That earns me the smallest upward curl of his mouth. “What happened?” I ask.
He holds my gaze for a second, seeming to decide how much to give me. “Long story.”
“Sounds intense.”
He shrugs, the corner of his temple pulsing, telling me it was very bad, so I leave it.
“Is that where all this mysterious Alpha menace comes from?” I ask, because I need to lighten it or I’m going to start asking questions I’m not sure he’ll answer.
“No,” he says, all cocky. “That part’s natural.”
I laugh despite myself.
Then he adds, quieter, “It just taught me early on that people show you who they are if you pay attention.”
I swirl my drink once, then hear myself say, “Fine, my turn. One real thing about me. At one of my jobs, I slept with my boss, and it turned out pretty badly.” The words are out before I can dress them up into something safer. I give a small shrug and look down at my cup, already wondering if maybe that was too much, too fast.
North doesn’t even blink. “How badly?”
I glance up. He’s watching me with that same unreadable focus, but there’s nothing casual in his voice now.
I let out a breath. “Bad enough that I ended up here on an extended vacation.”
His jaw hardens. “Then he’s a fucking idiot.”
The laugh that slips out of me is quieter this time, more startled than amused, and the second it does, I want to take the whole thing back. I’ve said too much, and I don’t even know why I blurted it out, except North has this unnerving way of making me want to bring the truth a lot closer to the surface than I should.
I glance down at my drink. “I probably shouldn’t have shared that.”
“No,” he says. “But I’m glad you did.” His gaze is fixed on me, calm on the surface and dangerous underneath. “If he put that look in your eyes,” he says, “he’d want to pray I never meet him.”
I need to get us off the topic of Daniel before I say too much or he asks questions. So I take the easiest turn available. “Can I ask you something?” I say.
North’s mouth quirks up at one corner. “You’re going to regardless.”
“Absolutely.” I take another sip of my drink, buying half a second. “Are you the pack Alpha? You give off the vibe.”
He doesn’t answer straight away. “We don’t formally designate,” he says at last.
“But?”
His gaze settles on me, steady and far too aware. “But I’m the one who assesses first, who makes the final call, who they both come to.”
That tracks, irritatingly well.
“Drives you crazy, doesn’t it?” he adds. “That I’m harder to read.”
I huff a laugh. “A little bit, yeah. I’m used to having people figured out faster.”
“I can tell.” There’s enough in the way he says that to send a shiver down my spine. Not because it’s cold, but because he’s already three steps ahead of me and in no hurry to announce it.And God help me, there’s a part of me that likes that. A reckless, poorly supervised part.
My attention drops to his forearms instead, partly because I need somewhere else to look and his sleeves are rolled to the elbows and the ink there has been distracting me. “Tell me about those.”
He glances down once, then extends his arm across the table without hesitation. The torchlight lights up his skin, and the tattoos sharpen into detail. A wolf’s eye on the inside of his left forearm. Across the other arm is a topographic mountain line, all clean black contours. On the inside of his wrist, neat-script coordinates. I trace the air above the wolf without touching him.
“The eye?”
“Reminder to see what’s coming before it gets close.”
