Chapter 4 - Layla #2
He had her caught in his gaze. A rabbit in a snare. A deer in the headlights. Any righteous fury she had melted away under the weight of his stare. He may as well have her neck caught in one enormous hand for the fear pounding through her chest.
He was a predator. Plain and simple. And her body responded to that.
“Any concern I might have for you,” he said, his voice silky and radiating danger, “is due to my position as Alpha. Forget that at your peril.”
She swallowed, fighting the urge to fold into herself. He was far from her, but she knew how fast he could move. How vicious his strikes could fall.
“M-my apologies, Alpha,” she said, gaze falling to the floor. Unbidden, her throat tightened, raw and painful.
Of course. Who the hell did she think she was?
Dominic did not reply.
Julian stepped forward, cutting through the tension before it could break, “We have what we came for,” he said, tone smooth, almost weary. “There’s no more to find here tonight.”
Dominic looked at him for a long moment, then back at Layla. Something flickered in his expression, but it was gone as quickly as it came.
He straightened, brushing invisible dust from his sleeve. “If you remember anything else, you’ll send word. Directly.”
Layla nodded once. It was all she could manage.
The three of them turned toward the door. Julian inclined his head slightly in farewell, a gentleman’s gesture that looked almost ridiculous on him. Theodore lingered a heartbeat longer, meeting her eyes with something like apology before following the others out.
The bell above the door gave its soft, false chime.
And then they were gone.
The silence left behind was almost unbearable.
Layla turned and gripped the bookshelf, trying to steady her breathing. The air still felt heavy with them. She may not have been able to shift, but she still recognized the power an alpha held. The power the Alpha held.
When her hands finally stopped shaking, she crossed the room and locked the door, just to hear the click. Then she turned off the lights one by one, until only the faint glow from the stairwell remained. She stilled, caught in its trap, her heartbeat fluttering.
The clock on the far wall ticked once, twice. The sound jarred her back to motion. She began to tidy up the shop, resetting chairs, aligning the row of books on the counter. Every movement helped ground her, helped chase away ghosts of the past.
When the last light was off and the door was bolted, she finally let herself breathe again.
Then she went downstairs.
The ritual table was still as she’d left it, chalk smudged, bowl overturned, salt scattered like frost. She crouched beside it, brushing away the worst of the mess, and felt the sharp sting of shame.
If she had been one second longer getting upstairs, Dominic would have found this.
The books, the circle, the proof of what she was.
And he would have looked at her not with anger, but disgust.
That thought was worse than fear.
She stacked her notebooks into neat piles, wiped down the table, anything to quiet her hands. Her reflection in the brass of the bowl looked too pale, her eyes too wide. She hated how frightened she’d been upstairs, how small she must have looked under his gaze.
“You’re still afraid of him,” she muttered under her breath, disgusted, “after all these years.”
But the words didn’t change the truth. Dominic Volkhov had been her brother’s closest friend and her childhood tormentor
The boy she’d loved in secret despite having every reason not to.
He’d been her measure for strength, for cruelty, for everything she was told she could never be.
And now he was Alpha.
And she cowered before him.
Her eyes narrowed, her magic flaring in her gut, sharp as a needle-point. She clenched her fist, and ice began creeping over the brass bowl. Slow, then fast, until it was completely encased.
She gestured sharply with her point finger.
The bowl exploded.
For a brief, glorious moment, she felt powerful.
And then it ebbed back, and red crept up her cheeks.
She was better than this. She had to be better than this. She couldn’t resort to petty destruction whenever she was angry. It would just prove them all right.
With a wave of her hand, the bowl was whole and clean again.
“Right,” she muttered, “there’s work to do.”
She reached for one of the upper shelves to start reshelving her texts. As she lifted a stack, a thinner, dust-coated volume slipped loose and landed on the floor with a muted thud. The sound made her flinch, nerves still raw.
She crouched to pick it up, brushing dust from the cover. It was a plain binding, the leather nearly black with age. She almost laughed.
Of course that book would jump out at her.
Layla almost put it back without opening it. Almost.
Instead, she carried it to the table and laid it flat. The spine creaked when she turned the first page. Inside, the handwriting was an uneven, looping scrawl. The ink had bled brown with time.
She read the heading of the chapter.
On the Nature of Hybrids in Respect to Witchcraft.
Her pulse kicked.
She scanned lines, her lips moving silently as she traced the faded words.
There were diagrams in the margins, wolfish silhouettes overlaid with runes, fragments of lunar cycles annotated in cramped script.
The author had written about binding, about attempts to suppress hybrid power using magic older than the packs themselves.
She turned the pages, faster now.
It was dark magic. Blood magic. The worst kind there was. Possession of this text alone was reason enough for exile. Or worse. If she gave it to them, they would burn it. And if they found it in her hands, they would burn her with it.
Layla closed the book carefully, fingers trembling.
She thought of Dominic’s face upstairs, his anger. His surprising restraint. She’d never known him to be restrained.
Maybe if she brought him this…if she could show him she’d found something useful…he would look at her differently. Maybe she could be something more than a burden, more than the outcast who never shifted.
But the idea of handing it over twisted in her stomach. She’d be signing her own death sentence.
Besides, she was just one witch. Self-taught at that, no elders to guide her, to teach her coven ways. Proper ways. Even if she was the most powerful witch alive, to perform this sort of spell…it would take an entire coven.
The candle guttered.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she whispered to herself, putting the book away.
She didn’t owe Dominic Volkhov anything.
Not after what he did.