Chaoter Four: Proposal
She straightened up from the ground, brushed the damp sand from her knees with what was left of her dignity, which was not much but she was going to use every bit of what was left, and looked at Wang properly for the first time since she had stopped coughing up pool water.
The animal hide around his waist was dark and worn smooth in the way of something used regularly. Water had mostly stopped dripping from his hair but his skin was still damp and the three stripes on his upper arm were catching the light in a way that made Lin Wan look at them again.
She had called them tattoos in her head. An automatic category her brain had reached for because it was the only one available.
But standing this close, looking at them properly, they did not look like tattoos. They sat in his skin differently. More like they were part of him. Like they had always been there and the word tattoo was simply the wrong word for what they were.
Lin Wan filed that away and looked at his face.
He had been watching her look at him the entire time.
His expression unchanged.
Lin Wan held his gaze and did not look away first.
Wang spoke.
"What is a small female like you doing here alone." His voice was low and direct, no warmth in it but no cruelty either. Just flat and efficient, the voice of someone who asked questions because they wanted answers and saw no reason to wrap the asking in anything unnecessary. "You have no escort. Where are the males of your family."
Lin Wan blinked.
Mates.
Not mate. Mates. Plural.
"I don't have mates," Lin Wan said.
Something happened in Wang's face.
It was small. She almost missed it. A pause in whatever was moving behind those dark eyes, brief and controlled, there and gone. He looked at Lin Wan and then he did something she had not been expecting.
He sniffed.
Not obviously. Not in a way that was meant to be seen. Just a slow quiet drawing in of air, his chin tilting slightly upward, his attention sharpening in a way that felt less like a person smelling something and more like something running a very precise kind of check and getting back a result it had not anticipated.
He took one step back.
Lin Wan watched his expression do something complicated.
It lasted less than a second and then his face was flat and neutral again, back to the surface he had been wearing since the pool. But in that one second Lin Wan had seen something move through him. Something that started in his eyes and settled somewhere deeper and quieter and did not entirely go away even when everything else did.
Lin Wan did not know what it meant.
Weiwei, apparently, did.
"Host," Weiwei said inside Lin Wan's mind, dropping her voice to something quieter and more private, like she understood that this was not the moment for her usual cheerful announcements. "Females on the Beast Continent make up approximately twenty percent of the total population. Unmated females are extremely rare. Most females take multiple mates as a matter of both survival and social structure. The beastman in front of Host has just confirmed through scent that Host carries no mate mark whatsoever. This is significant information to him."
Lin Wan kept her face perfectly neutral.
Multiple mates.
Right.
Lin Wan was going to put that in a box in the back of her mind, close the box, put the box on a shelf, and deal with it at a later time when she was not standing soaking wet in front of a stranger with a countdown ticking in the corner of her vision.
She looked at her countdown.
02:41:22
Lin Wan looked at Wang.
"I lost my memory," Lin Wan said.
Wang looked at her.
"I don't know how I got here. I don't know where I came from. I woke up near this pool and I don't remember anything before that."
She held his gaze steadily while she said it. She watched Wang process it, watched him take it in and turn it over somewhere internal with the same careful unhurried attention he gave everything. He was not a man who showed his thinking. He took things in and only showed you what he decided you were allowed to see, and right now he was showing her nothing at all, which told her he had not decided yet.
His eyes moved.
Down. Not in the way that made Lin Wan want to step back. Not invasive. Just observational, the way you looked at something you were trying to classify and could not find the right category for. He was looking at her clothes. Her jeans. Her top. Her tote bag still hanging from her shoulder, which had survived the whole ordeal considerably better than Lin Wan had.
Lin Wan was suddenly very aware that she was wearing things that clearly meant nothing to him and possibly everything about where she came from.
"Your clothing," Wang said. "I have not seen its like before. No tribe I know of makes anything of this kind."
Lin Wan said nothing.
Wang looked at her face.
Lin Wan looked back.
The silence between them was not comfortable. But it was not hostile either. It sat in the space between them like something that had not yet decided what it was going to become, waiting to see what happened next before it committed to a direction.
Then Wang spoke again.
"That creature that attacked you," he said. "You asked what it was."
Lin Wan straightened slightly. "Yes."
"It is called a phantom beast," Wang said. "They live in convergence pools. They are drawn to weak things, like females ."
Lin Wan stared at him.
There were about seven things she wanted to say to that and none of them were polite.
"So it attacked me," Lin Wan said carefully, "because I'm a female."
"Yes."
"And there are more of them."
"In other convergence pools. Yes, No phantom beast would share it's territory with another."
"And if I go near another convergence pool. . . "
"Do not go near another convergence pool," Wang said simply
Lin Wan looked at her countdown.
02:38:57
She thought about the three hours she had left. She thought about the mate bond Weiwei had described. She thought about the glowing tag she had seen floating over Wang's head with his name on it and the word compatibility written beside it in a way that left very little room for interpretation.
She thought about the fact that she was alone in a parallel world with no way home and no one who knew where she was and a body that was going to die in two and half hours, but she wasn't going to let that happen.
Lin Wan looked at Wang, and noticed his gaze had never left her.
Wang was already looking at Lin Wan.
"You said females without mates are not safe here," Lin Wan said.
"Yes."
"What happens to a female if she comes out without her mate."
Wang held her gaze. "Other males will want to claim them. Some will not ask first."
Lin Wan absorbed that.
"And if a female is already claimed," Lin Wan said slowly. "Already has a mate. Nobody can touch her."
"A claimed female is protected," Wang said. "Under tribe law and by the mate's right to challenge any male who disrespects that claim."
"And you," Lin Wan said. "You are unmated."
Wang's eyes flickered with something, a memory maybe. "Yes."
Lin Wan looked at her countdown.
02:37:14
She looked at Wang and thought about everything Weiwei had told her and everything Wang had just told her and the fact that the two pieces of information were pointing in exactly the same direction whether Lin Wan liked it or not.
She did not particularly like it.
But she was also not going to die in the next two hours because she was too proud to be practical.
"I need to ask you something," Lin Wan said.
Wang waited.
Lin Wan took a breath.
"If I wanted you to claim me," Lin Wan said, keeping her voice level and her chin up and her eyes on his face, because she was Lin Wan and she did not flinch from things even when they were deeply inconvenient and completely outside of anything she had planned for today, "would you be willing to do that."
Wang looked at Lin Wan for a long moment.
A long moment.
Long enough that Lin Wan started to wonder if she had made a mistake. Long enough that the countdown in the corner of her vision ticked down through four more seconds and filled Lin Wan with unease, what if he rejects her.
Then Wang uncrossed his arms.
"Come with me," he said.
He turned and started walking without checking whether she would follow.
Lin Wan looked at his back.
She looked at her countdown.
02:36:41
Lin Wan followed.