormous against the black sky, consuming the building where they had been, where we had been, where the only family I had built in four years of captivity had existed until an hour ago.

I had survived so much. I was still surviving. But surviving and being okay were two entirely different things, and I was so tired, so profoundly, bone-deep tired of the distance between them.

I didn't make a sound. I had cried silently for so long that even alone in a room, my grief was quiet. Just the pressure of it, behind my eyes and in my throat and sitting heavy on my sternum.

I don't know how long I'd been sitting there when the knock came.

I didn't answer.

A second knock. Then his voice, low through the door. "Are you alright?"

I said nothing. I pressed my lips together and stared at the far wall and waited for him to leave.

The door opened anyway.

His footsteps crossed the room slowly. I didn't look up. I wasn't going to let him see my face like this blotched and raw and stripped of every defence I had. I raised my hands to wipe my eyes, but they stopped halfway.

He was crouching in front of me.

I looked up before I could stop myself, and found those blue eyes closer than I expected, level with mine, and something in them that I had not anticipated.

Concern, genuine, unperformed concern.

"Are you alright?" he asked again, quieter this time.

"Don't." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Look at me like that. Act like you care." I held his gaze even though everything in me wanted to look away. "You took me from that building against my will. Whatever you told yourself to justify that, it doesn't make you different from any of them."

Something shifted in his expression. Not offense something more complicated.

"Lobita.."

"Don't call me that." The word whatever it meant felt too intimate in his mouth, too certain. Like he had already decided something about me that I hadn't agreed to. "My name is Sofia."

He was quiet for a moment. The candle on the bedside table threw warm light across his face, softening the sharp angles of it, and I wished it wouldn't.

"Sofia," he said. Testing it. Like he was deciding whether to allow it.

"My friends were in that building," I said. "You had your man burn it. That's what I know about you."

He opened his mouth. His phone rang.

He glanced at it. Something crossed his face not irritation, exactly. More like the controlled patience of a man who was used to being interrupted by things that demanded his immediate attention. He stood, answered it in a voice too low for me to catch, said something brief, and then looked back at me.

"This isn't finished," he said.

"You're right," I said. "It isn't."

He left.

I listened to his footsteps retreat down the hall, and then I dropped my head back against the side of the bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out how I was going to survive a man who looked at me like that like I was something he had been searching for, like my defiance was not an obstacle but a confirmation without losing what was left of myself in the process.

I was still working on it when the knock came again.

"I told you I don't want,"

"It's Kara."

A beat of silence.

"And Lilly."

I was on my feet before I'd decided to move.

I don't have words for what it felt like to open that door.

They were both there, Kara with her eyes red-rimmed but her chin up, Lilly with her small notebook clutched to her chest and tears running silently down her face, and for a moment I just stood there, because my mind couldn't reconcile the fire in the mirror with the two people standing in front of me.

Kara grabbed me first. Her arms came around me hard and certain, and she said into my shoulder, "We're okay. We're here, we're okay" the same thing, over and over, and I realised after a moment that she was saying it as much for herself as for me.

Lilly pressed in from the other side, smaller and quieter, her hand finding mine and holding on.

I stood between them and breathed.

When we finally pulled apart, I held them both at arm's length and looked at them cataloguing damage, force of habit and found them shaken but whole. Tired, and rightened. But here.

"Xavier," Kara said, answering the question I hadn't asked yet. "He got us out before before the fire. All of us. The women from the building."

"Draco told him to," I said slowly.

"Apparently." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "His words were take care of that. Xavier told me later."

Take care of that. Standing in the dark outside the auction house, Draco's voice flat and certain, and me hearing it as a sentence and not understanding it was two.

Take care of that. Get them out. All of them.

I thought about the car ride. The fire in the mirror. The way I had sat beside him in furious silence, believing the worst, and he had said nothing to correct me.

He hadn't explained himself. He hadn't defended himself. He had just driven.

I didn't know what to do with that.

"Sofia." Kara was watching my face with the particular attention of someone who had spent four years learning to read it. "What's going on in there?"

"Nothing," I said.

She gave me the look that meant she didn't believe me, but she let it go.

Lilly held up her notebook. In her neat, careful handwriting: Are you alright?

I looked at her. At both of them. At the ridiculous beautiful room with its silk drapes and chandelier, and the window looking out over grounds that went on forever, and the door that led to a hallway that led to a house that belonged to a man I didn't understand and wasn't sure I wanted to.

"I don't know yet," I said honestly.

Lilly wrote: That's okay. Neither do we.

Kara laughed a short, wet sound that was closer to a sob than anything else and pulled us both in again, and I let her, and for a little while the three of us just stood there in the doorway of a stranger's room, alive and bewildered and together.

It wasn't alright. Not yet, but it was something.

Sofia

Kara had opinions about the mansion.

This was not surprising. Kara had opinions about everything, the thread count of the sheets at the slave house, the particular injustice of being served cold porridge on Tuesdays specifically, the correct way to braid hair when you had no mirror and limited patience. In four years, I had never once seen her walk into a room without immediately forming a view on it.

She formed several on this one.

"Sofia." She stood in the centre of my bedroom with her hands on her hips, turning slowly, taking it all in. "Sofia, there is a chandelier."

"I see it."

"It has crystals on it."

"Kara..."

"Real ones, I think. And the bed..." She crossed to it and pressed one hand into the mattress, and her expression did something involuntary and reverent. "Oh. Oh, that's not fair."

Lilly was already sitting in the armchair by the window, her notebook open on her knee, watching Kara with the quiet amusement she reserved for moments when words would only slow things down.

"We don't know anything about this place," I said. "Or about him. Can we not decorate the cell before we've established whether the door locks from the inside or the outside?"

Kara turned to face me. "It's not a cell."

"It might as well be."

"A cell," she said, with exaggerated patience, "does not have a four-poster bed and fresh flowers and..." she picked up one of the crystal perfume bottles from the dressing table and sniffed it, "... oh, that's expensive."

"Put that down."

She put it down. Then she sat on the edge of the bed which she had clearly decided was hers to evaluate and looked at me properly. The performance dropped, just slightly. Underneath it was the same thing that was underneath everything with Kara: someone paying very close attention.

"Talk to me," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You've said you're fine approximately forty times since we got here and every time you say it you look less fine. Try again."

I sat down on the floor, the floor was still honest, and leaned back against the bed frame. Lilly looked up from her notebook and tilted her head in a way that meant she's right, you know.

"He called me his," I said. "Downstairs. Before he left. He said... " I paused. The words sat strangely in my mouth. "You are mine, Lobita."

Kara's eyebrows went up.

"Whatever Lobita means," I added.

"It means little wolf," Kara said.

I stared at her. "How do you know that?"

She looked, briefly, like she was deciding something. "Xavier told me,"

"Of course he did." I rubbed my face with both hands. "Kara. We have been here for a matter of hours. We don't know these people. We don't know their intentions. We don't know why Draco brought us here or what he wants or what happens when he decides he's done being," I gestured vaguely, "hospitable."

"He saved us."

"We don't know why."

"Does the why matter that much right now?"

"The why is the only thing that matters."

Lilly held up her notebook. She had been writing while we talked, in that quick, efficient way of hers, she could fill a page before most people had formed a sentence. The words said: Kara is right that he saved us. You are right that we should be careful. Both things can be true.

I looked at her. "You're supposed to be on my side."

She wrote: I am on your side. That's why I'm being honest.

Kara pointed at her. "What she said."

I dropped my head back against the bed frame and stared at the ceiling. The chandelier threw small fragments of light across it, restless and scattered. Somewhere in the house, a clock was ticking.

"He dismissed his mistresses," Kara said, after a moment.

I looked at her.

"This morning, apparently. The whole palace is in shock." She paused. "Xavier told me."

"You have to stop talking to him."

"He keeps appearing."

"That's not the same as having to."

She gave me a look that suggested she found this argument unpersuasive, and I decided not to pursue it because I was tired and the floor was starting to hurt and I had approximately seventeen more pressing problems to think about.

"He's going to ask me to marry him," I said.

The room went quiet.

"He already did," I admitted. "Sort of. He told me. That's how he said it. We'll be getting married, Lobita. Like it was already decided. Like I was going to.." I stopped. Shook my head. "I asked him why he needed a wife when he already had mistresses. He didn't answer. He saw my scars and.."

"Your scars?" Kara's voice sharpened.

"He reached for them. I accused him of.." I stopped again. The memory of his expression that flash of something that was not anger but was adjacent to it, cold and controlled sat uncomfortably in my chest. "He left."

Lilly wrote: Did he hurt you?

"No." That, at least, was straightforward. "He didn't. He left."

Another silence. Lilly wrote again, and turned the notebook to face me: A man who has everything you just described, who could do anything, left when you asked him to?

I looked at the page for a long moment.

"I didn't ask him to," I said. "I accused him of something. He was angry. He left anyway."

Lilly's expression said: Yes. That's exactly what I mean.

I didn't have an answer for that, so I pushed myself up off the floor and went to the window instead, mostly to give myself something to look at that wasn't their faces.

The grounds stretched out below, silver and still in the moonlight. I could see the fountain from here, the paths winding between the hedgerows, the other buildings set further back on the estate. It was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they're built by someone who has never had to ask the price of anything.

"I don't trust him," I said, to the window.

"That's fair," Kara said.

"I don't trust this place."

"Also fair."

"I don't know what he wants from me or why he chose me or what little wolf is supposed to mean or why every person in that auction house dropped their eyes when he walked in like he was.." I paused. "What is he, Kara? Do you know that too? Did Xavier tell you that?"

"He's an Alpha," she said carefully. "A very powerful one."

"How powerful?"

Another beat, slightly longer. "The most powerful one."

I turned from the window. "What does that mean?"

"It means.." She hesitated, then seemed to decide on honesty. "It means when Draco walks into a room, other Alphas bow. It means there are packs across three territories who answer to him. It means the men in that auction house weren't just being polite."

I thought about the silence that had fallen the moment he appeared. The bowed heads. The auctioneer's open mouth, frozen mid-syllable.

"Right," I said.

"Sofia..."

"I'm fine," I said, and this time I almost meant it. Or at least, I meant the version of fine that means I have filed this information in the relevant place and I am continuing to function. "I'm going to sleep. You should both sleep."

Lilly wrote: We're two doors down. Come and get us if you need anything.

I nodded.

Kara stood and crossed to me and took my face in both hands for a moment, a thing she did sometimes, brief and certain, when she wanted me to understand something without having to say it. Then she let go, and she and Lilly slipped out, and the door clicked shut, and I was alone again.

I stood at the window for a while longer.

Little wolf.

He had named me before I had agreed to be named. Had decided something about me before I had decided anything about myself. Had looked at me in that auction house like he had been looking for me specifically like I was the reason he had come, and everything else in the room was irrelevant detail.

Someone who has been looking for you for a very long time.

I pressed my fingers against the cold glass and thought about that, and tried to decide whether it frightened me.

It did.

But not, I was beginning to suspect, entirely for the right reasons.

I didn't mean to fall asleep.

One moment I was sitting on the edge of that ridiculous silk-draped bed, still dressed, still trying to think, and the next moment I was waking up to pale morning light coming through the windows and a silence so total it felt deliberate.

I lay still for a moment and took inventory, the way I always did: where am I, what are the exits, what do I know.

Where am I: a mansion belonging to a man called Draco, who is apparently the most powerful Alpha alive and who has decided, for reasons still unclear, that I am his.

Exits: the door, the windows, neither of which were currently viable.

What do I know: that Kara and Lilly were alive, two doors down. That the fire had been deliberate. That he had told Xavier to save them, and Xavier had, and Draco had said nothing in the car to let me know that.

I sat up.

That last part was still sitting strangely in me. He could have told me. One sentence, in the car, while I sat beside him white-knuckled and hollow with grief: your friends are alive, I had them taken out first. One sentence, and the entire drive would have been different.

He hadn't said it.

I didn't know yet if that was cruelty or something else entirely.

A knock at the door.

"Come in," I called, assuming it was Kara.

It wasn't Kara.

Susan opened the door with the expression of someone performing a task they found personally offensive. "The Alpha requests your presence for dinner," she said. "He's waiting."

I looked at her. "Tell him I'm not hungry."

Something moved in her expression, a flicker of what might have been satisfaction, quickly covered. "I would strongly advise against that."

"Would you."

"You may not be aware of how things work here." She clasped her hands in front of her, patient and precise and sharp-edged underneath both. "No one declines the Alpha's invitation. Not if they have any sense of self-preservation."

I held her gaze. "Thank you for the advice."

A beat. She seemed to be deciding whether this counted as compliance.

"I'll go," I said, before she could decide. Not because I wanted to. Because I had questions, and the only person who had answers was apparently waiting downstairs, and I had never in my life been good at leaving questions unanswered.

Susan's expression suggested this was not the victory she had hoped for.

She led the way.