He could have fought. Could have lied. I’m certain Bern had a plan to get them all out of this shit. But he didn’t. He opened his mouth, and the truth came out instead.
Don’t. Don’t make me respect this. Don’t add this to the list of things I can’t reconcile.
The corridor and the clearing, the knife and the forest, the man who sold wolves and the man who just stood up in a room full of his peers and saidI have no defense.
The hearing adjourns for the afternoon. The room empties in clusters — delegations, observers, the political groupings reforming in the corridor. Brenna is immediately surrounded. Conner stays close to Willow. Merric positions himself between the Ravenclaw delegation and Bern’s people with the casual authority of an alpha who knows exactly where the threats are.
I need air. I push through the side door into a corridor that runs along the back of the building. Storage rooms, a kitchen, a back exit to the yard. Quieter here. The voices from the main hall muffled by timber walls.
I’m thirty feet down the corridor when I feel him behind me.
Not a sound. Not a scent — the building is too saturated with wolf signatures for any single one to register. But my wolf knows. He’s close, and my body responds before my mind gets a vote.
I stop walking. Don’t turn around.
“You shouldn’t be back here,” I say. “Your delegation—”
“I don’t have a delegation. I have Dawes.”
“Then Dawes is wondering where you are.”
“Dawes knows not to wonder.”
His footsteps come closer. I still don’t turn around, because turning around means seeing him, and seeing him means the air between us lights up. And if it lights up in this narrow corridor with a storage room six feet to my left—
“What you did in there,” I say. “The non-defense.”
“What about it?”
“It was stupid. Bern’s lawyers will use your own words to bury you.”
“Probably.”
“You had a statement. I could tell. You had the whole thing prepared, and you threw it away.”
“It was a lie. I’ve been telling it for weeks, and it’s been getting heavier every time.” His voice is close now. Right behind me. I can feel his breath disturb my hair. “I’m tired of carrying it.”
“Since when does Garrett Forrester get tired of lying?”
“Since a woman tied me to a chair and told me the truth until I couldn’t unhear it.”
I turn around.
He’s right there. Two feet away. Something is different about the way he’s looking at me. Not the alpha assessment, not the wolf’s hunger. Something underneath both, quieter, that I’ve been catching glimpses of since the forest. The morning he woke me with his hand on my stomach. The moment he brushed hairfrom my face after he’d taken me. The expression that has no performance in it.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I say.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m something other than the woman who kidnapped you.”
“Youaresomething other than the woman who kidnapped me.”
“I’m really not.”
“You’re the woman who showed me what I was.”
My back is against the wall. I didn’t step back; he stepped forward. Or the corridor is narrower than I thought. Or my body put itself here because my body keeps making its own decisions about this man, and I’m losing the fight to overrule it.