Chapter 7: The Locked Drawer

Torin's POV

I had been awake since the toast.

My beta had told me about the card before the last guests left.

"Pinecrest's old Alpha. Thin, silver hair. He put something in her hand at the coat stand."

"Did she read it?"

"She read it standing there. Then she put it in her bra, which I took as a no comment."

I stood at the window of my study with the lights off.

Below me the pines stood black against the lake, and one lamp burned in the guest house, in a window on the second floor.

She wasn't sleeping either.

That made two of us, and I was not good at it.

The bond had been humming in my chest since the school hall.

I had never had one before, so I had no word for it.

It was like a note held in a pipe, low and constant, and it got louder whenever she was in the room.

When she'd turned her face up at the toast, it had stopped being a note and become a hand.

I had kissed her for the length of a breath.

I'd said a stupid thing afterward to cover it, and she had given it back to me sharper.

I had stood there in front of forty Alphas, wanting to laugh and wanting to drag her out through the kitchens.

That was a problem.

It was not the biggest one.

The biggest one was in a locked drawer under my left hand.

I didn't need to open it.

I knew every page.

Seven years ago I had been Marshal of the Crown, not King.

A man had walked into my office at dawn with blood dried on his shirt.

"I killed a wolf at my border last night," Declan Mercer had said. "I'm turning myself in."

He'd been twenty-nine, with a wife and a three-year-old at home.

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