9. Chapter 9
Maren hadn't slept.
She'd stayed on top of the covers through the dawn, through the long blue morning, into the part of the afternoon when the sun made a yellow square on the cabin floor, moved it, thinned it, took it away. Her eyes had been closed some of the time. That wasn't sleep.
She could still see him crouched at Tyler's level at three in the morning asking about a kitchen door.
She could still feel the word tender in her chest where she'd let it sit and not taken it back.
When the knock came at her door it was already dusk.
She knew it was him before he said her name. She knew by the weight of the feet on the porch. A thing she hadn't known she'd learned.
“Maren.”
She opened the door.
He was at the bottom of the steps the way he stood, fists in his pockets, coat on, cold on him from crossing the clearing. The exhaustion was still in his face but it moved back into a quieter room. Not gone. Farther off.
“Pack sits down at six,” he said. “Come eat.”
It wasn't a question. It wasn't an order either. It was an offer made by a man who knew she'd been alone with her own head for nearly a full day and was done letting her be.
She got her coat off the hook and put it on. Took her boots off the mat and laced them. The tire iron stayed on the table.
She noticed that it stayed on the table.
She noticed him not looking at the table.
The lodge was full.
Not loud. Full. The kind of fullness that came from a long room holding a long table holding the whole working part of a pack at the end of a day that had mattered.
Fire in the big hearth at the far end. Steam off the platters.
Elena at the swing door moving between the kitchen and the dining hall without hurry.
Two young wolves carrying a bowl of something between them because neither one wanted to be the one who dropped it.
Jace walked her in.
She'd thought he would leave her at the door and go to the head of the table.
He didn't. He put his palm at the small of her back for the width of the doorway, only long enough to get her through, and took it away again.
Crossed the length of the hall at her pace.
Pulled out the chair at his right and held it for her.
No ceremony. No announcement. Nobody turned to stare. Three or four heads lifted because a body moved into the room and then went back to their plates.
She sat.
He took the chair at the head beside her.
She understood the placement without being told what it was. Her body understood. The rest of her caught up a breath later and didn't argue.
The food came around. Roast with gravy. A bowl of something thick with root vegetables. A platter of cornbread somebody had cut into squares that weren't quite even. Maren took a little of everything because the bowls kept arriving and had to keep going somewhere.
The pack ate.
The pack talked.
She watched them.
Theo at Jace's left reached across for the pepper without asking for it.
A woman down the table laughed at something somebody on her far side had said, tapped her neighbor's shoulder for half a second, drew it back.
A man she didn't know by name cut a piece of roast into quarters on a little boy's plate without looking down because he was listening to somebody else's sentence.
Cade, across and three chairs down, caught her eye over the rim of his water glass, ducked his chin once, looked back at his plate. She had seen him do that at the pack meal on her second day. It meant about the same thing now as it had meant then. It meant I see you.
This wasn't a meal. This was a room where people ate because the eating was how the day ended.
She caught sight of Tyler.
He held the fork like the tool was new to him, learning how to use it for the first time.
Maren watched that.
Tyler's eating.
The thought landed and stayed.
Jace, next to her, didn't turn his head. Passed her the bread.
“Eat,” he said. Quiet.
She ate.
Down at Elena's end, Roman leaned in and said something low to Tyler.
The kid's head came up. Whatever it was, Tyler huffed a small laugh into his plate, and Roman clapped him once on the shoulder before he straightened.
Maren filed it the way she filed the easy things.
A steady wolf checking on a kid who'd had a hard week.
She had no reason yet to file it any other way.
A chair scraped near the head of the table.
The man who stopped at Jace's chair on his way out wasn't tall.
Wasn't big. Wasn't anything Maren had tagged across the room.
He had a face you could have sat next to on a bus for an hour and not pictured afterward.
Brown hair trimmed close. Quiet eyes. A line to his mouth that looked like the line of a man who'd decided a while ago not to take much up.
“Alpha.”
“Roman.”
The name landed in her for the first time. She filed it next to the face.
“You would do anything for her, wouldn't you?” Roman's eyes moved briefly to Maren and back to Jace.
“Anything.”
Jace smiled. Roman smiled back one breath later. The half-second before the smile came was the thing. “You're a lucky man, Alpha.”
Then the half-second happened.
Something moved behind Roman's eyes.
It wasn't long. It was there and it was gone.
Maren couldn't have put a word on it if she'd been asked.
Not fear. Fear had a shape she'd lived inside for three years and knew in the dark.
This wasn't fear. It was something older and worn thinner.
Something that lived underneath whatever face Roman had trained himself to show the room.
Then it was gone and Roman's face was Roman's face again.
It was the look of a man who carried a problem so heavy he'd stopped trying to set it down.
He inclined his head one more time at Jace. Moved his eyes over Maren, polite, the way a pack wolf would move his eyes over his alpha's mate.
“Luna.”
He didn't wait for her to correct him. He was already stepping past. Out the side door toward the cabins.
Maren watched him go.
She hadn't corrected him.
Noticed that she hadn't corrected him.
Noticed the thing behind his eyes before it was gone, and filed it, the way she'd filed a great many things in the last week, in a place her body could find later if her head needed it.
Jace, beside her, hadn't missed any of it. His thigh went a quarter-inch stiller when Roman stopped at the chair. She would understand later what he'd clocked. Roman's hands. Loose on purpose, in the way of a man wound tighter than he should have been for too long.
The walk back was three minutes long.
She'd known it was three minutes long because she'd walked it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.
The path from the lodge to her cabin cut across the clearing at an angle that went under the big pine at the east edge, past the woodpile, out to the cabins on the far side.
Tonight somebody had shoveled the path. The snow was piled on either side in heaps that caught the porch lights from the lodge and her cabin both, and held them.
Jace walked at her pace.
Not at his own pace, slowed down. At hers.
She registered that without saying anything about it.
“Elena tried to land a fourth helping on you tonight,” he said. “I kept score.”
“She got to three and a half. I want it noted that I fought.”
He laughed low in the dark. After that the quiet came back, but it was a different quiet than the walks before it. A warmer one.
The air out of the lodge had been warm with bodies, with fire, with food, with whatever the air of a full room was when the room was easy.
The air out here wasn't any of those things.
It was cold like a winter night. It moved along her jaw and found the bare strip of skin between her collar and her hair.
Halfway across, she made herself breathe evenly in through her nose. She wasn't sure what the thing was that was sitting at the base of her ribs, and she didn't want it to come up her throat before she'd got hold of it.
Jace didn't try to fill the silence.
His shoulders bunched tight, holding the responsibility of this entire pack. He walked her back.
At her porch she stopped.
Turned.
Put her palm on the railing post.
“What's a mate?”
The question came out before she decided to ask it. Maren hadn't planned it. She hadn't rehearsed it through the afternoon. It had been sitting in her for a week, and it had finally pushed through a seam.
She liked that he didn't answer right away.
He put one boot up on the bottom step of her porch, rested his forearm on his thigh. Looked up at her from a half step below where she stood. His breath went white in the cold.
“A certainty,” he said. “The one person in the world meant for you. You feel it before you know what it is.”
She held the railing tighter.
“And you don't get a choice?”
“You always have a choice with me.”
He said it without pause. He said it like it had been waiting in his mouth to be said.
“I would never take that away from you. Neither would the bond.”
Something in her let out a breath it had been holding since the stairwell. Since the first time he'd offered her a hand palm-up above a body on the landing and she'd had to decide what that meant, the night they met.
He let the silence do its work.
He watched her let the breath out. Didn't comment on it. Didn't reach.
“The moon goddess blessed me with you,” he said. Quiet. Not embarrassed. Not performing. “I am the luckiest man alive.”
She had to look at the porch railing for a minute because her face was going to do something she didn't want to hand to him in the cold dark.
When she looked back at him, she squared her stance.
“I don't know if I can be that person for you.”
“You already are.”
“This is a lot.”
“Yeah?”
The cold moved between them. Her breath. His breath. The creak of the porch post under her palm. Somewhere across the compound a dog barked once and stopped. A wolf, probably. She still didn't know all the ways of telling.
She made herself say it.