Chapter 21 Run With Me
Bella’s POV
He found me after dark, in the lower corridor outside the reading room.
I’d managed three actual chapters of a book, real progress, and was heading back with a feeling of mild accomplishment when Ronan appeared at the far end of the hall. Walking toward me at an easy pace, like he’d just been passing through.
I slowed but didn’t stop.
“Bella.” His tone was warm. It always was. “Late night.”
“A little,” I said.
He fell into step beside me without asking. I kept moving because standing still with him always felt like giving something away.
“You’ve been on the grounds a lot lately,” he said, conversational. “Morning, evening. Getting comfortable.”
“Trying to,” I said.
“Good.” A pause. “Saw you near the outer fence the other morning. Early.”
I said nothing.
“Find anything worth the trip?”
The way he asked it was light. Casual. The kind of question you’d put no weight on if you weren’t paying attention.
“It’s a nice walk,” I said. “Quiet before the pack wakes up.”
He nodded slowly, like that was a perfectly reasonable answer.
“Just be careful,” he said. “It’s easy to misread things near the border. Shadows, sounds, especially at night.” He glanced at me sideways. “Easy to misunderstand what you see out there. And misunderstandings have a way of becoming inconvenient.”
He said it like advice.
I was deciding between three responses when the air in the corridor changed.
I felt it before I saw him. A shift in the space, a settling of something, the particular quality of presence that Rhys carried when he walked into a room without announcing himself.
He was standing about ten feet behind Ronan.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask what was happening or look confused or give any indication that he needed more information. He just stood there and looked at Ronan with a stillness that was somehow heavier than movement would have been.
Ronan turned.
The two of them looked at each other.
Four seconds, maybe five. Ronan held it one beat longer than necessary, long enough to be deliberate, not long enough to be a challenge. Then he stepped back. Smooth, unbothered, a small smile that reached nowhere near his eyes.
“Goodnight,” he said, to the corridor in general, and walked away without looking back.
I watched him go.
Then I looked at Rhys.
He was already looking at me. His expression gave nothing away, which I was used to, but there was something tight at the corner of his jaw that hadn’t been there before.
“Inside,” he said.
“I was heading in,” I said.
“Then I’ll walk with you.” His voice was even. Too even.
We walked to the manor doors in silence. He pulled one open and held it. I went through, and I turned to say something, I hadn’t decided what yet, just something, but he had already let the door close and turned away.
I stood in the entrance hall and looked at the closed door.
Right, I thought. Good talk.
\-----
Sleep came and went in pieces.
By midnight I gave up, pulled on my cardigan, and went outside because the ceiling of my room had nothing useful to offer me.
The grounds were quiet and cool, the moon sitting low over the treeline. I walked without a destination, which was becoming a habit I wasn’t sure I’d had before coming here. At home I had always known exactly where I was going. Purposeful movement. Eyes on the objective.
Here I wandered, and somehow the pack grounds let me.
I ended up at the treeline without entirely planning to.
I stood at the edge where the grass thinned and the real ground began, looking into the space between the trunks, and that was when I saw the shape.
Still. Dark. Settled in the shadow between two trees like it had been there long enough to stop being restless.
A wolf.
I recognized the stillness the same way I had recognized it through a closing door. The particular quality of someone carrying weight they had stopped trying to put down.
I looked at him for a moment.
Then, without deciding to, I sat down in the grass.
Not close. A few feet of space between us, enough that it wasn’t intrusive. I pulled my knees up, looked at the trees rather than at him, and just stayed.
The first minute was tense. I could feel the alertness in him, that coiled, considering quality of a wolf that hadn’t decided yet. I sat still and kept my breathing even and didn’t ask anything of the moment.
Slowly, it shifted.
Not all at once. A gradual thing, like pressure releasing from something held too tight for too long. His breathing deepened. The rigid quality in the air around him eased.
The night settled over both of us.
I don’t know how long we stayed there. Long enough for my thoughts to stop running in circles. Long enough for the moon to move and the ground to feel less cold and the silence to stop feeling like a gap and start feeling like something that had its own kind of company in it.
I wasn’t thinking about Ronan. Or the seal. Or any of it. I was just sitting in the dark at the edge of a forest that wasn’t mine, next to a wolf who hadn’t chosen to know me, and I was, for the first time since I arrived here, genuinely still.
That caught me off guard, if I was being honest with myself.
I was looking at a gap between the trees when the movement came.
Sharp, controlled, too fast to follow. The wolf becoming something else in the space between one breath and the next.
Then Rhys was sitting a few feet away in the grass, and his eyes were on me, and they were open in a way I had only seen once before, for less than a breath, through a door that was closing.
No distance. No performance. No careful arrangement of his expression into something that gave nothing away.
He just looked at me.
And I looked back.
It lasted one second. Maybe two. Then something reset behind his eyes, gradual and quiet, and he looked away.
Neither of us spoke.
But the space between us felt different now. Not smaller exactly.
Just changed in a way I didn’t have a word for yet, and I didn’t try to find one.