“Tell me something,” he says. His voice is roughened. Post-sex, post-sleep, stripped of the alpha register.
“Like what?”
“Anything. Something real.”
I should give him nothing. Silence is my strongest weapon, and he’s asking me to put it down.
“My parents were killed when I was eleven,” I say.
I don’t know why I say it. The words come out in my flat voice, the one I use for things that live too close to the bone for inflection. “Territorial dispute. A pack moved on our land, and my father tried to negotiate, but they put him down. My mother fought. She lasted longer than he did.”
His arm tightens around me. Not a response. A reflex. The body’s answer when words don’t fit.
“Merric’s father took me in. Trained me. I grew up Frostbourne.”
“How old were you when you started fighting?”
“Twelve.”
“That’s young.”
“I was small. Small wolves learn fast, or they don’t learn at all.”
He’s quiet for a moment. His hand is on my back, his thumb doing that idle stroke again, and the rhythm of it is dangerously soothing.
“It’s strange,” he says eventually. “You don’t smell of magic. I don’t feel it in you either, even after we…” He stops.
I frown. “Why would I smell of magic?”
“Because you’re magic-blood?”
I lift my head from his chest and look up at him. “I’m not magic-blood, Garrett.”
His eyes meet mine, confusion there. “You’re not?”
“No. Why would you think that?”
“Because…” He pauses. “Because you came for revenge. For what we did to them. Why would you do that if you weren’t one of them?”
“One of them?” I shake my head. “There’s no ‘them and us’, Garrett. They’re wolves, like all the rest of us, just with extra powers. Some might say magic-bloods are superior.”
He scoffs. I narrow my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “That was out of line.”
“Damn right, it was,” I mutter, feeling the languor evaporating. Something dawns on me. “Wait. Your wolf claimed me… and you let him. Even though you thought I was magic-blood? When you hate them?”
“I don’t hate them, Briar. It’s just…” He exhales. “It’s how it’s always been. They’re dangerous.”
I snort. “Dangerous? I’ve seen what was done to those wolves. I don’t think they’re the dangerous ones.”
“You’re right,” he says, surprising me. He waits a beat, then goes on, “My father built the corridor. Not me. Him.”
I don’t respond. Let the silence work.
“After my sister died, he sat in his chair, and he stopped. Just… stopped. Like something essential had been disconnected. He’d been alpha for twenty years, and overnight, he couldn’t make a decision about feed orders.” His chest moves against mine — a breath deeper than the others. “He made the corridor. The contacts. He set it up. I was helping by the time I was twenty-one because he couldn’t, and I took it over formally by taking over the pack when he wouldn’t even come out of the study anymore.”
“And you just ran it.”