"He's damaged," I say.
"Very," Arden says honestly. No softening of it. "But he's been working at it for a long time."
"What happened to him?"
"That's his story to tell." Firm but gentle. "I'll only say that he was put into situations as a young person that no one should ever be put into. That he survived them the only way he could. And that the survival came with costs."
I think about what Finn whispered.He's quiet. He'll probably just look at you for a while.
"He took to my scent?" I ask.
"Remarkably well." It’s how Arden says it. Almost wondering. "I expected some response. Based on everything I'd observed, I thought there might be a connection, but the reality of it surprised even me."
"How so?"
"He wouldn't give it back," Arden says. "The blanket. I tried to retrieve it after a few visits, to replace it with something fresher. He refused. Quite firmly." A pause. "He still has it. He keeps it close when he sleeps, even though the scent has faded almost entirely now."
A man I've never met, sleeping with a faded piece of my nest.
I press my lips together. Whatever he found in my scent calmed him the way his calms me. The symmetry of it moves through me slowly, the way a large thing takes time to land.
"Is he dangerous?" I ask.
Arden takes a breath. "To people he doesn't trust, yes. He can be." He says it straight, no hedging. "Particularly around alphas he doesn't know. His emotions are volatile. Betas don'ttend to bother him much. And omegas—" He shakes his head. "He's never been dangerous to an omega. It's not in him."
"But the alphas."
"He was conditioned, very young, to be aggressive toward them. It was done deliberately. It's not a character flaw, it's damage." Arden’s voice tightens. "He's been working to manage it for years. The people around him, his pack, they're alphas he's built trust with over time. That trust took years. It doesn't come quickly."
"That's what people say, isn't it," I say. "Feral." I’m testing the word out loud for the first time, though I've heard it like you overhear things when a room thinks you can't follow the thread.
Arden doesn't flinch from it. "Some do, yes."
"But he has a pack."
"He does."
"Who?"
Arden just looks at me and gives a small smile.
"You're about to find out."
He turns off the main road onto a quieter street. Houses are spaced further apart with trees on either side.
Then he slows and pulls into a driveway.
The house is large and comfortable-looking with a porch that wraps around the front. There’s a garden that someone has been tending for a long time. It’s the kind of house that has the quality of being genuinely lived in rather than just occupied.
I look at it through the windshield.
My heart is doing something it doesn't usually do.
"Where are we?" I ask.
Arden puts the car in park.
"My home," he says.
