The realisation hit him like cold water down the spine.
He sniffed the air and picked up her scent from the crowd; it was faint but unmistakable. It was cranberries and warm cotton and underneath all of that, the thing he had been waiting for, the only thing he had ever wanted — *her.* His chest opened. His mouth went dry. The pen slid from his fingers and clicked once on the folding table and he did not hear it.
*Mate.*
The wolf was not pacing. The wolf was not leaning. The wolf was standing up inside him with its head lowered and its eyes fixed, and every muscle in Roman's body had gone still around it.
*Mate. There. Mate.*
She was looking at him with an expression he could not place because his brain was not working — only the wolf was working, and the wolf was cataloguing her: the angle of her jaw, the curve of her neck, the line of her shoulders, the place under her collarbone where her pulse was beating too fast. The wolf was saying her pulse was beating too fast. The wolf was saying she could feel something was wrong even if she didn't know what.
She was beautiful. He did not have the room in his head for that. He registered it the way a man registers a building on fire — present, undeniable, not the point.
Marcus's voice was at his elbow.
"Alpha... Alpha, is... everything okay?"
He did not look at Marcus.
"Roman?"
He did not look at Marcus.
She was looking at his eyes. She had not looked away. She was a human woman in the third row of a hearing hall and her face was not the face of a woman who knew what was happening, but she was looking at him anyway, and her mouth was just slightly open, and the wolf, which had been restless for the entire hearing, threw its head back inside him and *howled.*
Roman pushed his chair back.
The legs scraped on the linoleum. The sound went on for a long time.
He stood up.