Chapter 8 - Alanis
Javi Weston decided he didn't like her in seconds, and he was not particularly interested in concealing it. He did not need to say anything, but she could feel the tension radiating off of him.
Silas was harder to read, but he wasn’t unkind to her. He looked at her like he was looking at a foreign object. She could see the wheels turning in his head. He thought and acted like the Alpha he was.
August was the simplest of the three to read. He was calm but not indifferent to her presence.
Then there were Sara and Elle. Sara had introduced herself before Rael even finished. She crossed the room and pulled her into a hug. “Hi. Nice to meet you.”
Alanis, who had spent most of her life in environments where warmth came with conditions attached, found this briefly disorienting.
Elle was quieter about it. Just like her brother—August. She gave her a small smile and a nod.
After the introduction and debrief, Silas and Javi pulled Rael to the side, while August moved to the window with his phone.
Sara appeared at Alanis's elbow and said, without preamble, "Come outside. Elle and I will show you around."
It wasn't exactly an invitation, but Alanis figured out she could use a ground-level look at the territory, so she said yes.
***
The pack's land was larger than it had appeared from the house. They walked along the eastern edge with Sara providing commentary and Elle occasionally adding details that were more specific and more useful, and Alanis listened to both while building her own picture.
"Silas expanded the territory three years ago," Sara said, gesturing at the tree line that marked the northern border.
"When he took over from our father. One of the first things he did, actually—started negotiating with the adjacent packs almost immediately.
Our father had.... different values about a lot of things. Silas has been undoing some of them."
"Like the no-outsiders rule," Alanis said.
"Among others." Sara looked at her. "You've already heard about that."
"I was introduced to the pack last week. The reception was informative."
Elle, walking on Alanis's other side, snorted. "Silas's father made a law that prohibited relationships with anyone outside the pack. Humans especially." She paused. "I know what that kind of reception feels like. For what it's worth."
Alanis looked at her. "You're human."
"Yes."
"And Silas's mate."
"Yes." Elle met her gaze evenly. "He pulled me out of a trafficking auction a couple of years ago. Same network you were in." A pause. "I didn't ask to be rescued either."
Alanis held her gaze for a moment. "How long did it take," she asked, "before you trusted him?”
"Longer than I would have wanted.”
They continued walking, and Sara talked about the pack layout and fished for information on how Alanis was doing. Alanis answered a few of her questions and redirected what she wasn’t comfortable with yet. By the time they turned back toward the house, she'd been out here for nearly two hours.
She'd also learned, between Sara's commentary and Elle's additions, what the Weston pack had been doing for the past year—the training, the parallel missions, the financial investigation Rael was running, the operational infrastructure they'd built to find and dismantle a network that was destroying their reputation along with the lives of the women it trafficked and a ball of guilt lodged itself in her throat.
She had information they needed. She had eight years of organizational knowledge, field intelligence on the network, contact infrastructure that could accelerate what they were doing by months.
She had seen Rael’s files and said nothing to help.
Her reasoning was that she did not know him well enough yet.
She had people at the Lumen who were expecting her to reach out.
But those reasons were looking smaller in hindsight now. She walked back into the house, went upstairs, sat on the edge of the bed, and thought about the conversation she had with Elle and Sara. Those seven women were somewhere safe right now because Rael had gone back into that building.
She thought about Deva, who offered her a place to go in the middle of the night at a gas station. She also thought about how she'd felt in the car on the drive here, how she was torn between running away or staying.
“Fuck!” Alanis groaned loudly, laying back on the bed. “I am so fucked.”
***
The pack's behavior was more subtle than the Caldwell pack was, which made it more insidious rather than less.
It started the day after the Introduction to Rael’s family.
She was in the kitchen in the morning, making coffee, when two women she hadn't been introduced to came in to speak to Rael—who was not there, which they'd have known if they'd looked—and one of them saw Alanis and said something to the other in a low voice that clearly wasn't low enough: “that’s the human he bought.”
She'd gone to observe the training yard that afternoon.
She wanted to see the pack's capabilities and tactical patterns, which were useful regardless of what she decided to do next, and one of the older males had looked at her standing at the edge of the yard and said to the man beside him: “What's she going to do, watch? She can't even shift.”
She watched for another twenty minutes and left. Although she hated to admit it, Alanis felt lonely. Being in Rael’s pack reminded her of something she had felt for sixteen years before she ran away from it. It reminded her of the feeling of being in a community that thought she was of no value.
This was why she had no plans of staying.
Whatever the bond meant, whatever Rael's intentions were, whatever the truth was about the mate claim and the mission and all the rest—she could not build a life inside a community that had already decided she was less.
She had done that once, and it had nearly destroyed her. She was not doing it again.
She went to bed and woke at three in the morning, feeling like her body was literally burning.
She didn’t move at first. She remained lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling for a couple of seconds, trying to determine whether she was dreaming, ill, or dying.
Warmth was spreading across her body. It began in her stomach and branched out like an animal that had awakened in her body and was stretching.
Alanis swallowed and sat herself up on her elbows. No! she thought to herself. “No, no, no.”
She swung her legs out of bed, but when her feet hit the floor, her knees failed her. The room tilted a little. She held on to the dresser before she fell. Her heart was beating too quick.
A second wave struck, and it was stronger. She leaned forward and pressed her palm flat against her stomach, fingers digging in as though she might keep whatever it was there.
She was in heat. “No, no,” she said more forcefully, shaking her head. “This is not happening.”
But her body didn’t care what she believed. It kept going. The warmness crept up her spine, and under her ribs, and circled her breasts. Her skin prickled. Every inch of it. The fabric of her shirt seemed to be trapping heat against her skin rather than protecting her against it.
She took one end of it and pulled it up, over her head. Cool air blasted her skin for about two seconds before she suddenly felt everything too intensely.
She heard everything: the hum of electricity in the walls, the movement downstairs, footsteps, and the low murmur of voices. She heard the creak of the wood, too.
Wood, metal, sweat, detergent—it all came rushing in at once until something invaded her nostrils.
Her breath caught. Rael’s scent cut through them all.
She felt the heat in her body rising in response, and her hand clenched on the dresser. “Stop. Stop it,” she muttered, although she did not know who she was speaking to anymore. Herself, her body, or the bond. It did not matter anyway because they did not listen.
Her thighs pressed together, and the pressure did little or nothing to take off the edge.
It lasted about five seconds before it re-emerged even worse, drawing out a guttural moan from her throat.
With shaky feet, Alanis stood, ran her hand through her hair, pacing the room.
Each movement of the muscles, each contact of skin to skin, exaggerated everything she was struggling not to notice.
Her control was waning. This is what frightened her.
How her thoughts kept going back and back to one thing—Rael.
Her jaw tightened. “No, no,” she said, more decisively now, as she was stating a principle. “We’re not doing that.” But the problem was that this was not merely physical.
If it had been just physical, she could have handled it. She’d handled worse. Pain, withdrawal, fear. This would have been an additional thing to overcome. But this...this was instinct.
Alanis ran to the window, pushing it open. The chilled evening breeze swept in, caressing her hot body. She leaned into it, resting on the windowsill and closing her eyes. It helped till she smelt him again, and it was stronger.
Her eyes snapped opened. He was right outside her door.
Her body reacted instantly. A second wave struck her, eliciting a low moan from her.
Alanis curled her fingers against the windowsill.
This was bad. This was much more than bad.
She inhaled and exhaled deeply, trying to hold on to some semblance of control.
“This changes nothing,” she said to herself, even though her body was pulled towards him, murmuring the same word in her ear: Go to him.
Her stomach twisted. She clenched her hand, and for the first time since she woke up, she felt scared of what she might do if it kept building like this.
Avoiding him wasn’t going to make this easier. It was just going to make it worse.