Page 9 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Voices come from every direction at once, on top of each other. “What did he do to her?” “Get him out of here.” “Somebody hold him.” Valen stands in the middle of all of it, feet planted, silent. His mouth is a hard line, it stays that way. His eyes move once across the crowd, slow and complete, the same unhurried sweep I’ve watched him make from the treeline a dozen times. He holds his silence in front of a pack that has already convicted him. Some detached part of me understands exactly why, even while the rest of me knows how fast this can go wrong.

“Back up.” Nova speaks before Dane can. “Give him room to think.” Wolves listen to her faster than they would to almost anyone else right now, probably because she’s the only one in this yard staying neutral. The wolves ease back half a step before Dane even reaches them. His voice cuts through what’s left without getting louder than any of it.

“Enough.” He moves into the space Nova just opened. The pack gives him the rest of the way in. He looks at Rafe, Valen, and Kari, down and in real pain, with Harper’s hands pressed over the burn on her palm. He asks the question the rest of them skipped. “What happened?”

I step into the space between Valen and the pack, close enough that Rafe and Valen both have to look at me instead of each other, to see past the size of him. He stands square to the crowd. He’s built wide enough through the chest to block half the wolves behind him from my view. I’ll work out later what this is going to take from me but right now somebody has to say what’s true. It won’t be Valen.

“He didn’t touch her.” I say it to Dane, not to Rafe. Dane’s rules here, and right now Rafe will hear anything I say as me choosing Valen over him. “Six feet of open ground sat between them when Kari went down. I watched all of it.”

“Then how?” Rafe’s voice stays low. It gets thinner instead, stretched over something close to breaking. “How did she end up on the ground if he never touched her?”

“I don’t know what set it off.” The words come out steady. I’ve had years of practice at that. “I know magic better than I know almost anything else in this world. Nothing came off him toward her. No attack. No intent. Whatever answered in her hand, it didn’t come from him choosing to hurt her.”

I could end this with one more sentence. Telling Dane what Valen actually is would answer every question in this yard. I don’t say it, even Valen doesn’t know what he is. If I say it here, in front of all of them, he learns it from an accusation instead of from me. My hands stay loose at my sides. I keep my eyes on Dane. If I look at Rafe right now, he’ll see exactly how much I’m not telling him.

Dane looks at me for a long moment, the kind of look that weighs how much my word is worth to him after all these months. “You’re certain?”

“I’m certain he didn’t attack her. I’m not certain yet why the mark answered him and not anyone else standing in this yard.” Both of those are true. There’s a third thing I know but I keep it to myself.

Dane holds my eyes another beat, then looks past me at Valen. “You’ll stay where I can see you. You don’t go near the marked wolves again until I understand what happened. If I decide you’re the reason Kari’s on the ground, this conversation is over. So are you.” He turns to the wolves still crowded tight around them both. “He stays. Watched. Let him go.”

Valen gives him one short nod. That’s all he offers. The crowd breaks open enough to let air back into the space around us. I stay right where I am. I’ve never been this close to him before. Now I can finally see him, not just sense him. His hair is dark ash-blond threaded through with silver, thick and pushed back off his forehead, a shade darker than the dry grass along the treeline where he’s been lurking. He’s made for exactly this - a pack that wants to hurt him throwing everything it has at him and nothing about him moves.

His heat reaches me before anything else, there’s more of it than a body his size should throw off. It’s not unpleasant and I have to stop myself from leaning into it. He smells warm, a little like the treeline after rain. I’m standing here a breath later, still breathing him in like I have a reason to. I’ve had a long time to excel at reading the truth in people before they finish introducing themselves. Standing this close to him gives me nothing but his body, mine, and almost no space between them. Whatever he’s thinking stays somewhere I can’t reach no matter how hard I search for it. The only information left to me is entirely physical: his heat, height, the clean line of his jaw, breadth of his chest, and how far back I have to tilt my head to find his eyes.

Not being able to read him used to sit in my head as a problem I intended to solve eventually. Standing here, it turns into something else. Hunger, plain and physical, low in my body, arriving faster than I can account for. I’ve just told Dane, in my most careful and precise voice, that Valen did nothing wrong. The whole time, everything below my collarbone has already decided this man is the only thing in the yard worth paying attention to. I let it happen. I don’t know yet if that was a choice.

Dane’s ruling stands, though nobody in the yard looks satisfied by it. The last of the wolves peel off in twos and threes, Torres among them, throwing one more look at Valen before he goes. Lyanna is already kneeling over Kari, both hands wrapped around her burned palm.

“Hold still. Let me look.”

“I’m holding still.”

She isn’t. She’s already turning her wrist to check the damage herself. Lyanna catches her hand before she can twist it further.

“It’s fading. You’re fine.”

“I know I’m fine. I was fine before you got here.”

Kari pulls her hand back, flexes her fingers once, pushes herself up onto her feet before anyone can stop her. She waves off both Harper and Ben’s hands. Harper stays close anyway. Ben’s hand hovers at her back without landing. For a moment the four of them are just a knot of people taking care of one of their own, whether she wants it or not.

Valen steps back from us all, over toward the horse pasture at the far edge of the yard, putting as much space between himself and everyone else as the compound allows. The moment he’s far enough away, the strain in Kari’s mark eases, going quiet under Lyanna’s hands. I’m the only one who will ever know that detail happened. I keep it exactly where I keep everything else about him: quiet, and mine alone.

I walk back across the yard. Around me, wolves are still finding their way back to ordinary. By the horse pasture, Valen is standing where he stepped back to, watching the yard. I’m watching him. This time I hold his gaze instead of looking away. I’m carrying two things out of that yard that weren’t mine this morning. A hunger I didn’t choose and a secret that stopped being quiet the moment I spent my own standing to protect the man it belongs to. Neither is going to settle before nightfall.

Chapter 7

Valen

The treeline is one step away. It always is.

Open ground, then forest, then gone. I’ve used that step more times than I can count. Nobody’s ever stopped me from taking it, nobody’s going to stop me now but I don’t take it.

Behind me the yard is cool where the sun hasn’t reached it yet, and colder still in every wolf watching me from the porch, water trough, cabin steps. The same eyes tracked me all last night, after Dane’s ruling, after the pack scattered back to its business with nothing settled underneath it. They gave me a cabin at the edge of the compound, past the last row, close enough to the trees that I could’ve been back in them in ten steps if I’d wanted to be. I didn’t take that exit either. Yesterday I was a stranger they hadn’t decided about. Then a woman went down in the dirt six feet from where I was standing. Not knowing me was tolerable. Being blamed for hurting someone isn’t.

Packed dirt under my boots. Smoke starting up from the lodge chimney. Somewhere behind me a horse blows out through its nose, unbothered, the only creature in this yard that hasn’t picked a side. Three wolves cross the yard toward me. Mateo leads. Young, fast on his feet, moving quicker than the two behind him. He stops closer to me than he needs to and holds it there. Wyatt’s a step behind him, older, wide through the shoulders, the sort who doesn’t waste a word when a look will do the job instead. A third wolf hangs back near the porch rail, watching, not committing either way.

“You should go.” Mateo says it like he’s rehearsed it in a mirror. “While it’s still your idea and not somebody else’s.”