With Hearts to Hear| ✔

|31|

"You look chipper..." Leandra watched Killian expectantly from where she sat in his office chair. The man, after getting home, had taken a shower and changed before heading to his office where he was over two hours late.

Killian's only reply was an unimpressed look, and shooing her out of his seat. The stacks of documents that had once seemed never ending were beginning to ebb and he knew that if he stuck to his schedule then he'd be able to finish everything long before he was due to take Rachel out for dinner on Friday evening.

Leandra, raised a brow when Killian got straight to work, burying himself in the papers on his desk. Only this was not the man who needed to be distracted from two years ago, this was a man eager to get his work finished... She wondered exactly who the she-wolf had been, and what had happened that would warrant him working so hard.

"If one night with a she-wolf is all it takes to get over a mate... someone needs to tell the moon goddess to try a little harder." Leandra snorted, flicking her newly done braids over her shoulder. She paused, realising that she may have brought Rachel (implied or not) into the conversation. If he was trying to get over her then the most important thing was Killian's happiness. "But seriously, if this is what you want, and you're happy then I'm happy for you."

Killian looked up, watching his beta's reaction carefully— it would see that she was not entirely happy with whatever she thought he might have done, but she was certainly trying to be.

He couldn't help but debate whether he should tell her the truth. Their roles after all were based on mutual trust, and not only when it came with business with the pack. The danger with that, however, was his staunch resolution the previous night to be rid of Rachel.

Leandra scrutinised his look; he wasn't telling her something— it was written all over his face. She had half a mind to tell him that whatever it was she would find out anyway but she knew that it would probably have the opposite effect. Instead, she pretended she didn't notice, going to the opposite side of the room to file away the documents in her hand.

"I spent the night with Rachel."

In the ringing silence, his quiet confession sounded more like a firework exploding; Leandra could hear the words right inside her ear as if he had shouted them. Her hand froze on the draw, pivoting around to face Killian with a carefully neutral expression on her face, her previous task momentarily forgotten.

She opened her mouth, about to speak before abruptly closing it again. She looked like a blubbering fish on land, utterly speechless as she tried to gather some—any— words into her mouth.

"What?! Killian you went to get over the girl!" Even as the words left her mouth, she knew that they were not entirely accurate. He went because he thought he had to try to get over her, and that was something entirely different. She looked at him with an accusatory squint as she tried to work out how this could have happened. "What did you do? Abandon the poor she-wolf at the table to sniff out your mate?"

Killian rose, as if he had been slapped, his offence written across his face. "No! You think I would do that?"

Leandra sighed, the initial shock wearing off. Still she kept one of her perfectly arched brows raised as she shrugged. "Honestly, I don't know. That human makes you act crazy."

Killian wanted to be offended, but he couldn't, because Leandra was right. Knowing Rachel, whilst some of the time it had made him feel more like himself, it had also turned him into someone he hadn't been able to recognise.

"She was there at the restaurant. She was performing there." He murmured, the memory of her on that stage like an angel, replaying in his mind. His memory was sweet, and perhaps the light was a little too bright, and Rachel's hair was a little too curly, and her voice a little too haunting; but that was the way he had seen her. A siren, a mirage that he was terrified would suddenly disappear.