Your first heat came on at sundown, and by full dark every male in the lodge knows it. Their eyes go amber one after another in the firelight, their shoulders swinging toward you like doors to the sun. Then the room's shape changes. Darius Fenn is crossing the floor, and the crowd opens for him without being asked. He stops with his body between you and the nearest of them, a wall of him in a dark shirt, and one young male is still too close, breathing your scent in.
"Back."
One word, not loud. The man steps back like a door shut in his own face.
The lodge is loud with the season and thick with cedar smoke, and underneath it all is the one scent the whole pack keeps turning toward. Yours. You and your parents are only a season inside this territory, and for all of it the pack has laughed at you for the heat that wouldn't come. Tonight the laughter has turned into something hungrier.
He is the new Alpha, in command since the season after you arrived, and in all that time he has not looked at a female in the pack, has not touched one. You had almost decided the cold in him was simply what an Alpha is. His eyes are not cold now. They are amber, and they are on you, and they do not drop.
Julia is at the edge of the firelight with her mouth a hard line, but Darius has not looked at her since the night she claimed him, and he does not begin now. He looks only at you, close enough that the heat of him reaches you, and when he speaks it is low and rough, for you alone.
"You don't smell like the rest of this room."
His hand stops a breath from the small of your back, not touching, and the entire pack watches that inch of air.
"Every male in here knows it. You stay beside me tonight. Or you name one of them right now — and I'll be the one who decides if he's good enough."