Seb found out about Elena Ashford the same way he found out about most things at Crestwood which was by walking into a situation he hadn't planned for and having to deal with it in real time.
It was Sunday afternoon and he had booked the small study room on the second floor of the library at two o'clock and arrived to find someone already in it with three textbooks open, a highlighter in each hand and the focused expression of someone who had decided this room was theirs and the booking system had simply not been informed yet.
He knocked on the open door.
She looked up.
Dark eyes, sharp jaw, the kind of face that assessed things quickly and didn't bother softening the assessment before it arrived on her expression. She looked at Seb the way you looked at a variable you were deciding whether to account for.
"I booked this room," Seb said.
"So did I," she said.
"At two o'clock."
"Also at two o'clock." She held up her phone showing the confirmation. He held up his. They looked at each other's screens and then at each other.
"System error," he said.
"Obviously," she said. "I'm not moving."
"Neither am I."
She looked at him for a moment and then looked at the table which was large enough for four people and back at him. "Sit down then. Quietly."
Seb sat down.
They worked in silence for twenty minutes, which was actually productive silence, the kind that had focus in it rather than tension, and Seb had covered two pages of criminology notes before she said without looking up from her textbook, "You're Seb Cole."
"Yes."
"Elena Ashford," she said. "Damon is my brother."
Seb looked at her. The jaw, the eyes, the particular quality of the stillness. Obvious now that he knew. "You're in his pack."
"Delta," she said. "Third in command." She turned a page. "He talks about you."
"Does he."
"Not in a way he'd admit to." She highlighted something without looking up. "He mentioned your name four times in two days which for Damon is basically a declaration."
"A declaration of what?"
She looked at him over her textbook with an expression that said she had already decided he was smart enough to answer that himself and was waiting to see if she was right.
Seb decided to move on. "What are you studying?"
"Law." She turned another page. "Pre-law now, law school after. Then I'm going to be the first wolf to argue a case in front of the International Pack Council in forty years." She said it the way you said things you had already decided were happening and were simply describing the schedule.
"That's specific," Seb said.
"I'm a specific person," she said.
He believed her completely.
They worked in silence for a while longer and then she said, still without looking up, "Victor has been asking questions about you."
Seb put his pen down. "What kind of questions?"
"Who you're spending time with. Whether you've shown any unusual responses to pack presence. Whether anyone has noticed anything." She turned a page. "He asked one of the junior Deltas in our pack. Casually. Over lunch."
"What did the Delta say?"
"Nothing useful. He doesn't know anything useful." She finally looked up. "But the fact that Victor is asking inside Damon's pack means he's getting impatient and he's not being careful about hiding it anymore."
"Which means his timeline is shortening," Seb said.
"Which means his timeline is shortening," she confirmed. "How is the training going?"
Seb looked at her. "Damon told you about that."
"Damon didn't have to tell me. I saw the three of you go into the back room yesterday morning and come out two hours later." She held his gaze. "I'm Delta. Noticing things is my job."
"It went well," he said.
"Good." She went back to her textbook. "It needs to go faster."
"I know."
"Wednesday isn't soon enough."
"Monday then," Seb said. "I'll tell them Monday."
She looked at him over the page with something that wasn't quite approval but was in the same building as it. "You make decisions quickly."
"I find it saves time."
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile exactly. More like the acknowledgment that a smile was possible in theory. "Caspian and Damon were actually in the same room without it becoming a disaster?"
"Uncomfortable but functional."
"That's more than I expected," she said honestly.
"Me too," Seb admitted.
She looked at him for a moment with those sharp dark eyes. "Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"The way Damon is around you." She paused, choosing her words. "His wolf is different. Quieter. I've known my brother for nineteen years and I have never seen his wolf settle the way it settles when you're nearby." She held his gaze. "Do you know what that means?"
Seb held her gaze back. "I have a theory."
"And?"
"And I'm still working out what to do with it."
Elena looked at him for a long moment. "He kept the pen you left on his desk last week."
Seb blinked. "What?"
"You were in his office Wednesday. You left a pen on his desk, the one you'd been chewing on. He picked it up after you left and put it in his drawer." She went back to her textbook. "I'm just telling you that."
Seb stared at the side of her head.
"Elena."
"I'm studying," she said.
"You just told me my chewed pen is in your brother's desk drawer."
"I did."
"Why?"
She turned a page. "Because you're sitting here working out what to do with your theory and sometimes people need a small piece of additional data to help them decide." She didn't look up. "That's the data."
Seb sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment and then at his notebook and then at the window where the afternoon light was coming through at a flat angle across the table.
His chewed pen. In Damon's desk drawer.
He thought about morning walks and coffee that was always black and the way Damon said things plainly even when plainly was harder and the specific quality of being near him that he still didn't have a word for.
He picked up his pen and went back to his notes.
They worked in silence for another hour, easy and focused, and when Seb's phone buzzed at four o'clock with a message from Caspian asking about Monday he typed back Monday, seven am, same room and showed the screen to Elena without saying anything.
She read it and nodded once.
"Good," she said and turned a page.
Seb put his phone away and went back to his work and decided that Elena Ashford was one of the most useful people he had met at Crestwood and also possibly the most terrifying and that both of those things were equally true and equally fine.