Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Ipull my jacket tighter coming through the door and the cold hits my face like a slap. Alaskan weather doesn't negotiate. It simply is, and everything that exists here does so on its terms.
Stone is already running the warm-up when I arrive. He clocks me — one nod, eyes back on the group — and keeps talking. I take a position at the edge of the yard and look at who's here.
Six residents, counting me. And Jake.
Jake is at the far end of the yard, arms crossed, jaw set, looking at the fence line with the expression of a man who has decided to be present under protest. His opinion of being here is visible from twenty feet away and possibly further.
He hasn't looked at me yet.
I turn my attention to Stone.
Jake is watching Stone. Not the threat-assessment scan he runs on every space he enters, that flat cataloguing sweep that maps exits and bodies and potential problems. This is different.
Attentive in a way that pulls at something in his face he doesn't know is showing.
He tracks Stone's movements with the awareness of someone who has spent a long time knowing exactly where that person is in any given space.
The way your body learns to orient toward the person it takes its cues from and doesn't unlearn it just because the context changes.
The habit hasn't left him even though the context has.
Stone ran the warm-up and Jake's shoulders dropped a fraction when Stone's voice filled the yard — not relaxing, something more involuntary than that. Recognition. The easing of a body that has been braced for a long time and just heard something familiar.
Stone doesn't acknowledge it. He runs the warm-up the way he runs everything — methodical, present.
If he feels Jake's attention he doesn't show it in any way I can read.
But he positions himself, I notice, so that Jake can always see him.
Each time Stone moves to demonstrate something or address a different resident, he ends up at an angle Jake can track without turning his head. Small thing. Entirely deliberate.
I watch Stone do this three times before I'm sure I'm seeing it correctly. The fourth time I'm certain.
He knows Jake is here. He knows what Jake needs, which is to be able to see him, and he's providing it without making it a thing.
Without asking. Without acknowledging the dynamic between them that I can read from twenty feet away.
Just — arranging himself in the space so the man who followed him off a mountain can find him whenever he needs to.
I don't know anything about what happened up there. But I know what I'm looking at.
***
Dalton is at the edge of the yard.
He has his notepad. He always has his notepad.
Right now he's writing, which means he's observing something and filing it, which means he could be observing anyone and probably is but the third arc knows exactly how much of his attention is pointing in my direction and doesn't keep that information to itself.
I have approximately zero feelings about this.
Jake clocks him inside thirty seconds. I watch it happen — the scan landing on Dalton and staying a beat longer than everything else.
Jake's head stops moving. His weight shifts slightly onto his back foot.
He's reading Dalton the way he reads every potential variable — the notepad, the position at the yard's edge, the professional stillness that isn't quite the stillness of a wolf.
Something about Dalton registers as different and Jake is working out what.
Dalton looks up from his notepad, meets Jake's eyes briefly, looks back down. Unhurried. Neither challenging nor retreating.
Jake looks at me. "Who's that."
"Security consultant. He's monitoring me."
Jake looks back at Dalton. Something settles in his expression.
"Hm," he says.
Stone's eyes move between me and Jake with an unhurried assessment. I think about saying something and decide against it. Stone doesn't make arbitrary decisions and he paired us for a reason and I don't need to know the reason to let it happen.
Jake looks at me when Stone calls it. "Fine," he says. To no one in particular.
"Great enthusiasm," I say.
"You want me to be enthusiastic?"
"I want you to not look like you ate something rotten."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile — the ghost of one, gone before it committed to anything. It's the first thing close to humor I've seen from him and I don't push it.
***
The work is resistance bands, paired pulling, core stability.
Functional. The kind that requires contact without requiring conversation, which is probably why Stone chose it.
Two people on either end of a band working against each other — it's simple, it's physical, and it doesn't ask for anything you're not already giving.
Stone demonstrates the first position with one of the other residents while I unroll a band and Jake watches me do it. He doesn't offer to help. I don't ask him to.
Jake takes his position across from me and wraps the band around his hands and looks at me with dark eyes and says nothing.
He's broad through the chest and shoulders in the way of someone who has been doing hard physical work for years in conditions that required it — not built in a gym for aesthetics, built by necessity.
The kind of physical presence that takes up space without advertising itself.
My alpha nature registers him the way it registers all of them, that involuntary cataloguing that started the morning I shifted and hasn't stopped since.
The problem is that proximity makes the bond flare. I see the golden shape on my wrist pulsing, not complete, but still a problem I can’t ignore.
Three feet between us and it's a low persistent pull — rougher than Gray or Leo or Dalton, something that doesn't know how to queue and isn't going to learn.
It has no patience and no subtlety and at three feet it runs like a current I can feel in my sternum.
I keep my face neutral. Jake is doing the same, jaw tight, the effort of it visible in the set of his shoulders and the way he's looking at a point slightly past my left ear rather than at me directly.
We're both managing it. That's what this is. Two people who did not choose this standing three feet apart managing something neither of us knows how to turn off.
Stone calls the start. We begin.
The band pulls taut and I plant my feet and pull back and Jake does the same and his hands are close to mine on the band — not touching, four inches of cold rubber between our grips, but close enough that the heat off him crosses the gap or I imagine it does, which at this point amounts to the same thing.
The pull between us doesn't care that we're doing a supervised exercise.
It doesn't care about Stone twelve feet away or Dalton at the edge of the yard with his notepad.
It runs through the contact point of the band like the band is conducting it and I push against it the same way I push against Jake's grip — steadily, without giving ground.
He's stronger than me. He's not using it. He's calibrating, matching my resistance with his, keeping the band at the same tension rather than pulling me off balance. I notice this and say nothing about it.
We hold the position. The band is taut between us. His jaw is still tight and his eyes have stopped avoiding mine — we're looking at each other now, directly, the way you look at someone when you've given up pretending you're not, and the yard is cold and the bond is loud.
The other residents are working around us.
I can hear the slap of bands and the scrape of boots on frosted ground and somewhere behind me one of the Red House guys muttering to himself.
Normal sounds. The sounds of a session running.
And in the middle of it, three feet of taut rubber and a bond that has no manners and Jake's dark eyes not looking away.
I breathe. He breathes. The band holds.
He doesn't let go first. Neither do I.
Stone calls the switch.
We change positions. Stone comes over to adjust my stance — his hands quick on my shoulders, impersonal, the way he touches every resident during programming, corrective and professional — and Jake goes very still for one second.
I feel it before I see it. The grip on the band tightening.
The jaw. His eyes track Stone's hands on me with the quality of a man whose instincts have said something he hasn't finished deciding whether to act on.
The bond flares briefly, a warning pulse, and I breathe through it.
Stone steps back. His eyes meet mine for a fraction of a second, then he's already moving to the next pair.
Jake resets. His hands loosen on the band. His shoulders drop a fraction and he looks somewhere past me again, the practiced distance he's been maintaining since the corridor, and we go back to work.
We work for another forty minutes. The cold stops being something I notice and becomes the ambient condition of the world.
My shoulders burn by the end. Jake shows no sign of physical discomfort whatsoever, which is either impressive or annoying and I haven't decided which.
By the time Stone calls the end I can see frost on Jake's jacket collar and he doesn't seem to have registered it.
The mountain, probably. After the mountain, an Alaskan morning in a facility yard is barely a footnote.
***
The group disperses in the way of people who have been cold and physically exerted and want to be somewhere warm. Residents peel off in twos and threes. Stone stays, as he always does, to collect equipment. I'm rolling up a band when Jake stops beside me.
He doesn't look at me. Looks at the mountain line above the tree line above the fence.
"The bond," he says. Flat. A fact being reported to a room.
I wait.
"It's worse when you're close." The words come out like he's annoyed at himself for having to say them. "I thought it would get easier."
I huff a quiet laugh. "Did it get easier today?"
"No." A beat of silence. The mountain line. "Does it for you?"
I think about Dalton in the common room. The almost-scene by a bookshelf that didn’t happen and has been happening anyway in every room I've been in with him since. Three days of the pull getting louder, not quieter.
"No," I say.
He nods, still looking at the mountain. "Okay."
He walks away before I can say anything else.
The partial bond between us settles to a background hum now that the distance is back. Just the pull I've been carrying since he arrived in a Red House corridor, which feels like longer ago than it was.
I finish rolling the band. The yard is almost empty. Stone is stacking equipment near the far wall, unhurried.
There are three arcs on my wrist now. Five people I feel a pull towards.
Bonds and partial bonds running at varying volumes through my body at all hours, orienting me toward different points in the building and the compound like I've become a compass with too many norths.
Gray in Gold House, the bond stretched thin across the compound but present.
Leo somewhere in the building being loud about something.
Dalton at the yard's edge with his notepad, and I can feel the direction of him through the arc the same way I can feel the cold through my jacket.
And Jake, now — and RJ both fainter but still there.
I should know what to do with that by now.
I don't think anyone would.
There's no protocol for female alpha because female alphas don't exist in this facility's documented history, which means there's no protocol for what it means to carry so many bonds simultaneously while undergoing reclassification while a man with a notepad documents your every movement.
I've been making it up as I go. I'll keep making it up.
I start toward the gate.
I'm almost through it when I hear it — Jake's voice, low, behind me. Not to me. To Stone, who is collecting the last of the equipment, who has his back turned, who didn't ask.
"She's different."
I slow down but don’t stop as I step through the door into Red House.