Chapter 3
Chapter three
Ihear him before I see him.
Shouting first — not words, just volume, someone who has stopped caring what it sounds like. Then something hitting a wall, or a door frame, followed by the kind of controlled scramble that means staff are involved and not winning.
I'm in the common room. I should stay in the common room. I go to the doorway instead, because I have apparently not yet learned anything.
The corridor in Red House is not supposed to sound like this. Two staff members I recognize from overnight shifts are trying to walk a man down it and the man is not interested in being walked.
Big. Dark hair that needs a cut. A fresh tear splits the shoulder seam of his jacket.
He’s already shrugged off one staff member’s grip and is explaining, at volume, that he’s done being touched — not in those words, the words he’s using are more direct — and the explanation involves a lot of motion and the strong implication that a wall is about to be involved.
"Jim isn't here." Not talking to the staff. Talking to the building, to whoever made the decisions. "I was told Jim was here. Where is he. Where—"
"Mr. Jake, if you'll just come with us—"
"Don't." Short. Absolute. "Don't touch me!"
Feral-edged. Present enough to be using language, not present enough to be using it well. The words are getting out but the filter between impulse and output has packed up and left.
I step into the corridor.
He goes completely still.
Not gradual. Not a slow register of my presence — one second in motion, the next second not, like something cut the feed. His head comes around and he finds me with the directness of someone who isn't looking with their eyes first.
The mark on my wrist detonates.
Not a pull. Not the warm-steady register of Leo's bond or the directional ache that's been pointing west since this morning.
This is a shockwave — rough and immediate, hitting the existing bonds and ricocheting through all of them at once, and my alpha nature responds to him before I've decided to respond to anything.
He feels it too.
I can see it — the way his whole body recoils and then locks. His jaw goes tight.
I look at the gold pulsing mark on my wrist. The fourth fucking mark. Not subtle.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," I say, to my own wrist, out loud, in front of everyone.
He shakes his head. Not no — clearing it. Like a dog shaking off water. Then he looks at me harder, like looking harder will make whatever just happened make sense.
He takes a step toward me.
Both staff members move immediately, closing the gap between us.
"Easy," one of them says. To Jake, not to me, hands up, the careful voice of someone who has a taser on their belt and does not want to use it.
Jake looks at the staff member. Then back at me. His jaw works.
"Your room is down here," I say. Level. "Let them take you there."
"I don't—"
"I know." I hold his gaze. "Do it anyway. It'll work out."
I don't know if that's true. I say it because he needs something to hold onto right now and the alternative is watching him get dropped in a Red House corridor on his first day, and I don't want that. I don't know him and I don't want that.
He stares at me for another second. The bond between us is very loud.
Then something in his shoulders drops — just slightly, just enough — and he turns and lets the staff walk him down the corridor.
I follow at a distance.
***
His room is the same as any other room in Red House. Window, bed, desk.
Jake steps inside. He doesn't look at the bed. He looks at the corners. The door frame. The distance between the bed and the exit. Then he stops in the middle. I stay in the hallway and the staff step back but leave the door open.
The arc on my wrist is aware of him. It's been aware of him since the corridor and it hasn't quieted and I am not going to look at it while he's in the room.
He doesn't look at it either.
We are both very carefully not looking at my wrist.
"Jim," he says. Quieter now. The corridor-volume gone, just the word.
"I don't know where Jim is," I say. Honest.
He looks at the window.
"It'll work out," I say again. It sounds less convincing the second time. He doesn't call me on it.
"You the alpha," he says. Not a question.
"Apparently."
"Great." Flat. Single word. Full paragraph of opinion.
"I'm getting that reaction a lot lately," I say. "Really good for my ego."
He doesn't find this funny. That's fine. I wasn't entirely trying to be funny.
I push off the doorframe. "Get some sleep if you can. Everything is worse when you haven't."
I turn to go.
Behind me, flat and factual, the absolute last thing I expected:
"You smell like the mountain."
I stop walking.
He doesn't elaborate. The door closes.
***
The hall is quiet. I press my thumb against the area where the fourth bond mark flared, it’s gone already.
You smell like the mountain.
I've never been to the mountain. I don't know what it smells like. Whatever I carry that he recognized — it came from the bonds, probably from Gray. He walked through that door feral-edged and furious and asking for someone who isn't here, and his first piece of information about me was a scent.
Somewhere further out, in the way I always know where RJ is without meaning to, I can feel him — not a bond, the wanting that monitors without my permission.
And behind that closed door is a man who arrived in cuffs looking for someone who isn't here and told me I smell like a place I've never been.