Chapter 9 The Alpha’s Study
Bella’s POV
Third day in this manor and I still couldn’t figure out the east wing.
Mira had tried to explain it to me — the corridors curve, don’t trust how they look — but knowing something and feeling it are different things. I turned at what felt like the right point, pushed a door that felt like the right one, and stepped inside before my eyes caught up with where I actually was.
Not the reading room.
Wide desk near the center with papers spread across it. Shelves on two walls. A tall window pouring in grey morning light.
And Rhys, standing at that window with his back to me.
My hand was still on the door handle.
He hadn’t heard me yet. Hadn’t moved at all, actually — just stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out at whatever the window showed him.
The sensible thing — the obvious, easy, no-consequences thing — was to back out quietly and pretend this never happened. He’d never know. I’d find the reading room eventually.
I was already stepping back when the floorboard betrayed me.
One small creak. That was all it took.
He turned.
We looked at each other.
“Wrong room,” I said. “I was looking for the reading room. I took a bad turn.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at me — not unkindly, but with that slow, considering quality, like he was working through something he couldn’t quite land on. Like a word sitting at the back of your tongue that won’t come forward.
It lasted a few seconds.
Then it was gone, and his face settled back into what it usually was. Closed. Unreadable.
“The reading room is the next corridor,” he said. “Left at the end.”
“Thank you.”
I should have left then. I know that.
But something about standing in that doorway — looking at him standing there in a room full of maps and papers and the particular quiet of someone who carries a lot alone — something about it pulled the question I’d been swallowing since the wedding straight up to the surface.
“Do you remember me?”
It came out before I’d fully decided to say it.
He went very still.
Not the casual kind of still. The deliberate kind — the kind that means the body has been given an instruction.
“What?” he said.
“From before. Not the ceremony.” I held his gaze. “Before.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He said it cleanly. No pause, no shift in his expression. Like a door being shut from the inside.
I watched him for a second longer than I should have.
“You don’t remember,” I said. Not a question.
“I would,” he said. “If there was something to remember.”
That landed somewhere behind my ribs and sat there, quiet and unpleasant.
Because either he was lying — or whatever I’d seen in those woods had simply mattered less than I thought it had.
I held his gaze for one more beat.
Then I nodded.
“Alright,” I said.
He watched me. Something passed through his jaw — barely visible, barely anything.
“Leave,” he said. Flat and final.
I nodded again, turned, and walked out.
The door swung shut behind me — and in that thin half-second before the latch caught, through the narrowing gap, I saw it.
His fist came down on the desk.
Not a slam. Controlled. Deliberate. Like he’d decided exactly how hard to hit it and stopped himself from going further. He stood there with his knuckles pressed into the wood, jaw tight, eyes fixed ahead — completely alone in a way that had nothing to do with the empty room.
His expression wasn’t cold.
It was something else. Something that didn’t look practiced at all.
The latch caught.
I stood there staring at the wood grain, the muffled sound of it still sitting in my chest like it had no intention of leaving.
––––-
I found the reading room eventually.
Left at the end of the next corridor, exactly like he said. Small, south-facing, a cushioned window seat and shelves on three walls. Warm and quiet. The kind of room that asked nothing from you.
I pulled the first book my hand touched without checking the title, sat down on the window seat, and opened it somewhere in the middle.
I stared at the same sentence four times.
Understood it zero.
On the fifth attempt I stopped pretending, closed the book, and went back to my room. I lay down on top of the covers, still dressed, and looked up at the ceiling.
His face kept coming back. Not the closed-off version. The other one — the one in the gap before the door shut.
The one that didn’t look like a mask at all. Then, without really deciding to, I fell asleep.