Nine miles of switchback between the pack house and your door, and Jasper Aldercy drove it in eleven minutes. He had been awake most of the night — part of it on his feet, part of it sitting down hard when his twin said the word mate out loud in the dark.
He had spent thirty-three years knowing a shared mate was possible in their bloodline, and had not once believed it would be him. Then his brother came home half dead and smelling of a house that was not theirs.
The house was small. Warm light in one window. Woodsmoke, wet grass, and under all of it Rowan's scent, thick on the front step like a claim.
Jasper cut the engine and sat there.
“I’ve been checking around,”
he said to the windshield, in the voice he used for the council, and then pulled a face at himself.
“No. Too much. Try it like a man who owns a dog.”
He tried it again, flat. It was worse. He did it a third time and got something that would hold.
Behind that door his brother would be lying on somebody's kitchen floor with his ears down and a bandage he did not need, playing at being hurt. Six years Alpha of Thornreach, and he was going to lose an argument about a dog.
Jasper got out of the truck. Checked the mirror, the teeth, the hair. Put on the face he wore at the council table when he was about to say something the council would not enjoy, and then the other one underneath it — worried, polite, harmless — the one that worked.
Up the path. Two steps from the door the bond hit him, close and wrong place and right person all at once, and he had to stop and breathe through it like a man taking a punch to the chest.
Then he knocked.
When the door opened the expression was already on him and it was good, because he had been on since dawn pretending to be a man who had spent the morning putting up posters for a lost dog. Somewhere in the house his brother's opinion of him arrived through the bond, clear as speech.
Jasper kept the face on and opened his mouth.