“That’s what this is about?” she asked as three sets of eyes turned to her, one curious, one worried, and one full of barely-contained fury. “You’re worried about me?”
Dominic pushed off the table, “Layla—”
“No,” she said, her voice frozen over, “no, you don’t get to come in here after all this time and accuse me of contradicting crimes, all because you can’t admit you’re worried about me. You don’tgetto worry about me. You lost that right years ago, Dominic.”
“Layla,” Theodore said, his voice tense, “look, I know we were all sort of hard on you, but we were kids—”
“Stay out of this, Theodore,” Dominic said, his voice near-silent. And no less deadly because of it.
A frisson of fear ran up her spine.
He had her caught in his gaze. A rabbit in a snare. A deer in the headlights. Any righteous fury she had melted away under the weight of his stare. He may as well have her neck caught in one enormous hand for the fear pounding through her chest.
He was a predator. Plain and simple. And her body responded to that.
“Any concern I might have for you,” he said, his voice silky and radiating danger, “is due to my position as Alpha. Forget that at your peril.”
She swallowed, fighting the urge to fold into herself. He was far from her, but she knew how fast he could move. How vicious his strikes could fall.
“M-my apologies, Alpha,” she said, gaze falling to the floor. Unbidden, her throat tightened, raw and painful.
Of course. Who the hell did she think she was?
Dominic did not reply.
Julian stepped forward, cutting through the tension before it could break, “We have what we came for,” he said, tone smooth, almost weary. “There’s no more to find here tonight.”
Dominic looked at him for a long moment, then back at Layla. Something flickered in his expression, but it was gone as quickly as it came.
He straightened, brushing invisible dust from his sleeve. “If you remember anything else, you’ll send word. Directly.”
Layla nodded once. It was all she could manage.
The three of them turned toward the door. Julian inclined his head slightly in farewell, a gentleman’s gesture that looked almost ridiculous on him. Theodore lingered a heartbeat longer, meeting her eyes with something like apology before following the others out.
The bell above the door gave its soft, false chime.
And then they were gone.
The silence left behind was almost unbearable.
Layla turned and gripped the bookshelf, trying to steady her breathing. The air still felt heavy with them. She may not have been able to shift, but she still recognized the power an alpha held. The powertheAlpha held.
When her hands finally stopped shaking, she crossed the room and locked the door, just to hear the click. Then she turned off the lights one by one, until only the faint glow from thestairwell remained. She stilled, caught in its trap, her heartbeat fluttering.
The clock on the far wall ticked once, twice. The sound jarred her back to motion. She began to tidy up the shop, resetting chairs, aligning the row of books on the counter. Every movement helped ground her, helped chase away ghosts of the past.
When the last light was off and the door was bolted, she finally let herself breathe again.
Then she went downstairs.
The ritual table was still as she’d left it, chalk smudged, bowl overturned, salt scattered like frost. She crouched beside it, brushing away the worst of the mess, and felt the sharp sting of shame. If she had been one second longer getting upstairs, Dominic would have found this. The books, the circle, the proof of what she was.
And he would have looked at her not with anger, but disgust.
That thought was worse than fear.
She stacked her notebooks into neat piles, wiped down the table, anything to quiet her hands. Her reflection in the brass of the bowl looked too pale, her eyes too wide. She hated how frightened she’d been upstairs, how small she must have looked under his gaze.
