“Why are you actually here?” she asks. “Not the pack security answer. Theactualanswer.”
“Those are the same answer.”
“They’re really not.”
I take another step forward, and I don’t entirely decide to. She still doesn’t move, and we are close now, closer than we’ve been, the fence at her back and the river sound below us and the carnival noise far enough away to feel like a different world. Close enough that I can smell her properly, not the ambient drift of her scent across the ground, but the real thing, the warm-smoke citrus edge of it, and underneath…
Underneath is the part I can’t categorize. Underneath is something that my pack instinct translates before my brain can intercept it, something that my instinct has been translating all week and that I have been refusing to read.
My hand moves before I decide to move it.
Not aggressively, I don’t grab. I reach, and my fingers close around her wrist, loosely. I’m stopping her, preemptively, even though she hasn’t moved toward leaving, like my hand has concluded she’s about to go before the rest of me has caught up to the moment.
She looks down at my hand on her wrist. She looks up at me. And she doesn’t pull away.
My grip is light, barely there, just contact. Theinside of her wrist where the pulse runs. I can feel it now, the beat of it, faster than her controlled surface suggests, and she knows I can feel it.
“Let go,” she says. Quietly. Not frightened.
“You were going to leave.”
“I’m allowed to leave.”
“I know that.” I don’t let go. “I’m asking you not to.”
Something shifts in her face. “Asking?”
“Yes.”
The word sits between us. Her pulse is fluttering under my fingertips. It’s not slowing, not steadying, something more complicated than either of those. I’m close enough now that her exhale reaches me, close enough that the woodsmoke warmth of her scent is everywhere. My pack instinct is doing something I’d shut down immediately if I could find the switch.
I should let go.
I don’t let go.
“You’re in distress,” I say. It comes out lower than I intend. “Your scent. It’s been running all week, but right now it’s…” I stop. The word I have for it is not a word I’m giving her yet. “I need to verify something.”
“Verify,” she repeats. Flat. “What does that mean?”
“It means I need to be closer.”
She goes very still. “Archer?”
“I’m not…” I stop again. I know what this looks like. I know what this is, and what it isn’t, and I need her to know the difference. “I’m not claiming anything. This is assessment. Pack protocol for an Omega in distress on our territory.” A pause. “I need to scent-check you. The juncture of your neck. That’s where the distress signal is strongest.”
The silence that follows has a very specific quality.
“You’re asking,” she says slowly, “to put your face in my neck?”
“I’m asking to verify your distress level. Those are the same thing and also not the same thing.”
“That is—” She stops. Something moves through her expression that is not quite outrage, but close to it. “That is the most clinical description of an incredibly—” She doesn’t finish.
“Yes,” I agree.
Another silence.
“Fine,” she says. One word. Clipped. Her jaw set with her decision.
