Chapter 6 The Approved Claimant
Mireya
I woke with my key clenched in my fist and Oren Belsky’s scent inside my room.
Cedar oil. White pepper. The medicinal bite of alpha stabilizer.
For one disoriented second, I was nineteen again.
My wrists were strapped to a clinical bed. A physician stood beyond the glass, explaining that an approved claimant had the legal right to establish compatibility. Oren waited beside her in a gray uniform, already smiling as if my body had accepted on my behalf.
Then the key cut into my palm.
The room returned.
Water-stained wall. Narrow bed. Gray morning pressed against two windows. My boots positioned beneath the sill where I could reach them without crossing the door.
No restraints.
No Oren.
His scent came from outside.
I threw back the blanket and nearly hit the floor.
Heat rolled through me, deeper than the restlessness in the forest. My skin felt too tight. My breasts ached beneath my shirt, and a wet pulse low in my body answered the alpha scent before I could smother it.
Not consent.
I said the words aloud.
“This is not consent.”
The room warmed around me.
The covenant heard declarations made inside its walls. Good. Let it learn.
Three knocks struck the door.
Not Ivo. He had knocked once during the night when the fire smoked, then waited until I invited him to speak through the wood.
“Mireya,” Tomas said. “Are you awake?”
“Who is outside?”
“A Registry delegation.”
“Who?”
Silence.
My stomach turned before he answered.
“Oren Belsky.”
The heat surged.
I doubled over with one hand braced on the bed. My scent flooded the room, blackberries crushed into rain-wet soil. Lightning-metal coated my tongue.
Something heavy struck the hall wall.
Ivo’s voice followed, harsh and low. “Get him off the grounds.”
“I am attempting to keep Zephan from reaching the grounds,” Tomas said.
Another impact.
I dragged on my boots.
“Mireya, stay inside.”
I went still.
Tomas exhaled beyond the door. “Poorly phrased.”
“Very.”
“Your room is secure. Oren cannot enter it.”
“He has an assignment order.”
“The covenant does not recognize Registry paper.”
“People do.”
I fastened my coat over clothes I had slept in and slid two knives into place.
“Where is he?”
“At the outer gate.”
“Is the gate open?”
“No.”
That mattered.
The front doors remained open by my order, but the lodge grounds had a separate threshold: an iron gate set into the blackthorn wall. If Oren stood outside it, he had not yet entered territory surrendered to my consent.
“Who closed it?”
“Zephan.”
“Without telling me?”
“The patrol arrived before dawn. He believed the closure protected your location.”
The promise in the forest had been exact. No controlling my route without telling me. No closing a path behind me.
Zephan had found the first edge of it and stepped over.
“Open my door,” I said.
“I cannot.”
Right.
I unlocked it myself.
Tomas stood several feet back, hands visible. His dark hair had come loose at one temple, and there was blood on his collar.
“Yours?” I asked.
“Zephan’s.”
“Is he hurt?”
“Only in his dignity.”
A snarl rolled up the stairs.
“And several supporting walls,” Tomas added.
I stepped into the hall.
Ivo stood at the far end with both arms locked around Zephan’s chest. The effort had driven them into the paneling hard enough to crack it. Zephan’s eyes were almost entirely black. Bitter orange and wet bark filled the corridor.
He saw me.
His body stopped fighting Ivo.
That was worse.
Every violent line of him redirected toward me. Night-blooming jasmine thickened beneath the aggression, lush and dark. My knees weakened.
I gripped the key until its teeth hurt.
“Back,” I said.
Zephan did not move.
“She is not speaking to you,” Ivo said against his ear.
“I am now. Zephan, back.”
His throat worked.
One step.
Then another.
Ivo released him carefully.
Zephan retreated to the end of the corridor and braced both hands on the window ledge.
“You closed the gate,” I said.
“There were twelve armed officers on the road.”
“You agreed not to close a path without telling me.”
“You were asleep.”
“Then wake me.”
“You needed rest.”
“You decided.”
His fingers dug into the wood.
“Yes.”
No apology. Not yet.
Oren’s voice carried from below.
“Mireya! I know you’re inside.”
My body answered him with another cramp.
The scar at my throat burned so sharply that I touched it before I could stop myself.
Ivo saw.
Fir smoke filled the hall.
The Hunt woke beneath it.
Take the rival.
The command did not arrive in words this time. It entered through the walls, through the hounds beginning to howl outside, through the three alphas whose scents turned the corridor into a storm.
Ivo drew blood from his palm with his own nails.
Zephan’s head snapped toward the stairs.
Tomas whispered something in a language that made the lamps dim.
“Stop,” I said.
All three looked at me.
“No one attacks him unless he crosses the gate.”
“He came with a claim order,” Zephan said.
“Paper.”
“Backed by silver ammunition and twelve officers.”
“Then make them cross first.”
Ivo wiped his palm on his trousers. “You should not go down.”
“You don’t get to tell me that.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
His jaw tightened. “I am asking you not to expose yourself to a scent that is already accelerating your heat.”
An ask.
Not an order.
The distinction did not make him right.
“He spent eight years using Registry procedure to speak for me,” I said. “I’m not letting him do it again while I hide upstairs.”
Ivo lowered his head once.
“Then I walk beside you.”
“Behind me.”
Pain moved across his face as the Hunt resisted.
“Behind you,” he agreed.
I looked at Zephan. “Open the gate.”
“No.”
The refusal landed like a struck match.
“You closed it without my permission.”
“And I will accept the consequence after the alpha outside stops broadcasting a mating claim into your heat.”
“Accept it now. Open the gate.”
“Mireya.”
“You promised.”
The territory tightened around him.
Zephan flinched.
Promises had weight here. He had told me so with his body when he opened the northern road.
He looked past me toward Ivo, searching for support.
Ivo gave him none.
Zephan swore, pushed away from the window, and headed downstairs.
I followed.
The front doors stood open to a colorless dawn. Vuk and six other hounds paced across the lawn, their bodies smoking above frost-white grass. Beyond them, the blackthorn gate remained closed.
Oren waited on the road.
He had dressed for an official recovery. Gray enforcement coat. Polished black boots. Silver designation badge at his throat. His dark blond hair was combed neatly away from a face the Registry liked to print on recruitment materials.
Nothing about him looked dangerous.
That was deliberate.
Sabine Kestrel stood beside him in a white field coat.
My surprise lasted one heartbeat.
Of course she had come.
The Deputy Director of Designation Security did not send another person to collect evidence that could destroy her. She arrived to control the account herself.
Ten officers formed a line behind them. Two more held the horses. Every rifle carried scent-dampening silver around its barrel.
Oren smiled when he saw me.
My body lurched toward him.
I caught the doorframe.
Fir smoke surged behind me. Ivo stopped before crossing the line of his permitted mark.
“Mireya,” Oren said. “Come here.”
The old command in his voice had been trained into him by Registry clinicians. An alpha frequency pitched to soothe an omega while lowering resistance.
My pulse slowed.
My feet wanted to obey.
I drew my knife and pressed the point into my palm.
Pain cleared the softness from my mind.
“Use that tone again,” I said, “and I will file it under coercive scent practice when I testify.”
Sabine’s expression did not change.
Oren’s did.
Only for an instant. The smile tightened. His nostrils flared.
“You’re ill,” he said. “You don’t understand your condition.”
“I understand it well enough to know your scent is worsening it.”
“Our compatibility is activating.”
“My rebound is reacting to an aggressive alpha.”
“Your body knows me.”
“My body knows poison too.”
Zephan laughed from the gate.
Oren’s attention shifted to him, then to the hounds.
“You have no standing here,” he said.
“Neither do you,” Zephan replied.
“I have a state assignment.”
“The trees can’t read.”
“Then perhaps they’ll understand fire.”
Every hound turned toward Oren.
Ivo came down the steps behind me.
He had armed himself. Sword, knives, iron baton replaced by a shorter weapon at his hip. He stopped one pace behind my left shoulder.
Tomas took the same position on my right.
Not flanking me.
Waiting where I had placed them.
Sabine noticed.
Her gaze moved to the key hanging from my fist.
“Mireya Sanz,” she called, “you have been declared medically incompetent under Emergency Designation Statute Twelve. Deputy Commander Belsky is authorized to retrieve you for treatment.”
“Declared by whom?”
“Registry physician Elian Voss.”
“Who examined me?”
“Your suppressant history and current scent breach provide sufficient evidence.”
“So no one.”
“The statute permits remote determination when an unbonded omega creates a public danger.”
“I am standing on private supernatural territory.”
“You crossed the boundary while trafficking another unstable omega.”
Petra had reached them as a suspicion, not a body.
Relief loosened one knot in my chest.
“Where is she?” Sabine asked.
“Who?”
“Petra Nwosu.”
“If you lost an adult woman assigned against her will, that sounds like an internal administrative failure.”
Zephan made a quiet approving sound.
Oren stepped toward the gate.
The hounds bared their teeth.
“Mireya, enough.”
His command tone struck harder.
Heat flooded me.
My vision blurred. Every scent on the lawn became unbearable: Zephan’s bitter orange, Tomas’s beeswax, Ivo’s iron, the spectral cold of the hounds.
Above all, cedar and pepper.
Oren.
My approved alpha.