A murmur rippled through the assembled males, some curious, some with an edge of mockery. Almost subconsciously, Layla stepped closer towards Dominic.
Her mate. The words were foreign and uncomfortable.
“Come on,” Dominic said quietly, “your hands are shaking. It’s time you slept.”
“I’m fine.”
“All the same, let’s go.”
“Dominic—” His name slipped out before she could drag it back into the saferAlpha. She didn’t apologize. “You keep saying you’ll do anything to protect Skymist. I might be wrong,but if this dream truly was some sort of prophecy…won’t you let me help you?”
A muscle jumped in his cheek. For a heartbeat, the room vanished, and it was only the two of them, the unkind intimacy of an unspoken history. He looked like a male taking stock of his losses.
Julian saved him, or tried to. “I think you should sleep, Luna,” he said, practical as a tax collector. The title,Luna, made her balk. “We need you clear-headed if you are to help.”
Theodore said nothing. His silence had an edge.
Layla exhaled, feeling altogether like a child being dismissed from the adults’ conversation. “Fine,” she said, turning to Dominic. “I’ll leave you all to your plotting.”
With a quirk of his brow, Dominic turned to the others. He rattled off orders, and his men responded in kind, dashing around the place or yelling down their phones to their packmates. Layla stood in the wash of it, feeling both foolish and furious, heat prickling the backs of her eyes. She blinked hard until it went away.
Dominic came back to her last. Up close, she could see the exhaustion tugging at him, the rigid set of his shoulders, the messiness of his hair.
“You should know I hate this,” she said, “being handled.”
His mouth quirked. “I’d noticed.”
He gestured to the door, and after a beat, she obeyed, brushing past him to the staircase. She felt Theo’s eyes drilling into her. She didn’t look back. The hall seemed longer than it had an hour ago, the lamps burning lower, the world narrowed to the sound of two sets of footsteps up the old wooden stairs. Outside,the sun rose higher in the sky, the first rays of gold cutting through the murky ice of the morning fog.
“I could just go home, you know,” she said as he led her down a corridor.
“The door to your shop is broken; it’s not safe.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“All the same, if the pack wakes up to find their Luna unguarded—”
“I’m not their Luna.”
He stopped so suddenly she almost walked into him. Stumbling back, she would have glared at him if it weren’t for the fire in his eyes. “Our mating ceremony would say otherwise.”
Layla’s chest tightened. “I didn’t ask for this.”
Something in his expression flickered. Anger, pain, she couldn’t tell. It was gone a heartbeat later, replaced by the mask she’d come to recognize as the Alpha’s face, unreadable, carved from stone.
“Come,” he said again, and started walking.
The room he led her to was small, bare floorboards, a narrow bed, a washstand, and a single window that looked out over the harbor. The tide was high; she could hear it lapping against the stone wall below, rhythmic and lonely.
“This will do,” he said, then turned toward the door. “Get some sleep. You’ll need it.”
She didn’t answer.
He hesitated before leaving, looking back at her, his jaw tight. “Look, Layla…”
She stared at him, throat tight, all at once terrified and desperate for the next words to come out of his mouth.
But he simply shook his head and repeated, “Get some sleep,” before turning on his heel and vanishing, closing the door with a soft click behind him.
