Sebastian

It isn’t fair. It isn’t right. And I know that, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

I sit in my study, staring out the window, my mind on Aria, the girl I’ve just casually escorted to the library so that Mim, another Alpha’s daughter who was taken from her people unjustly, can show her the proper way to dust the baseboards and polish the silver. I can hardly believe two women who deserve to be the ones being waited on hand and foot are actually serving me and my family. It sits in my gullet like a bowling ball, like a glob indigestible gristle one isn’t supposed to swallow. But I’ve been forced to swallow it every bit as much as these two girls have been, and even though I hate it, there’s very little I can do about it.

I swivel in my chair, taking in the view of one of the gardens. The sun is bright this Saturday. Birds chirp, fluttering from tree to tree, as if it is spring and not the heart of winter. It isn’t snowing, nor is there a trace of slush on the grounds that I can see ribboning out from the garden's perimeter. My father detests the white stuff and insists our lawnkeepers do their best to remove it as quickly as possible. I asked him once when I was younger why he didn’t just move south. He’d laughed and said that was a good idea, but his pack was here. “Unless… I take over another pack, one located further south.”

At the time, I’d been a child and had had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t understand pack politics, territory, different Alphas having different rules, any of that. Now that I am twenty-two and am in preparations for taking over our pack, the Kurts Pack, as soon as my father decides to step down, which will likely be in the next five or ten years, I get it a lot more than I did back then. I understand that he can’t just move. I also understand that he is powerful enough to take whatever he wants to from any other pack and often wonder if the vicious attacks by marauding packs of “rogue” wolves are secretly backed by someone powerful enough to fund them, fight them, and keep them all secret.

I tap my fingers against my desk and let my mind wander back to this new girl. Aria Vargas. She is stunningly beautiful, with long auburn curls and blue eyes. She’s a tiny thing, though not as short as Mim. Still, I imagine I could wrap my hands around Aria’s waist, that I could span my hands around her middle and that my fingers could touch on the other side. Of course, doing such a thing would require us to stand quite close together. The scent of her, vanilla with a hint of cinnamon and just a touch of floral--roses, I think--has me closing my eyes and inhaling, hoping I can still pick up a note of her on the air. I can’t. She hasn’t been in my office, after all, and she is all the way down the adjoining hallway now, in the large library. 

She was frightened. I could smell that on her before I could even take in the perfume of her natural essence. When I saw her standing there at the end of the hallway, her fingers turtled into fists at her sides, I knew she was more terrified than she was aggravated about being lost. Sometimes I think Elivra and the other servants intentionally give the new servants vague directions just to frustrate them. I knew Aria was coming today and had meant to make myself available in case she needed help, but I had found her purely by coincidence. This wasn’t our first meeting or the first time I ran into her on a whim either.

I don’t think she knows it was me yet--last night. In the park. I think she may have recognized my eyes but hasn’t placed them yet. I remember the first time I saw her, standing outside of her parents’ apartment building, the day my father went in to make his agreement with her father. I didn’t expect her parents to accept his offer, but when they did, when he came back with that smug look on his face, walked right past the girl he’d just bargained for without so much as glancing at her, I felt a knife sinking into my heart. It wasn’t fair or right. My father thought he could gain control over other packs by making agreements with them he couldn’t keep. He promised to keep the entire remaining Vargas pack safe from renegades in exchange for their daughter’s servitude. He’d also forgive their debts. Since nearly every pack owed my father something, it all worked out. The Vargas pack didn’t owe us directly, but they owed another pack, a pack that was deeply in our debt. Now that Vargas wouldn’t have to send payments to the other pack, he could save some money and possibly move himself and his wife out of that disgusting apartment. Aria would be paid for her work here as well. Eventually, she might be able to save up enough to earn her freedom,, to afford a little cottage within our compound, maybe go to college--or in her case, finish college. It was my understanding she was already attending before her life was disrupted yet again by the dealings of greedy men she couldn’t possibly understand. Even I was struggling to comprehend my father’s angle here. I knew he was of the opinion that owning someone’s children was the best way to exert power over them, I just couldn’t imagine ever being so heartless myself as to ever want to be so brutal.

A tapping on my office door has me turning in my chair to see who it is, even though I already know before I see his face. My cousin, Dez, short for Desmond, but no one calls him that, trots in, a wide smile on his handsome face. We look very little alike for two people who share grandparents. He is thinner, not as muscular as I am, though he is plenty strong. He’s more wiry while I am broad chested. His hair is a caramel blond, not the dark brown mine is, and his eyes are a light blue that alternate between intense and welcoming. He has a handsome face; we share the family nose and square jaw. His eyes are wider than mine and set slightly further apart. When he comes in, wearing a suit, as I am since my father expects us to always look our best, he brushes his jacket behind him to rest his hands on his hips, grinning at me.

“Well?” he asks, stopping at the corner of my desk. “Did you meet her?”

“Yes,” I say, as if I hadn’t met her before. I have. That time on the sidewalk, though there were no introductions. And then again last night when I went for one of the longest runs I’ve ever ventured out on, in an attempt to release steam, even though I know better than to prowl through the city at night, especially that one, where our kind is not allowed. “I met her,” I tell Dez, not wanting to mention last night at all and not bothering to remind him that I had already met her on the day my father collected her.

“Is she pretty?” he asks.

“Beautiful.” It isn’t easy for me to admit. It means nothing, really, other than I admire the girl. Dez doesn’t need to know that there are the beginnings of more than that beginning to lace their way through my heart.

“Cool. Where is she?”

“Library,” I say, as if a full sentence would take too much effort. “She’s with Mim.”

He laughs immediately at the mention of Mim’s name. She is… something else, that is for sure. I know how Dez feels about her, the daughter of the Alpha from Wilks Pack. He thinks she is gorgeous--clever, witty, hilarious. I am not sure she is any of those things, but I know she entertains him, and it seems as if she has taken Aria under her wing, too. Not that I lingered too long at the library door to listen in, but I did. A little.

“Perfect,” he says, spinning on his heel. “I think I shall go introduce myself to her.”

I try to be nonchalant. “All right,” I say, hoping he leaves. I do have some work I need to get done today, even though it is a Saturday. Aria’s arrival has made it hard to concentrate on anything.

Dez heads toward the door but stops before he reaches the hall, his hand on the jamb. “Oh, and I went to check on Gloria and found her sitting on your chase lounge, eating those chocolate truffles your mother picked up for you in Paris.”

I stare at him, my eyebrows arched, not sure what to say. My personal maid is a nuisance at best and an annoyance for certain. She rarely cleans my room at all, and no matter how many times I tell her to stay out of my things, she doesn’t listen. It’s Elvira’s job to discipline her, but since Gloria is her niece, I can’t get her to actually take any action against the girl. “Great,” I mutter. I will have to fix this later.

Dez laughs and disappears down the hallway, and I return my attention to the papers on my desk, trying to push Aria, and the fact that I need a new personal maid, out of my mind.