The Alpha Who Owns The Ice

He didn't wait for her to invite him in a second time. He stepped past her, into the small apartment, and stood in the middle of it like he'd forgotten how his own legs worked, staring at the photocopy in her hand.

"Killian." She used his first name without meaning to, the formality of the interview gone somewhere in the last five minutes. "You're scaring me a little."

"That makes two of us." He dragged a hand through his hair. "May I see it?"

She hesitated, then held it out. He took it carefully, like it might dissolve, and turned it over to the pencil writing on the back. His jaw worked.

"Ashgrove," he read aloud, and something in his voice cracked open around the word, grief wearing the shape of a name.

"You know what that means." It wasn't a question.

"I know exactly what that means." He sat down, hard, on the arm of her secondhand couch, still holding the photo like it weighed more than paper should. "Where did you get this?"

"It fell out of my intake file. HR said it wasn't supposed to be there."

"Your intake file." He laughed, short and humorless. "Of course it is. Someone in this building has been keeping tabs on you longer than today."

"Keeping tabs on me for what? I don't even know what Ashgrove is."

He looked up at her, and for the first time since she'd met him that afternoon, the calculation dropped out of his expression completely, leaving something rawer underneath. "It was a pack. A family. Fourteen years ago, they were slaughtered, every one of them we thought, in a single night. Farmhouse burned to the foundation. I was fifteen. My father took our whole pack out to help fight the fire, for all the good it did." His thumb brushed the edge of the photo, over the little girl's raised hand. "There were supposed to be no survivors."

"Pack," Sienna repeated. "As in wolves."

"As in wolves." His eyes held hers, steady, daring her to laugh, to call security, to do any of the things a sane person would do. "I'm not speaking in metaphor, Sienna. I need you to understand that before we go any further."

She should have laughed. She wanted to, badly, wanted this to be some elaborate hazing ritual for new hires, a hidden camera somewhere, Dale bursting in to explain the joke. Instead she found herself thinking about headaches on full moons, about nights she couldn't sleep and mornings she woke up with dirt on her feet and no memory of leaving the house, about a foster mother who used to lock her bedroom door from the outside once a month and never explained why, just cried when she thought Sienna wasn't watching.

"Say it's true," she said, very carefully. "Say all of that is true. What does it have to do with me?"

He held up the photo, angled it so the girl's raised wrist caught the light. "Do you have a mark like this?"

She didn't answer. She didn't have to. She pulled back her sleeve, slow, and turned her wrist over, and the crescent-in-a-circle sat there on her skin like it always had, the same mark she'd spent twenty-four years being told was just a birthmark, nothing more.

Killian made a sound low in his chest, something between a groan and a growl, and when he looked back up at her his eyes weren't quite brown anymore. They'd gone gold at the edges, bright and unmistakable and utterly inhuman, and every hair on her arms stood up at once.

"What are you," she whispered.

"The same thing you are." He stood, slow, giving her room, hands open at his sides like he was gentling something wild. "Alpha of the Frost Pack. And you, Sienna Cole, or whatever your name actually was before someone hid you in the foster system, are the last surviving daughter of the Ashgrove Pack. Which makes you," his voice roughened, "the single most hunted woman in this entire territory, and you've been walking around with no idea for fourteen years."

Her legs didn't feel steady enough to hold her, so she sat, hard, on the edge of her own coffee table, staring at the man with the gold eyes standing in her rented apartment.

"You're insane," she said, without conviction.

"I wish I were." He crouched in front of her, close enough that she could feel heat coming off him like a furnace, and his voice dropped to something that felt dangerously, unbearably gentle. "I need you to listen to me very carefully, because I'm only going to get to say this once before someone else in this building finds a way to make sure you never hear it. There are people who have spent fourteen years believing the Ashgrove line is extinct. If they find out that isn't true, the man responsible for burning that farmhouse to the ground is going to come and finish the job."

"Why would he wait fourteen years and then just - know? How would anyone know?"

His eyes dropped, briefly, unwillingly, to the pulse point at her throat, and then to her wrist again, like the gesture cost him something. "Because when I shook your hand this afternoon, every wolf in a mile radius could have scented what you are. Sienna. You're not just Ashgrove."

"Then what am I?"

He said the next words like they were being pulled out of him against his will, like some part of him had been fighting to keep them down since the moment she'd walked through the training facility door.

"You're my mate."

The words landed in the small apartment like a stone through glass. Outside, faint and far away, a phone was ringing, someone's TV murmuring through the wall, the ordinary noise of a building full of ordinary lives, and none of it touched the silence between them.

"I have a fiancée," he said, before she could speak, bitterness threading through the words. "Talia Voss. Her father runs the pack that's held the peace treaty with mine for six years, a treaty that ends the second I don't marry her like we agreed. I was engaged to her this morning. I have been for four months." His jaw flexed. "And then you walked into my facility, and every instinct I have told me the woman I'm marrying isn't the one I belong to."

"That's not my problem," Sienna said, even though her voice shook saying it. "I took a physiotherapy job. I didn't sign up to be anyone's mate, or anyone's political crisis, or the reason a treaty falls apart."

"I know." He said it like an apology, like a man already grieving something he hadn't lost yet. "I know, and I wish to every god I don't believe in that I could let you walk away and never think about any of this again."

"Can you?"

His silence was its own answer, long enough that she felt it in her chest before he finally spoke.

"No," he said. "I can't. And that's the part that terrifies me."

Somewhere below them, out past the parking structure window, a car door slammed, too sharp, too deliberate to be nothing, and Killian's head snapped toward the sound like a wire had been cut inside him. He was on his feet before she'd finished processing the noise, moving to the window, going very still in a way that made her stomach drop straight through the floor.

"Killian. What is it?"

"Get away from the window," he said, low, urgent, already reaching for her arm. "Now, Sienna. Someone's here who shouldn't know this address exists."