She had time to think one clear thing as he lifted her: *this isn't real.*
Then everything was very loud.
Diego was up and lunging across the empty seat where she had been, his hand reaching for the Alpha's arm. One of the Gammas crossed the distance from the corner to the third row in a way Elena's eye could not follow and put her brother on the floor without seeming to hit him. The hall erupted — people standing, a chair going over, a werewolf woman two rows down crying *oh, oh, oh,* the human petitioners at the back shouting, a sign coming down — and the Alpha carried her toward the doors like she weighed nothing.
When her brain finally caught up to what was happening — the fact that she was being carried out of the hearing hall by the Alpha — she got a hand flat against his chest and shoved, and it was like shoving a wall that happened to be warm. She twisted, trying to get her hips over his arm, trying to drop her weight and find the floor with her feet, and his arm only settled more surely under her knees, taking the new angle without effort. She drove an elbow up toward his jaw; he turned his head so it met nothing. She was strong — she trained, she was not soft — and none of it reached him. He was not straining against her. That was the part her body could not make sense of: he was not fighting her, he was carrying her, and her whole strength did nothing to him at all.
"Put me down,"
she said. Her voice came out lower than she meant it.
"Put me down. Alpha. Put me down!"
He looked at her then, and he smiled — open, bright, the smile of a man handed the one thing he had stopped waiting for.
"You're safe,"
he said. His voice was low and torn open.
"I have you, you're safe."
"Alpha please! put. me. *down!*"
He did not.
His chest was hot under her shoulder. He smelled like cedar and something darker she could not place, and his arm under her knees was solid as a beam, and he held her against him like something he had gone a long way to find. Marcus was at his shoulder the whole way, talking fast and low — *Alpha, the press, the optics, Alpha, at least let her walk* — and the Alpha was not listening.
The doors of the hearing hall burst open and the cold air hit her face. People on the steps. A black car at the curb, the back door already open, a driver beside it. He carried her down the steps without breaking stride, and she kept working the whole way — a twist, a push, a hand hooking for a hold she could not find — right up until he set her down into the back seat.
The instant her weight hit the seat she went for the far door, lunging across the leather, and her fingers found the handle and pulled, and it did not give. Locked.
Behind her, distantly, she heard Diego roar her name. Behind her, distantly, she heard someone clap — a werewolf woman, somewhere in the crowd, *clapping* — and she turned back and drove a shoulder for the gap in the door before he could fold himself in after her.
There was no gap. He came in around her, drew the door shut, and the lock caught. The car was already moving.
She was on the far half of the bench, half over the locked door, and he reached across and brought her back — and she fought that too. She braced a hand on the seat and pulled against his arm, got a knee under herself, tried to make herself heavy, tried to keep the last foot of leather between them that was still hers. It went the way everything else had gone. His arm closed around her waist and drew her in, without hurry and without strain, until her back was against his side and there was no leather left to keep — and then there was nothing to brace against, and her body knew it before she let herself.
She stopped fighting. She let her head fall back against the seat and breathed out, long and unsteady, and heard herself make a sound that was almost a laugh and was nothing like one.
*Okay,* she thought. *Okay. I'm here, then.*
"Get off me,"
she said, and there was no fight left in it now, only the words.
"Give me some space."
He watched her the way a man watches a thing he has wanted for years and stopped expecting. He was not gloating. He was happy, plainly and completely, and she had no idea what to do with that.