Chapter 12 - Layla #2
Layla hadn’t thought she would move. She did anyway, a small step forward before sense stopped her.
Dominic’s eyes snapped to her. Whatever he’d been about to say to Julian died on his tongue.
His attention narrowed with the same force she had seen at their ceremony, a look that made distance fade away.
He crossed half the room in an instant and stopped a breath away, hands at his sides.
“What happened?” he asked, not looking at Theodore.
“Nothing,” Theodore said at the same time Layla said, “We argued.” Her voice came thinner than she liked. She lifted her chin, trying to shake off emotion. “It’s fine.”
Dominic’s gaze flicked to Theodore, sharp enough to make her brother straighten, and back to her. The protective set in his shoulders eased a fraction, but his eyes still roved her face. “You should be in bed,” he said, softer this time.
“I’m not made of glass,” she said. The bite in it was small, tired, but she didn’t take it back.
Julian reached them, cautiously hovering at the edge of whatever it was that stretched between them. “We need to use what hours are left of dawn,” he said to Dominic, “before the humans wake.”
Chase stepped forward, expression drawn but steady. “We moved the body to our hall,” he said, voice low, “Arthur’s with him. We’ll send runners to go after the other two scouts. Whatever did this—” He searched for a word and failed. “It wasn’t clean. We found no clear tracks. It won’t be easy.”
“As I said before,” Dominic said, his voice rough with lack of sleep, “my scouts are yours to command. You and Arthur. This impacts both our packs.”
“Which direction do the tracks suggest?” Julian asked.
“Northeast into the trees. Then nothing.” Chase’s jaw tensed. “If it crossed back towards the mountains, towards Voskresen, we wouldn’t know.”
Dominic’s attention seemed split. His brow was furrowed as he contemplated the discussion, but his eyes were on her. It sent a shiver down her spine. “Double the watch at the western ridge,” he said, not turning. “No one runs a line alone until we know what we’re looking at.”
“Already done,” Julian said.
“Good.” Dominic’s eyes were on Layla again. “You’re freezing.”
“I’m fine,” she said, “just tired.”
His mouth almost moved, words seeming heavy, but Chase cleared his throat, and the room pivoted back to business.
“We’ve pulled our scouts in,” the Nordan wolf said, “Arthur wants to coordinate trails with yours as soon as possible. If this is some sort of message, we need to respond quickly and without mercy.”
“It isn’t a message,” Theodore said, voice too quick. “After all, it was only a body found.”
Chase’s stare cooled by a degree. “Don’t tell me you actually believe that, Theo.”
Theodore set his jaw. “What proof is there of an ulterior motive?”
“When isn’t there an ulterior motive?” Chase said, rounding on her brother, teeth bared. The two had always been friends, but Layla knew the pack came first. It always came first.
Theo’s shoulders tensed. “I’m just saying, maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to—”
“Enough,” Dominic interrupted. “Now is not the time to try and score cheap points against each other.” He turned to Layla, reaching out as if about to take her arm, before thinking better of it. “Come on,” he said instead, “there are rooms upstairs. You should sleep.”
“Wait, I can help,” she said, backing away from him. “What I saw…if I write it down, if I map it, maybe there’s something there that we could…”
Every head turned to her. Not hostile, exactly. Not kind. Measuring.
Julian’s expression didn’t change as he stepped forward. “What did you see,” he asked, “exactly?”
“It was just a nightmare,” Theodore said, too fast. “She just had a stupid nightmare. We shouldn’t waste time dwelling on it.”
Layla ignored him. “A figure,” she said to Julian, eyes on Dominic. “Pale. Not a man or a woman. It said I was…part of something. And then a white wolf appeared on the edge of the forest, and it was torn apart by something I couldn’t see.”
The males stared at her, their expressions hard. She fought not to let herself crumple under the weight of their scrutiny.
Dominic’s gaze didn’t leave her. “And you woke,” he said, “when?”
“A little before you got to the shop,” she hated how small she sounded, how weak. “It felt different from a normal nightmare. “I don’t know how to make that useful to you, but—”
“It is useful,” Julian said simply.
Theodore looked at him sharply. “How?”
“I don’t know yet,” Julian said, eyeing her.
A murmur rippled through the assembled males, some curious, some with an edge of mockery. Almost subconsciously, Layla stepped closer towards Dominic.
Her mate. The words were foreign and uncomfortable.
“Come on,” Dominic said quietly, “your hands are shaking. It’s time you slept.”
“I’m fine.”
“All the same, let’s go.”
“Dominic—” His name slipped out before she could drag it back into the safer Alpha. She didn’t apologize. “You keep saying you’ll do anything to protect Skymist. I might be wrong, but if this dream truly was some sort of prophecy…won’t you let me help you?”
A muscle jumped in his cheek. For a heartbeat, the room vanished, and it was only the two of them, the unkind intimacy of an unspoken history. He looked like a male taking stock of his losses.
Julian saved him, or tried to. “I think you should sleep, Luna,” he said, practical as a tax collector. The title, Luna, made her balk. “We need you clear-headed if you are to help.”
Theodore said nothing. His silence had an edge.
Layla exhaled, feeling altogether like a child being dismissed from the adults’ conversation. “Fine,” she said, turning to Dominic. “I’ll leave you all to your plotting.”
With a quirk of his brow, Dominic turned to the others.
He rattled off orders, and his men responded in kind, dashing around the place or yelling down their phones to their packmates.
Layla stood in the wash of it, feeling both foolish and furious, heat prickling the backs of her eyes. She blinked hard until it went away.
Dominic came back to her last. Up close, she could see the exhaustion tugging at him, the rigid set of his shoulders, the messiness of his hair.
“You should know I hate this,” she said, “being handled.”
His mouth quirked. “I’d noticed.”
He gestured to the door, and after a beat, she obeyed, brushing past him to the staircase.
She felt Theo’s eyes drilling into her. She didn’t look back.
The hall seemed longer than it had an hour ago, the lamps burning lower, the world narrowed to the sound of two sets of footsteps up the old wooden stairs.
Outside, the sun rose higher in the sky, the first rays of gold cutting through the murky ice of the morning fog.
“I could just go home, you know,” she said as he led her down a corridor.
“The door to your shop is broken; it’s not safe.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“All the same, if the pack wakes up to find their Luna unguarded—”
“I’m not their Luna.”
He stopped so suddenly she almost walked into him. Stumbling back, she would have glared at him if it weren’t for the fire in his eyes. “Our mating ceremony would say otherwise.”
Layla’s chest tightened. “I didn’t ask for this.”
Something in his expression flickered. Anger, pain, she couldn’t tell. It was gone a heartbeat later, replaced by the mask she’d come to recognize as the Alpha’s face, unreadable, carved from stone.
“Come,” he said again, and started walking.
The room he led her to was small, bare floorboards, a narrow bed, a washstand, and a single window that looked out over the harbor. The tide was high; she could hear it lapping against the stone wall below, rhythmic and lonely.
“This will do,” he said, then turned toward the door. “Get some sleep. You’ll need it.”
She didn’t answer.
He hesitated before leaving, looking back at her, his jaw tight. “Look, Layla…”
She stared at him, throat tight, all at once terrified and desperate for the next words to come out of his mouth.
But he simply shook his head and repeated, “Get some sleep,” before turning on his heel and vanishing, closing the door with a soft click behind him.
Layla sat on the edge of the bed, her hands still trembling faintly.
Her palm still hurt, the wound an angry red line.
Mating marks never healed as quickly as a shifter’s normal wounds.
She pressed it to her heart and closed her eyes, but all she could see was the white wolf again, torn apart and silent, and the pale figure standing in the snow, waiting.