With my pack, I was always performing.
Every room we entered together was an assessment—Dante reading the crowd for threats, Kieran reading it for opportunity, Seb reading it for an audience. I was an extension of that machine. A variable they factored in. Every gesture I made was either an asset or a liability depending on who was watching and what they needed me to be that evening, and the constant calibration of it was exhausting in the way that slow erosion is exhausting: you don't feel it happening until you notice how little is left.
Right now I feel none of that.
This man hasn't asked me to be anything. He asked me to dance, and we're dancing, and the silence between us has been continuous and completely comfortable, which is either a remarkable coincidence or a sign that his instincts are excellent. He doesn't fill quiet with chatter. He doesn't reach for small talk to prove he's present. He's simply here, steady and warm and smelling like cedarwood and aged leather and the Irish whiskey signature that my nose has spent the last twenty minutes cataloguing and reconsidering and cataloguing again because it keeps doing something new at different proximities.
Safety.
That's what it registers as, which is the strangest thing, because safety has a specific reference point in my experience and it's usually a locked door rather than another person.
Standing next to him is like standing next to a locked door that also knows how to waltz.
The orchestra shifts into something slower, and he adjusts without discussion—not stopping, not asking, just reading the tempo change and moving with it. Our steps narrow. Thespace between us doesn't close dramatically, just settles into something closer than the formal frame, and I let it, because the evening has reached that point of loosening where reasonable decisions and slightly unreasonable ones feel approximately the same distance apart.
When the set ends, the room reorients itself with the particular social shuffle of people redirecting between dances. He draws back slightly, and I become aware of time again—the specific temporal awareness that kicks in when you've been somewhere good and haven't been watching the clock. I glance toward the room's far end where I know there's a clock mounted above the fireplace.
Twenty minutes to midnight.
Oh.
"Drink?" he asks.
"Please."
He takes my hand—an easy, unremarked continuation of the dance hold into something more casual—and moves through the room toward the bar with the particular quality of a large man who doesn't use his size to clear space but simply moves and the space clears anyway. People notice him as we pass. That much is obvious. Two women near the curtained alcove watch him go by with the expression of people revising their evening plans. A masked Alpha near the corridor entrance tracks him with something different—recognition, maybe, or the specific attention that men with some kind of history between them exchange without speaking.
I catch a fragment from nearby: "—owns some sort of protective services, the rumors have been going around for ages?—"
And from the other side: "—that kind of quiet though. You know the ones who don't need to announce anything. Just?—"
I tuck both away without comment.
I also realize I don't know his name.
We've been dancing for an hour and I don't know what to call him.
Maybe that's fine. Maybe the whole point of a masquerade is to be with someone and not know, and the not knowing is part of what makes the evening feel like something outside of normal life.
Maybe I like it.
Cole is at the bar with the easy acknowledgment of someone who remembers a conversation worth having. He looks at my masked companion with the professional neutrality of a good bartender, which is to say he notes and doesn't react. A scotch appears for the masked Alpha—Cole pours it from a bottle I'd have to lean over the bar to identify, but the color is the deep amber of something aged properly, and the scent that reaches me from the glass is peat and dried fruit and a thread of honey that belongs in good Highland whisky. For me, another glass of champagne, which I accept because twenty minutes to midnight is not the time to switch drinks and I have a train to catch.
He guides us through the corridor beyond the main reception and out toward the courtyard section—a covered outdoor space that the castle's architecture offers up like an afterthought, stone arches opening onto a terrace with balustrade, the whole thing dressed for tonight with climbing roses in deep red and ivory woven through the stonework, small lights threaded between them. Grapevines trained up the outer columns, their new spring leaves a vivid, almost luminous green in the evening lighting. The air here is cool and clear and carries the collective scent of all those roses—that warm, slightly sweet, faintly spiced depth that roses have at night when the temperature drops and the volatile compounds concentrate.
We stand at the balustrade. The grounds spread below, dark and quiet, the lanterns along the paths giving just enough light to see the shapes of the formal gardens.
He lifts his glass.
I lift mine.
We drink without a declared toast, which is its own kind of toast—the one that doesn't require words because the occasion is sufficient.
Three weeks ago I was lying face-down on my apartment floor because of a plank.
Standing here right now, champagne cold in my hand, roses on every column, is a considerable upgrade.
"Why did you come tonight?" He's looking at the gardens when he asks it, the scotch glass loose in one hand, his posture relaxed against the balustrade in a way that makes the question sound like curiosity rather than interrogation.
