Elena stood at the door of the Alpha's bedroom with her head tilted toward the hallway. Nothing moved in it. Roman was downtown until evening, so there was time, but the staff were somewhere in the house, and she kept her breathing small. She tried the handle and it turned, so she slipped inside and pushed the door to behind her.
She stood just inside it. The room smelled of him, pine and cold woods, and being here without him felt wrong in a way she did not care to examine. She had come for her phone, and she looked the room over once from the door, the way she would a gym she meant to clear.
She opened the drawer of the nearer bedside table, because a bedside drawer was exactly where a man would drop a phone he had taken off someone. Instead it held dozens of small, curved, pale objects, all alike. She picked one up and turned it over, and it was light and smooth. Shells, or something like shells. She put it back and looked at them for a long time, and she had no idea why a grown man would keep them by his bed.
She went round to the other side, where this morning's coffee cup still stood beside the lamp. The drawer there held a stack of papers with the pack's sign across the top. She lifted them, looked underneath, and set them back. Work, kept by the bed. Her petition had probably sat in a pile exactly like this one while his office refused it three times.
She went through the chest of drawers from top to bottom, and it was all dark T-shirts, jeans and socks, folded and put away. She ran her hand under the clothes in each drawer and shut each one as she had found it. The bed was made, though badly, with the sheet thrown over and the pillows punched. She felt beneath the pillows and slid her hand between the mattress and the frame.
A tall cupboard turned out to be packed to the door with camping and climbing gear, and when she opened it half of that gear came with her. She caught it with both hands and shoved it back until the door would shut. Muddy boots stood where boots went, still muddy. In the corner a basket held a shirt torn open down the back, and she lifted it to see, because it had torn the way a shirt tears when a wolf comes out of it. Beneath it lay a woman's bra and a woman's dressing gown, and the dressing gown was perfectly good. He had been clearing things out, and none of it was her business. She dropped the shirt back on top.
The walk-in closet was lit warm and even, and one side of it was empty, with bare rails and clear shelves. It was an odd thing in a house this full. She went along his side instead. There were suits in three colours, all cut the same, above a row of white shirts, and she put her hand into the pocket of every jacket, looking for the dark one he had worn yesterday, the one he had put her phone in. Every pocket was empty. The drawers under the counter held belts, a few ties each the colour of a suit, and a box of watches, and one wristwatch lay out on the counter. She picked it up, felt the weight of it, and put it down where it had been. There was no brand name on anything, only cloth and cut and weight, and she ran a gym and knew what things cost. Each thing in these rooms was worth more than everything she owned.
In the bathroom a toothbrush, a razor and a bar of soap stood at one of the two basins, and a towel hung over the glass of the shower, still damp from the morning. The other basin was dry and bare. It was a lot of room for one man. She opened the drawers beneath, found spare soap and folded towels, and shut them, then came back into the bedroom and finished the search.
She had wanted him to be three things only, the Alpha, a werewolf, the man who had taken her, and that man was easy to hate. But these rooms belonged to a man with habits, who kept shells by his bed and read work papers at night, who left his coffee cup out and came home muddy. She resented knowing any of it. He had the money, the house, the outdoors, even a woman's things in a basket, so why take her? He already had everything he needed.
She put it all back as she had found it, with the drawers shut, the shirt in the basket and the gear shut in its cupboard. At the door she listened, then slipped out into the upstairs hallway and drew the bedroom door closed behind her.
Her phone was somewhere else, and the study was the one locked room left. The household treated her as a guest and left her alone in the house, so one day somebody would leave that door open, and she would be there. Until then there were the ways out on foot, and the gate came first.