Elena’s POV
The gravel bit into my heel as I stumbled further off the path.
I did not cry. I refused to cry.
I pressed the flat of my palm against my cheek and felt the heat radiating up through my fingers. The skin was already tight. Puffy. A ridge was forming along my cheekbone where the edge of his hand had landed.
I looked down at my other wrist, the one in the cast. Then at the scatter of broken glass in the grass. My heart was doing sothing ugly in my chest, a ragged uneven rhythm that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with rage.
I walked.
Away from the stone steps. Away from the soft warm spill of light out of the ballroom windows. Deeper into the dark.
The path curved around a hedge and opened into a small clearing. A fountain sat in the middle, a stone basin with a cherub on top that had been carved so long ago its face had worn smooth. Water ran down its cheeks where its eyes should have been. I almost laughed.
I sat on the low stone lip of the basin, on the side furthest from the house.
I tried to fix my hair.
The gown had been designed to leave my shoulders bare. The long platinum sweep of it was pinned up on one side with a little silver comb. I pulled the comb free. I shook my hair loose. I tried to arrange it so that it fell forward across the left side of my face.
It fell the wrong way.
I tried again. I tucked, I tugged, I pressed. It slid back.
My eyes were burning.
I pressed both palms flat against the cold stone of the fountain and I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth and I did not cry.
“That’s going to bruise.”
I jerked.
The voice had co from the hedge behind . Low. Young. Careful.
I was on my feet before I had decided to be, the cast held awkwardly across my body, my good hand half-curled.
“Easy.” A young man stepped out of the shadow, his palms lifted. “Easy. I’m not him.”
He stopped at the edge of the lantern light, where the glow did not quite reach him. Dark hair. Tall, but not as tall as Marcus. Broad through the shoulders in a way that said he would be broader in a few years. He looked to be about my age.
He did not step any closer.
“I’m Gage,” he said.
I did not say anything.
“Damien’s brother.”
I let my good hand fall to my side.
“Backup heir,” he added, like it was a joke he had told too many tis to find funny anymore. “Dam has no kids yet, so I get dragged to these things. Lucky .”
“You’re staying in the shadow.”
“I am.”
“Why.”
“Because Alpha Marcus is at the window.” He tipped his chin very slightly toward the house. “And I would rather he not see talking to you.”
I did not look toward the house.
I sat back down on the edge of the fountain. Slow. Careful. My knees felt unreliable.
Gage stayed where he was.
“May I,” he said, and gestured at the far end of the stone lip.
“It’s not my fountain.”
He sat. Far enough away that I could not have reached him if I had tried. Close enough that his voice did not have to carry.
“That’s a hell of a right hand you took,” he said quietly.
I turned my face further away.
“And the cast.” He glanced at my wrist. “Let guess. Stairs.”
“I fell.”
“Down stairs.”
“Yes.”
“Classic.”
“It happens.”
“Elena.” His voice was still low. “It happens a lot, apparently.”
I looked at him.
In the dim edge of the lantern light his eyes were not dark like his brother’s. They were a lighter color, hazel maybe, and they were watching the way a person watches a wounded animal in the road. Not with pity. With the quiet calculation of soone trying to figure out if they could get close enough to help without getting bitten.
“You don’t know ,” I said.
“No.”
“Then don’t.”
“All right.”
He didn’t leave.
The fountain ran behind us. Sowhere past the hedges, the faint thread of an orchestra lifted and dipped.
“I watched you in there, you know,” Gage said, after a while. “With my brother. With Marcus. Most people in that room wouldn’t have stood up to him. I don’t think I would have.”
“I didn’t stand up to him.”
“You spoke to an Alpha he hates and you didn’t apologize for it.” Gage shrugged. “Close enough.”
I pressed my fingertips gently against the swollen ridge of my cheek. It pulsed back at .
“Listen.” Gage’s voice dropped further. “I’m going to say sothing, and then I’m going to shut up about it, and you can do whatever you like with it.”
“What.”
“Our territory borders yours on the east. Not far. If you ever needed to get out of Peak, and you made it over that border, we wouldn’t turn you away.”
I went very still.
“You don’t know what you’re offering,” I said.
“I think I do.”
“You don’t.”
“Then tell .”
I did not tell him.
I stared at the worn stone cherub with the water running down its face and I thought about a cell phone I did not own and a map I could not read and a mother who could not walk from the bed to the kitchen anymore.
“I don’t have a phone,” I said.
Gage was quiet for a mont.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, that is useful to know.”
“I’m not asking for one.”
“I know you’re not.”
The curtain twitched at a window above us. I caught the movent out of the corner of my eye. I did not lift my head. I did not have to.
I already knew.
“He’s watching,” I said.
“He’s been watching for hours.” Gage did not move. “Every ti I thought about coming out, he was back at a different window. He lets you stay out here, but he doesn’t let anyone co near you.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Is that what it is, then.” His voice was careful. “Is he that kind of possessive.”
“He is that kind of everything.”
Gage let out a breath through his nose.
We sat there in the dark. I did not know how long. The orchestra swelled and went quiet a few tis. The lanterns on their hooks swayed when the wind ca through. Every so often, without looking, I could feel the weight of Marcus’s gaze shift from one window to another, like a searchlight moving along a fence line.
At so point Gage stood.
“I’m going to walk the other way around the hedge now,” he said. “So it doesn’t look like we were together.”
“All right.”
“Elena.”
“Yes.”
“East border.”
“I heard you.”
He slipped back into the shadow of the hedge and was gone.
I sat alone.
I sat alone for a long ti.
The music inside changed. Slower now. The kind of song that played at the end of an evening, when the dancers were tired and leaning against each other more than dancing. Car doors started to open and close on the far side of the house. Gravel crunched under wheels.
The side door opened.
I did not stand.
Two n ca down the stone steps together, heads bent close. Damien. Gage behind him, a step back, the way a beta walked behind his alpha.
Damien saw .
He stopped where he was on the path. His eyes went to my cheek and his whole face changed.
“Elena.”
I pulled my hair forward again. Uselessly.
He crossed the gravel in a few strides.
“Please,” I said. “Damien. Please don’t.”
He stopped short.
“Did he do that.”
“Please.”
“Tell that is not what I am looking at.”
“You’re going to make it worse,” I whispered. “Please. Please go.”
Damien’s jaw worked.
“He has no right,” he said. Quietly. Carefully. The way a man speaks when he is holding sothing dangerous between his teeth. “Pack mber or not. Alpha or not. He has no right to put his hand on you.”
“Please.”
“If this was because of our conversation at the table—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to .”
I retreated further into the shadow of the hedge. The lantern light could not follow there. My face went dark.
“If you stand here,” I said, “he will co out. And it will not be he hits next ti.”
Damien was silent.
Gage stepped forward and touched his brother’s elbow.
“Dam,” he murmured.
Damien did not look at him. He was still looking at the place where I had been, where now he could only see the line of my gown and the pale shape of my good hand against the dark.
“All right,” Damien said at last. “All right.”
He stepped back onto the path.
Gage leaned in close to him and spoke quickly, low, words I caught only pieces of. East. Border. No phone. Damien listened. He did not nod. He did not have to.
They walked slowly back toward the front of the house. Damien paused on the drive to shake hands with another Alpha who was on his way to a waiting car, to clasp a shoulder, to say sothing that made the other man laugh. He was the picture of a guest leaving a pleasant party.
I watched through the hedge.
The side door opened again.
Marcus stepped out.
He did not look at the drive. He did not look at Damien, or at Gage, or at the other Alphas making their unhurried way to their cars. He did not look at the lanterns or at the roses or at the cherub with water running down its face.
His eyes cut straight through the dark.
They found in the shadow of the hedge where no lantern reached, and they locked on.
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