Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

I have no idea why

FARAH

He releases my throat and I gasp, the air rushing back into my lungs so fast it burns. My legs threaten to give out beneath me and I lock my knees, refusing to let them, because the courtyard is still watching and I can feel their confusion pressing against me like something physical—the anger of people who have been denied something they wanted, redirected but not resolved.

No one speaks.

No one moves to challenge him. Whatever Caspian is to these people, whatever authority lives in that single word mine, it is enough to hold even grief-sharpened fury in place.

He turns back to the crowd like nothing happened, like his hand wasn’t just at my throat, and his voice comes out cold and precise and completely steady.

Patrols will be doubled, he tells them. No one travels alone, not for any reason, not under any circumstance. Every lycan reports suspicious activity immediately, directly to him or to the lieutenants he names in quick succession. He moves through it like a general running through strategy, methodical and efficient, and the crowd absorbs each instruction with the focused attention of people who understand what it costs to lose one of their own. I watch the tension in his shoulders as he speaks, the way his jaw tightens every time Viktor’s name leaves his mouth, and I understand that this—the cold precision of it, the tactical certainty—is how he is holding himself together. He has taken everything that could undo him and hammered it into a shape he can use.

When he finally dismisses them, the crowd doesn’t move all at once. They disperse slowly, the way water drains reluctantly, and many of them pass close to the platform on their way out. Close enough that I can see their faces clearly. Close enough that I feel every dark look they cut toward me, some openly hostile, some carrying a flat, measuring quality that is somehow worse. I want to make myself smaller, to pull my shoulders in and drop my gaze and give them nothing to find, and Caspian’s whispered words are the only thing that stops me.

I just want to be the one to make you suffer.

Weakness here is an invitation, and I have enough enemies already without creating more.

So I stand straight. I meet their gazes when they come, even though my heart is slamming against my ribs hard enough that I’m certain they can hear it, and I keep my face as still as I can manage and wait for the courtyard to empty.

***

“You’re being moved,” Caspian says when the last of them have gone, and he takes my arm again—his grip different this time, firm but not bruising—and pulls me off the platform and away from it without waiting for a response.

He takes me through a part of the palace I haven’t seen, a long corridor where the walls are lined with portraits hung at even intervals, each of them framed in dark wood and depicting a face with the same quality of presence—a particular kind of authority that sits in the set of the jaw, the directness of the painted gaze. Previous Alphas, I assume, and I have just enough time to notice that several of them share Caspian’s dark coloring before he stops in front of a heavy wooden door and produces a key from somewhere, fitting it to the lock with the ease of someone who has done it before.

The room on the other side is small. A bed with plain linen, a chair, a narrow window set high in the wall with iron bars across the glass that let in a pale rectangle of morning light. There’s a washbasin in the corner, a rug on the stone floor, and a single lamp already lit on the small table beside the bed. It is still a prison. But it is a more comfortable one than the chair I spent the night in, and that distinction lands somewhere in my chest with a complicated thud.

“You’ll stay here from now on,” he says, gesturing inside without looking at me. “Elara will bring meals. You don’t leave this room without me or a guard I personally assign.”

“Why did you do that?”

The words come out before I can stop them, and I turn to face him fully, finding some reserve of courage I didn’t know I had left.

“Out there, why did you—”

I can’t finish it. Why did you claim me? Why did you put yourself between me and them? The questions sit in the space between us, unasked but legible, and I watch something move across his face before he closes it off entirely.

“Don’t flatter yourself.” His voice is even, almost bored, which is somehow more cutting than coldness would be. “I told you what I want. I won’t let my pack steal that pleasure from me.”

His eyes move over my face with an expression like he’s calculating something, and then he says, quietly and with complete certainty, “The more you’re seen as mine, the more it will hurt when I destroy you.”

There’s something in his eyes as he says it that doesn’t match the words. Something brief and complicated that he buries so quickly I almost convince myself I didn’t see it at all.

He turns toward the door, and I hear myself speak before the decision to do so has fully formed.

“I don’t know who Serapha is.” My voice is smaller than I’d like but it holds. “I don’t know what she did to you. But I’m not her.”

He stops.

His back is to me and it is very rigid, and the silence that follows stretches long enough that I start to think he won’t answer, that he’ll simply leave and take whatever lives behind that stillness with him. Then, without turning around, without any of the fury or the contempt I’ve grown used to bracing for, he says it quietly, like something he has known for a long time and stopped fighting.

“You will be.”

The door closes. The lock turns. And I am alone.

I sink onto the edge of the bed and sit there with my hands in my lap and my whole body shaking in the particular way of someone whose body has been holding itself together on adrenaline alone and has just run out of it. The silence of the room presses in around me and I let it, because there’s nothing else to do, nowhere to go, nothing to think about except his voice saying you will be with that quiet, terrible certainty—

The pain hits without warning.

It splits through my skull so suddenly that I cry out, both hands flying to my temples, and I barely register that I’ve fallen sideways onto the bed before the images come. Not dreams—too sharp for dreams, too immediate. I am running through a forest so dense the canopy swallows the sky, and I know this forest the way I know my own hands, and there is a sword in my grip and the weight of it is familiar. Dark blue eyes, watching me the way someone watches the only thing they’ve ever been certain of, full of trust so complete it looks like love, it is love, and I know this face—

Then blood. Everywhere, all at once, saturating everything, and the eyes that were full of trust looking up at me with something else in them now, something I can’t hold the shape of before it’s gone—

I gasp and I am back in the small barred room, shaking so hard the bed frame trembles beneath me, my face wet and my stomach turning. The headache is already fading but the images aren’t, they’re sitting behind my eyes like they’ve always been there, like they’ve been waiting.

The dreams are getting stronger.

And I have no idea why.