Kaela's POV
Sleep doesn't come.
I've been lying on the cot they gave me for hours, staring at the ceiling and listening to the compound settle into quiet. The room is cold. There's a window but it's high up and all I can see is darkness and stars that feel very far away.
My mind won't stop moving. It keeps replaying the ceremony. Riven's face. Petra's smile. The sound of my mother's heels walking away from me. The way nobody followed when I left the hall.
I sit up because lying down is making it worse.
The room is small enough that I can see the whole thing from where I'm sitting. A cot. A table. A chair. A bathroom door. Nothing to do but think and I'm so tired of thinking.
Around midnight, the door opens.
I jump because I wasn't expecting anyone. Zane stands in the doorway holding two cups of something that steams. He doesn't ask if he can come in. He just comes in and sits in the chair across from the small table like he's been invited.
He sets one cup in front of me.
"Hot tea," he says. "Sleep doesn't work when your brain is on fire."
I look at the cup. Then at him. There's no catch. No trick. He's just sitting there in dark clothes with his dark hair and his dark eyes and he's not looking at me like I'm a problem anymore.
He's looking at me like I'm a person.
I take the cup. It's warm and it smells like honey and something herbal I don't recognize.
"Why are you here?" I ask. Not suspicious. Just confused.
"Can't sleep either," he says, and he drinks from his own cup like we do this all the time.
We don't talk about packs or borders or why I'm here or what happens tomorrow. We just talk. About small things. About nothing that matters and everything that does at the same time.
He asks what I like to do.
I tell him I like reading. I like watching wolves run at sunset because it's the one time they look free instead of controlled. I like the smell of rain before it hits the ground.
He asks what I was running toward when I crossed into Ashford territory.
I think about that question for a long time. Nobody's ever asked me that. They just asked what I was running from.
"I don't know yet," I finally tell him. "I was too busy running away to think about where I was going."
He nods like that makes complete sense.
I ask him why he built his pack in the mountains instead of somewhere easier. Somewhere with more resources. Somewhere that wasn't so harsh.
"The mountains don't care who your father was," he says. It's simple but there's weight under it. "They don't care what he lost or what he failed to protect. They just exist. And if you're smart enough and strong enough, you can build something real here."
I'm quiet for a moment.
"That's a good reason," I tell him.
We talk about what we wanted to be before the world told us who we had to be. He says he wanted to be someone who built things that lasted. I say I wanted to be someone my mother was proud of. The second part comes out before I can stop it and I feel my face get hot.
He doesn't make me regret saying it. He just listens.
At some point I tell him about my grandmother's earrings that are probably still on the ceremony hall floor. I tell him I was wearing them for luck. I tell him I thought they meant something.
He asks what I think they mean now.
"That I'm stupid for believing in luck," I say, but I'm smiling a little when I say it.
He says something about how luck is just another word for not giving up yet, and I laugh. It comes out sudden and real and surprised, like my body just remembered how to do that.
We both go very still after I laugh.
The sound of it seems to echo in the small room. I haven't laughed since before the ceremony. I didn't think I would ever laugh again and now I just did and it feels like I've given something away that I can't get back.
Zane is watching me. His expression hasn't changed but something in his eyes has. Something darker. Something that looks like hunger.
"What?" I ask, and my voice sounds different. Smaller.
He doesn't answer right away. He sets down his cup and leans forward. Just a little. Just enough that the space between us starts to mean something.
"You're not what I expected," he says quietly.
My heart does something stupid in my chest.
"What did you expect?" I ask, even though I'm not sure I want to know the answer.
He leans forward more and the space between us keeps shrinking. I should move away. I know I should move away. This is enemy territory and this is the Alpha of that territory and I don't even know his last name beyond the fear that comes with it.
But I don't move.
He doesn't move either.
The distance between us is almost gone now. I can feel the warmth coming off his body. I can smell him. Something like pine and smoke and something underneath that my wolf recognizes and responds to before my brain can catch up.
"I expected someone broken," he says, and his voice is lower now. "Someone who would apologize for existing. Someone who would beg."
"I'm not begging," I whisper.
"No," he agrees. "You're not."
He moves like he's about to close the space entirely. Like he's about to do something neither of us will be able to take back.
And I realize I'm not going to stop him.