33. Raine
33
Raine
My evening with Rose goes better than expected.
Her infectious energy keeps me company all through the night until we both settle down long after the moon rises. She sleeps on a couch across the room, curled up with a blanket tucked up to her chin.
While she sleeps peacefully, I toss and turn with a restlessness that I haven’t felt in a long time, not since being with the Pollis pack.
Eventually, I push back my covers and slide out of bed. With it being so late at night, there’s a chance that not many of Nyx’s packmates are up, and as long as I avoid any of his enforcers wandering the town, I should be able to sneak out and get some fresh air.
The mansion is quiet—a little too much for my liking. It has the hair on the back of my neck standing on end as I slowly descend the stairs to the main floor, my ears perked for any sign of footsteps approaching.
I hear nothing, which is both encouraging and scary. My wolf is alert along with me, but nothing seems to catch her attention either, so instead of staying frozen at the bottom of the staircase, I make my way over to the foyer.
I’ve yet to map out this entire place, but at least I know how to get to the front door and back again when I come back from my midnight stroll.
The door is unlocked when I try it, surprising me more than how quiet this place is. While a pack alpha leaving the door to his residence unlocked isn’t that unusual, I expected more security for the goddamn Southern Alpha King.
Nothing stops me from leaving though. Not an enforcer, or an alarm system, or hell—even Nyx himself.
The night breeze is surprising considering the valley is practically a desert. Up above, the sky is dark, with stars speckled all around. The moon glows softly, casting a halo of light that guides me down the front steps and onto the main dirt road of the town.
Instead of heading into it, I shift and move around to the back of the property where Nyx told me the conservatory is. I’m not all that interested in greenery, but the pond sounded nice.
I keep my ears perked while I trot through the clipped bushes and toward the back of the property. It’s kind of strange seeing so much green around me when the rest of the town is the complete opposite. Nyx never really struck me as the type to care about curb appeal, though what do I know?
At the end of the day, he’s still a stranger to me.
When I finally make my way through the maze of hedges, I spot a large greenhouse. There are dim lights on inside of it, drawing my curiosity. It’s darker out here than it was back at the mansion, but somehow much more peaceful.
I shift and head for the greenhouse, and just as I take my first step forward, the ground completely disappears out from under me.
A small yelp leaves my lips just as I plunge under cool water, the air from my lungs bursting out of me from the shock. I grasp for the surface, something brushing against my leg that has me kicking at it. My foot hits something solid before it darts away, my eyes cloudy from how murky the water is.
So much so that I can’t tell which way is up and which way is down.
Oh fuck, am I actually going to drown on my first day in this fucking pack’s territory?!
Something grabs me by the back of my nightshirt, hauling me up and breaking me through the surface of the water. I choke out whatever I breathed into my lungs, my chest burning from the pressure.
My body is slapped down onto solid ground and rolled over onto my side, where I can properly cough up more water from my lungs.
“I distinctly remember telling you that the pond sneaks up on you,” a dark voice says, hovering over me.
My eyes squeeze shut, a few tears pearling out from the corners as I heave in a few shallow breaths. Of course…of all fucking people to have caught me drowning in a goddamn pond…it just had to be my new alpha.
He pats my back with a few solid hits. “You need to cough hard to get it all out. Breathe in deeply and then cough.”
I struggle to do as he says, but finally after a few tries, I pull in a lungful of air and then heave out a wet cough, choking up the last of the water I swallowed.
“There’s a good girl,” he murmurs.
A thread of heat zings through me, sending me jolting back from him on instinct. He’s kneeling on the grass next to the spot I’d just been occupying, his hand still outstretched from where he’d been patting me. He eyes me curiously with a rather bemused expression.
Ripping my gaze away from him, I look back over my shoulder to the pond, where the water still ripples. I can’t believe I fell in like a fucking idiot, but aside from that, how deep is it? When I’d been flailing around, I hadn’t felt the bottom at all.
The ground had simply dropped off into what felt like a steep five feet down with no gradual decline. From here, the pond doesn’t seem that wide, maybe fifty feet all the way around.
Nyx standing suddenly catches my attention.
He wanders over to the side of the pond and lowers himself again down onto one knee. He reaches a hand out over the still-rippling surface, just barely grazing over it. Something under the water moves, and then another, until I realize that what touched me while I’d been drowning was a bunch of fish.
“Look how upset you’ve made my poor koi,” he says.
His tone doesn’t sound upset. In fact, he sounds as bemused as he looked when getting me to finally breathe again.
I lift myself up farther onto my hands, twisting at my waist to get a better look. “I never considered you a fish person.”
He throws a look over his shoulder at me, his long hair curling slightly at the ends from getting wet when rescuing me. Even from here, I can tell that what I said has amused him even more.
“Oh? And what sort of person did you consider me?”
I’m stunned for a second, mostly because how in the world am I supposed to answer that? Tell the truth about all of the rumors I’ve heard about him over the years, or lie and say that he seems like the complete opposite of whatever it is I’ve come to know.
Either way, neither of those personalities strikes me as a “fish guy.”
“ Are they your fish?” I ask instead.
“Who else’s would they be?”
Slowly, I push myself up onto my feet again and wander over to him. My clothes stick to me like a second skin and I don’t miss the way he eyes me, mostly focusing on my belly, which has just only begun to grow slightly swollen. If these clothes weren’t wet, no one would know.
I stand next to him, looking down into the water where over a dozen fish— koi— move around. They’re quick, their colors flashing in the blink of an eye before disappearing into the murky depths once more.
“Did I disturb some kind of fish ecosystem or something?” I ask.
A soft sound draws my attention back to him once more, surprise tingling in my veins at his full-blown smirk. With it, the twin black hoops in his lips become more pronounced.
“Yes, you have.”
Fuck me. My teeth gnaw at the inside of my cheek.
He lifts himself up to his full height again, close enough that he nearly brushes his hand with mine. “There is a way to make it up to them, though.”
I raise a brow. “How?”
Making it up to fish…now that’s a first.
He nods for me to follow him, careful to not stray too close to the side of the pond while heading over to the greenhouse. When we approach it, he unlatches the handle and pushes the door open, moist heat hitting both of us in the face.
I follow him in, the scent of dark earth tickling my nose. Plants surround the entire greenhouse from top to bottom, making it hard to see the back of it or where the sides even arch up.
Nyx moves through the plants easily, as if he’s done this a million times. And perhaps he has. It’s just another thing about him that I really didn’t expect at all. I’m not a fool who thinks that any of this means he has a soft heart.
If anything, it terrifies me even more to consider that he truly is an enigma, capable of just about anything.
He bends over to open up a cabinet on the ground, grabbing something heavy and lifting it into his arms. He sets it down on the counter above and rips it open, digging a plastic scoop into it and pulling it out to hand to me.
I move through the plants carefully, trying not to touch anything lest I accidentally knock something over and destroy it, like I seem to have a knack for lately.
When I reach him, I take the cup and look down into it, realizing that it’s full of pellets.
For the fish.
He doesn’t say anything before turning back around, sealing the bag up, and shoving it back under the cupboard.
“You want me to feed your fish?”
“Do you have a better idea to get them to calm down?” He lifts a brow at me.
Well, obviously not.
“They won’t calm down on their own?” I ask.
He very slowly crosses his arms over his chest. That’s when I realize that he’s also in what looks to be pj’s—a loose fitted t-shirt and relaxed cotton bottoms, both of them black.
A thought occurs to me. “Why are you awake and out here at this time of night?”
“I can’t wander my own lands?” he counters immediately.
Touché.
“I should be asking you the same,” he says, nodding to me. “Why are you outside?”
Instantly my body freezes.
Apparently in my almost-kind-of near-death experience, I’d gotten too comfortable in addressing him and not been scared shitless that he caught me out here without asking him first.
Sure, he told me earlier that I was welcome to wander the parterre, but that was before I disturbed his fish…and him.
Now he has grounds to keep me locked inside, never to see the light of day ever again.