7
Declan’s POV
Early morning.
I was standing at the office window, looking down at the training ground, watching the young wolves file in.
Their scents and voices tangled together into something loud and layered, the way a pack always sounds when it’s still waking up.
Then she walked in.
I noticed her before I’d decided to look for her.
That was the part I couldn’t explain — she hadn’t done anything to draw attention, hadn’t made a sound I could identify above the rest, hadn’t moved any differently from how she’d moved the day before.
And yet.
The way she crossed the space was like watching someone who had learned a long time ago to take up exactly as much room as she needed and no more.
Precise, contained, every movement with something compressed inside it.
I’d spent years training alongside exceptional fighters, had stood across from some of the best wolves on the Alliance roster.
I knew what competence looked like in a body.
She was something past that.
Dante turned one slow circle in my chest and then stopped.
Like a dog going still because it’s heard something distant — not alarmed, just *listening*.
I pulled my eyes away and looked at the papers on my desk.
I read the same line four times.
She’d left the office last night with those last words hanging in the air between us — *Good night, Voss* — door closed behind her, clean and final, like a conversation ended exactly where she’d decided it would end.
Not where I’d decided.
Not where the moment had seemed like it was going.
*You remind me of someone.*
The sentence had come out of me before I’d cleared it.
I hadn’t meant to say it and I couldn’t take it back, and what was worse, I hadn’t been wrong.
I didn’t let myself follow that thought all the way to where it pointed.
That night at Pinewood Lodge lived in a locked room in my memory, and I’d made a decision about it — accepted Celeste’s account, accepted the chain as proof, accepted the responsibility.
Unraveling that now, on the basis of a feeling, on the basis of the way a woman moved across a training ground —
That was the kind of thinking that broke things.
And yet Dante had stopped walking in circles and was just standing there, very still, facing in her direction.
He didn’t move.
My phone rang.
Celeste’s name lit up the screen, and I picked it up before the second ring.
“Dinner?” Her voice was soft, careful, carrying that particular texture she always used with me — the one that said *I need this* without ever quite saying it out loud.
“Sure,” I said.
“Seven o’clock.”
“I was thinking somewhere quieter this time.
Less crowded.”
“Fine.
Send me the address.”
“Okay.” A pause.
“Are you busy right now?”
“Yes.”
“Right.
Of course.
I’ll see you tonight then.”
She ended the call, and I set the phone face-down on the desk.
Six years of that particular dynamic, and I still hadn’t found a way to navigate it that didn’t leave me feeling like I was doing something wrong.
I’d accepted what she’d told me.
I’d taken responsibility for that night.
That was what an Alpha did — you didn’t run from the consequences of your own actions, even the ones you couldn’t fully remember.
You stood under them.
But standing under something and being at peace with it were two different things.
Dante made a sound inside me that I felt more than heard.
Not agreement.
Definitely not agreement.
I looked back at the window.
She was crossing the courtyard below, moving toward the far building where the afternoon sessions were held. The source of this chapter is g.com.
The last of the day’s sun was going low and orange over the ridgeline, and it caught the length of her hair and turned it deep gold, almost amber.
She walked the way she always seemed to walk — straight line, steady pace, completely indifferent to the way people’s attention tracked toward her as she passed.
Two of the younger wolves turned to look.
A senior instructor near the equipment shed glanced up from what he was doing.
She didn’t notice any of it.
Or if she noticed, she didn’t care, which I was starting to think was more likely.
She reached the corner of the far building.
For one second she was in profile against the light, chin level, shoulders back, that particular quality of stillness she carried even while moving.
Then she turned the corner and was gone.
I was still standing at the window.
I realized I’d stopped reading the line in the report altogether.
Had stopped some time ago, in fact, and was just standing here with the paper in my hand that I wasn’t looking at.
I set it down.
Dante was quiet in the way he got quiet when he felt he’d made his point.
Not the easy, neutral quiet of a wolf at rest.
The deliberate quiet of one that was waiting for me to catch up.
Six years of knowing something was wrong.
Six years of pushing that knowledge down, of building other things on top of it, of telling myself that what I remembered from that night was distorted, unreliable, probably nothing.
Six years of Celeste’s name in my phone and Celeste’s face across dinner tables and Dante never once — not once — responding to her the way I kept waiting for him to.
And now this woman, with no scent I could read, no pack marker, nothing that should have registered at all — and Dante going still and careful in my chest like he was listening for a sound he already knew.
*You remind me of someone.*
I hadn’t planned those words.
They’d arrived on their own.
Dante hummed low, somewhere behind my ribs.
*You know*, he said — though he said nothing, made no actual sound, because that wasn’t how it worked.
*You already know.*