Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

The one to make you suffer

FARAH

The blood on his shirt is still wet.

That’s the detail my mind keeps snagging on as Caspian drags me through the winding corridors, his grip around my arm so tight I can feel my pulse beating against his fingers. The smell of it reaches me in waves—copper and iron and something darker beneath—and my stomach turns with each step I’m forced to keep pace with him. His stride is long and deliberate, eating up the stone floor with the particular violence of a man channeling fury into movement, and I stumble twice before my legs remember how to work properly beneath me.

He doesn’t slow down for either stumble.

The corridors blur past in pale morning light, servants flattening themselves against walls, guards straightening, everyone making themselves small and peripheral in the presence of their king. Then we’re through a set of heavy doors and the sound hits me before anything else does. Hundreds of voices, and then sudden, collective silence.

The courtyard is massive, and it is full. The weight of it lands on me all at once—hundreds of eyes turning toward me the instant we emerge, all of them carrying the same thing. Hostility. Suspicion. Something raw and barely leashed that makes the fine hairs on my arms rise beneath my tunic. Whispers begin at the edges and move inward like ripples.

The human.

He’s brought the human.

Caspian doesn’t pause. He doesn’t explain or acknowledge the crowd’s reaction in any way except to tighten his grip on my arm and stride forward, and the crowd parts for him the way water parts around something inevitable. I have no choice but to move with him, half-pulled and half-stumbling, aware that every face we pass is watching me with an expression somewhere between contempt and barely restrained fury. He pulls me up onto an elevated platform at the far end of the courtyard—raised stone that puts us above the crowd, visible from every angle, exposed—and releases my arm only when we’re standing at its center.

“Stay,” he says, without looking at me.

Like I am something he has momentarily set down.

From up here I can see everything, and what I see makes my stomach drop. The crowd parts down the middle and four guards appear, moving in slow procession, carrying a long wooden box between them. Closed and dark. Whatever is inside it, its effect on the pack is immediate—the murmuring dies completely, replaced by a grief so dense I can feel it pressing against my skin from across the courtyard. Someone in the crowd makes a sound that is not quite human, low and mournful, and it’s answered by others until the whole space is full of it.

I don’t know what’s in the box.

I don’t want to know.

I look at Caspian’s profile instead and find it rigid with the effort of containing something enormous. There’s a muscle jumping in his jaw, his hands fisted at his sides, and the blood on his shirt has begun to darken as it dries. When he speaks, his voice carries across the entire courtyard without effort, deep and absolute in the way of someone who has never once had to raise it to be heard.

“One of our own was taken. Tortured. Murdered.”

The sound that rises from the pack is not quite a shout and not quite a growl but something animal that falls between them, raw and collective. Caspian raises one hand and it dies, obedient as a trained thing.

“Viktor died because he was brave enough to hunt our enemies alone. He died because those who threaten us have grown bolder.”

His eyes cut sideways to me, just for a moment, just long enough that the entire crowd follows his gaze, and the accusation in that single glance is as clear as anything he’s ever said aloud.

“They sent us his head as a warning. They think we’ll cower. They think we’ll hide.”

His voice drops until it’s almost quiet, and somehow that makes it worse.

“They’re wrong.”

The roar that follows is enormous. I watch Caspian stand inside it with his shoulders back and his face arranged into everything his people need him to be—certain, fearless, unbroken. But I’m close enough to see his eyes, and what I find there is something he would never permit anyone to witness if he knew it was visible. Something careful and quietly terrified beneath all the fury. He is afraid for them. He is standing in front of hundreds of grieving people projecting absolute authority, and underneath all of it, he is afraid for every single person in this courtyard in a way that looks almost like love.

I look away before he can catch me seeing it.

⸻

The old man who steps forward does so with the confidence of someone who expects to be heard, his grey hair and the set of his jaw speaking to a lifetime of being listened to. He stops at the base of the platform and looks up at Caspian, and then he looks at me.

“And what of the human, Alpha?” His voice carries easily. “She appears from nowhere, and within days our enemies strike. Perhaps she is not a coincidence. Perhaps she is the warning.”

The murmur that moves through the crowd is lower and more dangerous than the others, and voices rise in agreement one by one and then together, and I feel the hostility I’ve been sensing since we walked out here coalesce into something with direction. Every eye finds me. I can feel the weight of each one like a physical thing, and my heart hammers so hard I can feel it in my throat, and I think with sudden clarity—this is how it ends, here, in a courtyard I don’t know, surrounded by people who have decided I am the reason they are grieving.

And then Caspian’s hand closes around my throat.

Not squeezing. Not choking. Just holding, fingers curled beneath my jaw, forcing my chin up and my spine straight in a single controlled motion that positions me exactly where he wants me—upright and visible and unmistakably beside him. The courtyard goes silent so completely that I can hear my own breathing.

“This one,” he says, and his voice is the particular quiet that comes right before something breaks, “is mine.”

The word lands like a stone dropped into still water.

“Anyone who touches her answers to me.”

No one speaks. No one moves. Even the old man recalibrates in real time, and I can see in the faces nearest to us genuine, thrown confusion at what their Alpha has just declared. His hand is still at my throat, his body half-turned toward mine, and it communicates something to every person in this courtyard more clearly than any words could. My legs feel like water. My lungs have forgotten their purpose.

Then his head bends toward mine, close enough that his breath moves against my ear, and when he speaks it is so quiet that only I can hear it.

“Don’t mistake this for protection,” he says. “I just want to be the one to make you suffer.“