Chapter 8 - Kahn
The bonding ceremony lasted forty minutes.
Kahn stood through it all with his hands at his sides and his face set in the expression Viktor called his Alpha face, which meant nothing showed.
He could have been thinking about border patrols.
For all they knew, they could have been thinking about breakfast. He was thinking about the scent of her.
She stood close enough that it hit him every time she breathed—something warm underneath the soap, something green and human that made his wolf press forward against his ribs hard enough that the muscles across his shoulders went tight.
He kept his hands still. She kept hers laced together in front of her, knuckles whitening by the minute, her gaze fixed on a point above Gideon’s left shoulder like she was counting down to a detonation only she could hear.
When Gideon said the final words, she turned her head and looked at Kahn. Not the face of a bride. The face of someone memorizing the person she intended to outlast.
She walked back to the Alpha house without a word. He listened to the door close from across the yard and did not follow.
He had no idea how they were going to live together.
He found out on Monday, when he came downstairs to find her curled into the armchair in the front room with a book she’d taken from his shelf—not even the self-preservation skills to take one from a low shelf, she’d dragged a chair over and gone for the top—her bare feet tucked under her, the borrowed sweater sliding off one shoulder in a way that his wolf noticed and he told his wolf to stop noticing.
He set his coffee on the sideboard. “The pack does a morning run. Every Monday. It would be good for you to attend.”
She turned a page. “Do they?”
“It would help with the pack’s perception of…”
“Of me. Yes. You can say it.” She still hadn’t looked up. “Their perception of the human girl who ruined the lottery. I’m aware of how I’m perceived.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“You were going to say of us, which is worse, because it implies there’s an ‘us’ that needs managing.” She turned another page. “I’ll think about it.”
She didn’t go.
On Wednesday, he tried writing it down instead, because something about her made him reach for strategies that would have worked on anyone else and then stand there watching them not work on her.
He sat at the kitchen table at six in the morning and wrote out a schedule in his own hand—pack functions, meetings, the weekly communal dinner where the Alpha and Luna sat at the head table together, visible, united.
Left it on the counter where she’d see it and went to the training yard.
He came back to find the schedule exactly where he’d left it, a single word added to the bottom in her handwriting.
No.
He picked it up. Read it again. Poured coffee he didn’t taste and carried it to his study, where he shut the door and pressed his thumb and forefinger into the bridge of his nose until the pressure built into something he could breathe through. She was right. She was right, and it didn’t help.
His wolf had been pacing the length of him for days, pressing forward at the worst moments.
When she walked past him in the hallway, close enough to touch.
When he heard her moving around above him at three in the morning—six paces one direction, turn, six paces back—because the floorboards in the Alpha house were old.
They carried sound the way old wood did, not loud, just present, and she never slept.
He sat in his study that Thursday night with a glass of something he wasn’t really drinking and listened to her footsteps track the ceiling and felt his wolf push against the inside of his chest like something trying to get out of a room.
The base of his spine ached with it. His hands had closed around the glass hard enough to go white at the knuckles.
Go to her.
He didn’t move.
She’d been handed a life she hadn’t chosen. The least he could do was not crowd her inside it.
Above him, the footsteps stopped. A creak—the bed. Then silence.
He exhaled. Set the glass down. The ache behind his ribs didn’t leave. It shifted, found a place to sit, and stayed.
By Friday morning, she’d apparently decided that waiting for staff was beneath her, because he came downstairs to find her barefoot at the stove with a pan in one hand and an egg in the other, cracking it one-handed with the efficiency of someone who’d been feeding herself in kitchens that didn’t want her since she was old enough to reach a counter.
She didn’t look up. “There’s coffee if you want some. I made extra by accident. The accent on ‘accident’ means I didn’t make it for you.”
“Understood.”
“Good. Because I don’t make coffee for people who leave schedules on kitchen counters like passive-aggressive ransom notes.”
“It was a suggestion.”
“It was a bullet-pointed itinerary with time stamps. There’s a difference.” She slid the egg onto a plate without looking at him. “You can have coffee, or you can have a conversation about my public duties. You cannot have both. Choose.”
He took the coffee.
She made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
It landed somewhere behind his sternum and sat there, warm, while he carried the mug to his study and closed the door.
He stood at the window with her coffee cooling in his hands and watched the morning light hit the mountains.
He’d told her he wouldn’t have chosen this. He’d meant it when he said it.
He wasn’t sure he meant it anymore.
Chris arrived later that morning and let himself in without knocking, because Chris had been letting himself into rooms without knocking since the year Eli died, and Kahn had been too grateful for the company to correct it.
He dropped into the chair across the desk, stretched his legs out, and looked at Kahn like a man who already knew the answer to what he was about to ask.
“How’s it going?”
Kahn looked at him over the report he hadn’t been reading. “She took a book off my shelf yesterday, and when I mentioned it, she said I know and kept reading.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“She hasn’t attended a single pack function.
She takes every meal alone. Yesterday she told me that my opinion on how she organized her room was both unrequested and unwelcome, and when I pointed out that I hadn’t said anything about her room, she said you were thinking it.
” He set the report down. “It’s going great, Chris.
I’ve never been happier. Please tell me she was easier as a child. ”
Chris had the nerve to smile. It was brief, but it was there. “She put a boy’s shoes in the freezer once because he said something she didn’t like. We were in the same placement for three weeks before I figured out she was the one doing it.”
“Perfect. That’s very reassuring.”
“She’s stubborn,” Chris said, and something in his voice dropped—not lighter, something else.
The register of a man talking about something that mattered more than he meant to show.
“She’s always been stubborn. But she’s not—she doesn’t stay angry.
She stays guarded. There’s a difference.
” A pause. “You’d have to give her a reason to come down from it. ”
Kahn thought about the coffee she’d made him. The accent on accident.
“She’ll come down from it when she’s ready.”
“And if the pack makes it harder for her before she gets there?”
He didn’t answer that, because Chris knew the answer as well as he did, and saying it out loud would only confirm what he’d been turning over since Viktor’s report two days earlier.
Viktor had sat in that same chair, same desk, and delivered the news in the careful, neutral tone he used when he thought Kahn was going to have a reaction that would need managing.
“Sloane Mercer,” he’d said. “She’s been talking.”
“Sloane is always talking.”
“Not like this.” Viktor had leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“The lottery was corrupted. A human can’t hold the bond.
She must have cheated in the maze. It’s not coming from one direction, Alpha.
It’s threaded through. Kitchen staff. Training yard.
The women’s hall.” He’d paused. “Your Luna’s meals have been arriving cold for four days. ”
Kahn’s hand had gone flat on the desk. The wood under his palm had creaked.
“Handle the staff. I’ll deal with Sloane.”
He had. Publicly, flatly, without room for interpretation—the lottery chose her, the bond is legitimate, this conversation is finished. He’d said it to three separate senior pack members in three separate conversations, and the message had traveled, because messages like that always traveled.
It wasn’t enough.
He stood at his study window the night Chris left and knew it the way he knew weather—in the body, below thought.
He could defend her title. He couldn’t make thirty years of pack culture accept what thirty years of pack culture had been built to reject.
The only thing that would change how his pack saw Caitlynn was Caitlynn herself—what she did, how she moved through the compound, who she chose to be inside it.
And she was up there in her room. Barely leaving. Eating cold eggs alone. Keeping the distance that was her right to keep.
He turned from the window. On his desk, underneath Viktor’s notes and the border reports and the correspondence he’d been ignoring, the original lottery list sat exactly where he’d left it. Twenty-three names. One of which shouldn’t have been possible.
He went upstairs. Passed her door—no light under it, but he could hear her, still moving, still not sleeping—and the wolf surged against his ribs so hard his step faltered. He pressed a hand to the wall. Breathed. Kept walking.
His own room. His own bed. The dark and the ceiling and three feet of plaster between them.
His wolf offered no useful suggestions.
He told it to go to sleep.
It didn’t.