James’s POV

Fourteen days.

James was a precise man and he knew exactly how long it had been, not because he had been counting in any deliberate way but because precision was simply how his mind worked, the automatic cataloguing of intervals and patterns that made him effective at running a pack and that was currently making him deeply irritated with himself.

Fourteen days since the lake. Fourteen days of his wolf riding high in his chest like something leaning against a door that hadn’t been properly latched, alert and interested in a way that had no use to either of them.

He had managed it, he thought, reasonably well. He had not gone out of his way. He had not been obvious. He had simply moved through the pack house and the grounds in his usual pattern, and if that pattern happened to take him through the kitchen at meal prep times, or past the kitchen garden when the light was still low, or near the equipment shed on the three occasions when she had been sent out there to take inventory on the canning supplies, that was the geography of the pack house working against him rather than any particular intention on his part.

He told himself this. His wolf found it unconvincing.

It was a Wednesday when Marcus finally said something.

They were in the training yard for the late-morning sparring review, watching two of the junior warriors work through a ground sequence that needed correction at the third transition. James had the criticism of it already organized in his head, the specific adjustment that would solve the weight transfer problem, and he was watching for the right moment to deliver it when Marcus stopped to his left and said, without looking at him, "You’ve been distracted."

James didn’t look at him either. "Noted."

"It’s been two weeks."

"Also noted."

Marcus was quiet for a moment. He had been James’s Beta for two years and his closest thing to a friend for considerably longer, which gave him certain licenses he exercised with care and that James permitted within defined limits. "Does it have anything to do with the reason you’ve been walking past the kitchen four times a day?"

In the yard, the junior warrior made the transition error for the third time. James called the correction before Marcus could say anything further, his voice cutting clean across the yard with the particular quality that made every wolf in earshot straighten a fraction of an inch. Then he turned to his Beta and said, at a register that carried no further than Marcus’s ears, "Drop it."

Marcus dropped it. But the look he didn’t quite suppress told James that it had been registered and filed and would be revisited at a moment of the Beta’s choosing.

James turned back to the training session and ignored the look and the filing both.

He called Candice to his office that afternoon.

He did not particularly want to. Candice was one of the ranked omegas, recently turned eighteen, and she had made her interest in him apparent through a series of escalating maneuvers that he had neither encouraged nor definitively discouraged, because discouragement required a conversation he hadn’t wanted to have and because, on two occasions in the past month, he had allowed the maneuvers to reach their logical conclusion because it had been available and convenient and he had been looking for something to occupy his attention.

He had not found what he was looking for. That was the problem.

She appeared at his office door eleven minutes after he sent the link, which was slightly too fast to be coincidental. She had changed her shirt.

"Alpha James." The way she said it had a particular texture, lower than her normal speaking voice, weighted with implication. She came into the office and let the door close behind her and positioned herself in front of his desk with her hip slightly cocked, her hair loose around her shoulders. She was attractive in a conventional and deliberate way, the kind of attractive that knew itself and used itself with the focused efficiency of someone who understood it as a resource.

He felt nothing in particular.

"Sit down," he said.

The instruction visibly recalibrated her. She had not expected the desk between them. She settled into the chair across from him with a shift in posture that kept her presentation intact but relocated it, leaning forward slightly, her elbows on the edge of his desk, her chin tilted up.

"I need information," he said.

"Of course." Her eyes were moving across his face with the practiced assessment of someone reading a situation for advantage. "Whatever I can help with."

"The omega." He kept his voice level and his expression neutral. "The one they call Trash. Where does she get her clothing?"

The shift in Candice’s expression was immediate and multilayered. The practiced openness closed down. Confusion replaced it, and underneath the confusion, something sharper and less flattering. "I’m sorry?"

"Her clothes. She wears the same items in rotation. I want to know where they came from." He watched her face sort through the possible reasons for the question and land on none of them. "You manage the laundry. You would know."

Candice sat back slightly. The careful seductiveness had become something more careful and less seductive. "I believe she has a few things she was left by the old woman. Rosie." She said the name with the particular neutrality of someone trying not to editorialize. "She died a few years ago. They were close, I think, when Trishelle was younger." A beat. "Did she take something that wasn’t hers? Because I have been noticing that she uses the washing machine without permission, and if the Alpha wants me to report--"

"No." He said it flatly enough that she stopped. "That’s all I needed. Thank you."

Candice looked at him for a moment. The practiced composure had developed a hairline crack. She stood slowly, smoothing the front of her shirt, and moved toward the door with the controlled walk of a woman managing a disappointment she wasn’t going to acknowledge aloud.

"Candice."

She stopped. Turned. The hope that moved across her face was genuine enough that he felt, briefly, something in the vicinity of pity, which he set aside because it wasn’t useful to either of them.

"The Delta," he said. "You’re mated to him."

A stillness. "Yes."

"Make sure that remains your primary commitment."

She left.

James leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling and thought about Rosie, which was easier to think about than the thing he was actually thinking about.

He remembered Rosie clearly, which was more than he could say for many of his childhood memories. She had been tall for a female omega, taller than most of the she-wolves in the pack, and she had moved through the kitchen with the unrushed authority of someone who understood that the work was the work and the hierarchy was the hierarchy and the two operated in parallel rather than in conflict. She had smelled like vanilla and woodsmoke, and she had made chocolate chip cookies on Sundays without being asked, which he had eaten with a focused dedication that he now recognized as one of the more uncomplicated pleasures of his childhood.

She had also, on one memorable occasion when he was nine years old, placed herself between him and a five-year-old Trishelle when he had been mid-sentence in telling the small girl exactly why no one would ever want her around. Rosie had looked at him with an expression he hadn’t seen directed at him before and hasn’t often seen since, not with his rank, and she had said, in the quiet, certain voice she used for things that weren’t up for discussion, "Enough of that."

He had been shocked enough to stop. He had also been young enough that the shame had reached him before the authority could override it.

He had been considerably less stoppable at sixteen, and at nineteen, and at twenty-two. He was aware of this. He filed it in the category of things that were true without requiring action.

Rosie was gone. Trishelle wore her clothes because Rosie was the only person in the Bloodmoon pack who had ever considered her comfort worth the investment of six feet of fabric and a sewing needle, and because no one after her had seen any reason to continue that particular effort.

He was thinking about this when he sent the pack link requesting that Trash be sent to his office.

She arrived in four minutes. A single knock, her knuckle against the door frame, and then she stepped inside and stood with her gaze lowered in the posture he had been seeing for so long it had become invisible to him, or had been invisible to him until fourteen days ago.

The clothes were Rosie’s. Now that he was looking for it, it was obvious. The proportions were close enough, the fabric worn to a softness from years of washing, but the fit was inexact in the way of clothes made for a different body. The shirt was slightly too wide in the shoulders. The trousers gathered a little at the waist where a belt held them. None of it revealed anything useful.

He gave her the instruction. Chocolate chip cookies and raisin bread, the timeline tight enough that she would have to move, watching her face as he delivered it for the flinch of someone calculating whether it was achievable, and then the small, controlled settling when the calculation came back yes.

She left.

He sat in the resulting silence and felt the frustration of a man who had asked a question and received an answer that only generated further questions, which was not a situation he tolerated easily in any context.

The walk around the grounds was Jack’s idea, in the way that most things James wanted were Jack’s idea once James had mentioned them within the Beta Warrior’s hearing.

"Fresh air," Jack said, falling into step beside him on the front porch. "You’ve been in that office all day. The she-wolves are going to think you’re in a mood."

"I am in a mood."

"Right, but they don’t need confirmation."

Jack grinned with the easy comfort of a man who had been James’s sparring partner since they were twelve and had the broken nose to show for a few of those sessions. "Besides, Reyna’s pack is visiting for the southern border assessment and she brought two of her ranked females. I’m just saying, in case you were looking for somewhere to direct your mood."

James considered this with the detached evaluation he applied to variables that were being offered as solutions. He was not opposed to the idea in principle. He had been applying himself, for fourteen days, to the project of finding something that would successfully occupy his attention, and the project had failed repeatedly, which suggested the approach rather than the materials was the problem.

He told himself this. His wolf declined to participate in the reframe.

He changed his shirt and added cologne without examining why he bothered, the automatic behaviors of a man preparing to be looked at, and stood in front of his bathroom mirror for a moment assessing what he saw there. He was not, by any reasonable accounting, someone who needed to work hard at this. He knew what he looked like. He had been aware of it since he was fifteen and the knowing had become more management than revelation.

Sandy blond hair. Clear, pale blue eyes that the females seemed to find arresting and that he found useful, the way any tool is useful when you understand its function. Good jaw, good shoulders, the build of a high-rank wolf that had been in consistent training since he was old enough to hold the form. The nose had a slight deviation at the bridge from a break that hadn’t set quite cleanly, and if he was being precise about the memory, he knew exactly when it had happened.

He had been eleven years old. He had said something to Trishelle that he no longer remembered the specific content of, only that it had been designed to land hard, and she had been backed against the kitchen wall, and she had stopped looking at the floor for approximately three seconds, her eyes coming up to his with an expression he had not expected because he had never seen it on her before. Not fear. Something past fear, on the other side of it, the look of something that has been pushed far enough that it has stopped calculating the consequences.

She had not thrown the punch intentionally. Or possibly she had. He had genuinely never been certain. Her elbow had come up in what might have been an attempt to cover her face, and his face had come down at exactly the wrong angle, and the result had been an explosion of pain across the bridge of his nose and blood on both their shirts.

He had not told anyone how it happened.

He ran his thumb along the slight ridge of the deviation and felt the familiar dull absence of feeling where the scar tissue had settled over the years.

Every time his thoughts circled back to her, they found the same routes. The kitchen at four in the morning. The lake in the afternoon light. The cookies Rosie used to make and the clothes that were Rosie’s and the fact that no one in fourteen years had seen fit to replace either with anything of her own.

He went downstairs to meet Jack and the visiting she-wolves and applied himself to the project of distraction with the focused discipline that was, for better or worse, his most consistent trait.

It did not work.

He was already sure it wasn’t going to, and the certainty of it sat in his chest all evening like a stone he hadn’t yet decided what to do with.