Helena gave me serious training.
I work the picks with steady hands, listening for the subtle clicks that tell me each pin has found its home. Maybe twenty minutes before someone notices the alpha's intended bride isn't where she's supposed to be.
The final tumbler gives, and the door swings open on silent hinges.
Stellan's study is smaller than I expected, dominated by a massive oak desk and floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books and files and objects I don't have time to examine. A fire burns low in the hearth, casting flickering shadows across the walls. The room smells like him, cedar and leather and something darker underneath that makes my newly awakened instincts purr with recognition.
I ignore the purring and head for the desk.
The drawers are locked, but these mechanisms are simpler. Easy compared to the main door. I start with the bottom drawer and work my way up, scanning documents, setting aside anything that catches my attention. Financial records. Pack treaties. Correspondence with other alphas across the territory.
And then I find the files.
The first photograph roots me to the floor.
It's me. Eighteen years old, standing outside my grandmother's house in Portland, a backpack slung over one shoulder and my hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. I remember that day. First day of community college. Helena had insisted on taking a picture, said she wanted to document every milestone. I'd rolled my eyes and posed impatiently, eager to get to class.
Someone else was documenting that milestone too.
I flip to the next photograph. Me again, a few months later, walking across campus with a coffee cup in my hand. Then another, me laughing with friends outside a movie theater. Another, me running in the park near my apartment, earbuds in, completely unaware that I was being watched.
The photographs span years. Hundreds of them, organized by date, each one annotated in precise handwriting that I now recognize as Stellan's. My twenty-first birthday at a bar with coworkers. My graduation ceremony. The day I moved into my first solo apartment. Moments I thought were private, captured and cataloged by a man I'd never met.
There's a photograph of me crying on a park bench after my first real heartbreak. A photograph of me dancing at a friend's wedding, my head thrown back in laughter. A photograph of me standing at Helena's grave, my shoulders shaking with sobs I thought no one witnessed.
He was there. For all of it. Every triumph and failure, every moment of joy and grief. He watched me live my life and documented it like a scientist studying a rare specimen. Or a predator learning the patterns of its prey.
My hands shake as I reach for the journals.
The first entries are clinical, almost detached. Observations about my routine, my habits, my apparent health. Notes about the suppressants I was taking and their likely effects on mydevelopment. Assessments of my physical capabilities based on the combat training Helena put me through.
But as the pages turn, the tone changes.
Her scent is like spring after a brutal winter. Even through the suppressants, even across the distance, I can smell what she's becoming. What she's meant to be. Mine.
My stomach turns. I keep reading.
A man touched her today. Put his hand on her lower back as they walked into a restaurant together. I've memorized his face. If he ever touches her again, I'll remove his fingers one by one and make him eat them.
The violence of the imagery makes bile rise in my throat. But beneath the revulsion, something else stirs. Heat pooling low in my belly where it has no right to be.
She took a self-defense class today. Watched her through the window of the gym, practicing strikes and blocks with a determination that made my wolf howl with pride. She's preparing herself. She doesn't know what for, but her instincts are guiding her toward the life she'll live with me. My fierce little omega. My future mate.
The casual possessiveness of the words makes my skin crawl. He was proud of me. Watching me learn to fight, thinking I was preparing to be his. The violation of it leaves me hollow.
I slam the journal shut and press my hands flat against the desk, my pulse roaring in my ears.
He's insane. He's been stalking me since I was eighteen, documenting my every move, fantasizing about violence against anyone who dared to get close to me. He knew I was omega before my grandmother finished suppressing me. He could have taken me at any point, invoked the blood pact early, dragged me to this fortress before I had a chance to build a life of my own.
Instead, he waited. He watched. He let me have those years, let me go to school and make friends and date men who never knew how close they came to losing their fingers.
It's twisted. It's the most terrifying thing I've ever read.
And some broken part of me is touched by it.
"Find what you were looking for?"
I spin to face the doorway, my heart slamming against my ribs.
