Chapter 7 #2
“I don’t need to.” He looks down his nose matter of factly. “I know Branson could kick his ass if he wanted to.”
I try not to laugh. Newly mated couples are completely ridiculous. “Let’s put ass-kicking on hold for now. We can always revisit the idea if we need to—and Branson can bring Wilder along with him, if he does end up making a trip out here.”
Lucien opens his mouth to tell me Branson doesn’t need Wilder’s help kicking Lord Augustus’s ass, but I cut him off by raising my hand to shush him. He takes the hint and says, “Okay, so what’s weird about this guy?”
“It’s the strangest thing.” I lean in a little closer to my screen and lower my voice to a whisper. “He doesn’t have a scent.”
Lucien’s nose crinkles. “What do you mean? Like, a faint scent, or a scent you don’t like?”
“No, I mean, he doesn’t have any scent at all. He doesn’t smell like an alpha, or even a person, really. He just…kind of smells like plastic.”
“Oh my Gawd.” Lucien’s jaw drops and his mouth morphs into a massive yikes. “That’s fucking horrendous.”
He wastes no time dissecting the information in a hundred different ways, so much so that after a while, he starts looking normal again. His face looks like it belongs to my Lulu. My friend. My old and best friend.
“Thank you for telling me this, Jens,” he says when it’s time for me to go. “I miss you so much, and I promise I’m going to try my best not to tell Branson anything you’ve said.”
One and a half minutes later, a message pops up on my phone. It’s Lucien.
Branson says he will kick that stuck-up alpha’s ass if he touches you.
Over the next half hour or so, more and more messages pop up, evidently in response to the detailed play-by-play Lucien is giving Branson of our conversation. To my surprise, I find myself smiling a little harder each time a message is delivered.
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt connected to Lucien and Branson like this, and it feels good. It’s different from the way it was before, but at least it feels like they care. Like they miss me and still love me.
I settle back into work with a little spring in my step.
Generally, I break my workday into two. I focus on cataloging and organizing in the morning, and in the afternoon, I treat myself to a little book restoration.
It’s painstaking work, but I absolutely love it, and this afternoon, I’m going to start on bringing a water-damaged copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles back to life. Can’t wait.
It’s an awful, wind-howling, lightning-flashing kind of night.
I had dinner on my own, as usual, and while I didn’t see Lord Augustus leave the property, it feels like I’m alone in the house.
The roof is creaking from the gale, and the old bones, the old soul, of the property are groaning from the strain of the bad weather.
I feel my solitude like a high-pitched hum I don’t like.
I feel something else too. Another kind of hum. One that vibrates lower down. This hum has been with me for as long as I can remember. This hum, I do like, despite the fact that it makes no sense at all.
I’ve drawn the curtains in my rooms and stoked the fire, but it’s done nothing to shut the night out. The low hum grows louder, sending tiny vibrations up my spine. It gets so loud that I find myself unable to stay still.
For the first time since I got here, I venture out of my rooms in the middle of the night. My heart pounds as I do it, but I don’t mind it. It might even be why I do things like this.
The house is eerily quiet and clashingly loud.
There isn’t another heartbeat to be heard, yet the building is alive with the sounds of discontent.
The wind howls and howls, whistling through walls as I walk.
I flick lights on as I go, finding rooms I haven’t been in before, entering with a quake in my step.
The quake is like the low hum. It doesn’t make sense for me to like it.
I shouldn’t, and I don’t know how to explain what I like about it, other than to say I like it.
The first room I enter is a small den. The walls are deep red and bedecked with art.
Marble, tapestries, and sumptuous velvet sofas beg me to touch them.
Long shadows reach out to me, cranking the volume of the low hum up considerably as I check that the windows are locked before beating a path back to the hallway.
I pass several closed doors. I don’t have the courage required to open a closed door, but I do barely have what it takes to touch my fingertips to one of the door handles.
The wrought iron is cool to the touch.
The wrongness of being here, of doing this, of snooping where I don’t belong, delivers a heady frisson of fear.
It’s a lot, but not enough. Not nearly as much as I want. It’s a sliver.
Just enough to make me shiver.
Just enough fear to make me stiffen.
I keep walking, turning on hall lights, until I find another door that’s ajar. I nudge the door with my foot, not with my hand, as though that makes what I’m doing better. It swings open to reveal a room that might as well have alpha stamped into the brickwork.
Everything about the room oozes Old World masculinity.
The walls are clad in dark wood. The rug on the floor is silk, intricately woven with jewel-toned details that pick up the richness of the timber in the room.
A heavy mahogany desk dominates the space.
It looks like it was carved by testosterone.
By big hands and a deep voice. There’s nothing on it except for a notepad, a single fountain pen, and a gold opener engraved with the Augustus insignia.
There’s an oversized chair with an upholstered leather seat and arms behind the desk, and behind that, there’s a painting that’s unlike the rest of the art in the house.
The other paintings are old, most likely incredibly valuable.
This one is new. It’s a painting of Gregor.
A close-up of him. He looks the way he looks when he’s ridden in the morning.
His eyes are flashing, his mane flowing out to the side.
It’s a beautiful piece. It’s powerful. It looks like movement. Like motion frozen in time.
It fills me with such certainty that this space belongs to Lord Augustus that my entire body tenses and I’m unable to move a muscle. Unable to draw the curtains. Unable to do anything but stand where I am and inhale desperately to see if I can pick up any hint of alpha scent.
I catch myself on my third inhale and bolt from the room, carefully half-closing the door so as not to arouse any suspicion that I was here.
Though turning on the lights in the hallways improves the eerie mood, the house is so vast that, despite my efforts, most of the ground floor is still swallowed by the black of night.
My old friend Fear is still with me. Wrapped around me tightly. Not like a blanket exactly, but rather something inside me that pulls my balls tight up against my body.
At last, my nerve fails me. I’ve gone as far as I can. I’ve ventured as far as I dare. The fun fear, the fear I like, the fear that turns me on, has tipped the scale into real fear, so I hot-foot it back to my side of the house.
My anxiety spikes as I make my way past the dining room and parlor.
The whine of the wind amplifies as I go.
It changes from a whine to a wail, and as I get closer to the entrance hall, I slow down to catch my breath.
When I do, I notice that the mournful whine I've been hearing for hours is accompanied by a semi-regular battering that doesn’t sound like something that’s caused by the weather.
I follow the sound to the front door and prick my ears. I’m right. The stormy sounds that are causing the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end aren’t from the wind.
They’re made by a person.
By a woman.
Someone else is here. Someone is at the front door, banging the knocker repeatedly, and crying.
At a loss, I look around and whisper hopefully, “Um, excuse me, Lord, are you here?”
I know he’s out. I know I’m completely alone in the house. I have been for hours. It’s why I’ve been so unnerved. It’s just that I’m not sure how one is supposed to handle things like this, and I think a person of noble birth might be what the situation calls for.
Of course he doesn’t answer.
The person at the door keens and bangs on the door again.
And again.
I’m really not sure what to do. Whoever is out there might be in trouble. They might need help. At the same time, it’s late, this isn’t my house, or my country, and nothing about what’s happening feels like a particularly good idea.
I wait for a few more minutes, and then a prickle of curiosity gets the better of me. I unlock the door and open it gingerly, ready to slam it shut if need be.
I’m met by the sight of a bedraggled, windswept omega in a high state of emotion. Her auburn hair is plastered to her face, mascara running down her cheeks, along with torrents of rain.
“Who are you?” she demands when she sees me. Her voice is stripped bare, a screech that’s had breeding and socialization torn from it. “And where is he? Where. Is. He? I need to see him. I have to.” Her tone changes from frantic to desperate. “Please, it’s urgent.”
I’m as taken aback by the dreadful state of this woman as I am by the fact that it’s abundantly clear that the odorless lord of the house is the alpha who has whipped her into this frenzy.
Behind her, lightning cracks on the moor, lighting a ghostly silhouette of an oversized man. A broad-shouldered brute who’s overly polite, dull, and belligerent, and so fucking mysterious I haven’t slept through the night since I first met him.
He makes his way across the drive, his gait long and dreary.
“Ceclia,” he says, exhaling a long, slow breath. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She spins to face him, reaching out and clawing at his soaked jacket. She sniffs feebly at the base of his neck as he attempts to bat her off. “Why have you done this to yourself? Why, Alfie?”
The way he frees himself from her is unexpected. I expect him to wipe her off like sweat, but he doesn’t. He handles her gently, in a way that’s so considerate and so laced with empathy that something strange fires in the back of my head. He takes her by the shoulders, firm but still gentle.
The simple action calms her immediately. Her hands drop to her sides and she stills.
“You, of all people, know why,” he says quietly.
She flails again, weaker than before. Her palms pummel his chest, sliding down past his pecs when she’s unable to muster the strength required to hold on to him. “Undo it. I beg of you, my lord.”
Her voice is different now. Weak. Raw. Still primitive but defeated too.
He leans his forehead close to hers.
She has her back to me, and he’s facing her. I can see his face clearly, though his eyes are shadowed. By the night. By a storm that rages in him, not around him.
His gaze drops to meet hers, and for a moment, thunder falls silent. “I will not.”
She throws her head back and wails like the wind. Like torment and pain working themselves through gaps between window frames and lead glass.
“Ceclia,” he says. She is a woman in need of shaking. A woman outside of herself. I can see that. Anyone could. He doesn’t treat her like that though. He cups her face gently, respectfully. So respectfully that something about it irks me. “Let me help you. Let me take this from you.”
She goes slack, head lolling back as she stills and then nods.
He takes one of her hands in his and tilts her chin up with the other so she’s looking into his eyes. His demeanor changes. His posture straightens. Strengthens. His shoulders grow broader. He grows bigger.
Something shifts.
Something in his eyes.
In his heart.
In the untamed corners of his soul.
It’s quick. A flash so bright that my spine contracts with fear as I wait for the crash of thunder that lightning usually delivers.
It doesn’t come.
What does come is the rolling sound of his voice when he says her name.
It’s his alpha voice. And it’s unlike anything I’ve heard before.
It’s so deep that I feel it in my ankles and my knees.
I feel it in the ground beneath me. In the floorboards.
In the walls around me and in the ceiling and stars above me.
It’s scratchy and ancient. A little hoarse, but not much.
A record that’s been stuck for a while and has just started spinning again.
It’s not the sound of it that’s unusual. It’s the force it’s delivered with. It’s the devastating blast. The way it detonates when it lands.
“You are free of me.” The art on the wall rattles and the old wooden beams creak. “You are well. You are your own person and are content without me.”
His words land, and as they do, she draws a sharp breath that makes her entire body jerk. She bobs her head slowly and looks around, evidently dazed.
Then she walks into the night.
I blink back my shock. Lord Augustus stands on the threshold of Beaumont Craven House, drenched to the bone. His hair is so dark it almost looks blue. Rainwater runs down his face. His features look severe at this time of night. More severe than usual.
“What just happened?” I ask.
At least, that’s what I mean to ask. No words, no sound leaves my mouth.
My entire body is made of jelly. Warm jelly that quivers despite the fact that no one is shaking it.
It’s a feeling I know well. A feeling I love and hate in equal measure.
A feeling I love and hate, depending entirely on the situation.
I’ve been alphaed.
An alpha voice has entered my body and reshuffled my nervous system. My ligaments are bendy and loose. My body is relaxed from head to toe. My mind is vacant.
It’s a familiar feeling, but it’s odd because he wasn’t talking to me. He wasn’t looking at me when he spoke. He wasn’t even all that close to me. There’s no possible way his voice could have affected me. At least, it shouldn’t have been able to affect me.
“Are you all right?” he asks quietly.
It’s almost as if he knows I’m affected. But how would he know? This doesn’t happen. You don’t get affected by an alpha voice when it isn’t directed at you. It’s impossible. It’s not a thing.
Despite that, my words are slow to form. Slow to rise to the surface. “Ngg,” I manage eventually.
He offers me his arm, bending it at the elbow. His posture is upright and brimming with generational confidence and gentlemanly coolness. “May I see you to your rooms?”
I mean to tell him that I have no need of such treatment. I’m more than capable of seeing myself to my own goddamn rooms, but my hand finds its way to the crook of his arm and he escorts me to my rooms without a word spoken between us.
The entire time, the heat from his body burns my palm like a brand.
By the time he delivers me to my door, the jelly in my knees has solidified, and I feel almost myself again.