Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

A failed interrogation

FARAH

The cold is the first thing I’m aware of when I open my eyes.

It seeps into my skin and wraps around my bones, and for a moment I don’t remember where I am or why my arms are screaming with a dull, persistent ache. Then it all comes rushing back—the chair, the rope, Caspian’s face inches from mine, the guard’s battered face— and I snap fully awake with a sharp intake of breath that does nothing to steady me.

Dawn is coming. I can tell by the way the darkness outside the window has softened into something grey and reluctant, pale light creeping through the glass like it’s afraid to fully commit. I’ve been awake for most of the night, drifting in and out of something that wasn’t sleep so much as tormented suspension, my body too exhausted to stay conscious and too cold to rest properly.

You made me this way.

His words have been circling my head for hours, wearing a groove into my thoughts the way water wears into stone. I don’t understand them. I have never been to this place, never knew lycans existed outside of stories until a few nights ago, and yet Caspian looks at me like I am the source of every wound he has ever suffered. The conviction in his voice when he said it is what terrifies me most—not the coldness, not the cruelty, but the absolute bone-deep certainty of a man who has been carrying something so long it has become indistinguishable from him.

I shift against the rope and my wrists throb in protest.

***

The woman who enters is maybe mid-thirties, with kind eyes set in a face that has learned to be careful. Her gaze sweeps the room with the practiced efficiency of someone accustomed to walking into spaces where anything might be waiting, and then it lands on me and she stops. The sound she makes is small and involuntary, barely a breath, and she presses her free hand to her mouth as her eyes move over me—the rope, my bare skin, the blanket I’d managed to kick within reach hours ago but couldn’t pull properly over myself with my hands bound.

Then she sets down the lamp she’s carrying and crosses to me without a word.

She wraps the blanket around my shoulders with warm, certain hands, and the kindness of it is so unexpected that something in my chest clenches painfully. She moves behind the chair next and works at the knot at my wrists, and when the pressure releases all at once the blood rushes back into my hands with a ferocity that makes me cry out despite myself.

“Just breathe through it,” she murmurs, still not quite meeting my eyes.

Her name is Elara, she tells me when I ask, and she helps me dress in the simple clothing she brought—a loose tunic and soft, wide-legged pants—with the quiet efficiency of someone who wants to help but doesn’t want to be seen doing it.

“Please.” I say it before I can stop myself, too tired and too cold for pretense. “What does he want from me? Who is Serapha?”

Elara goes very still, and it isn’t the ordinary stillness of someone choosing their words. It’s the stillness of someone who has just heard something dangerous.

“I can’t,” she says, and the two words carry the weight of something much longer. “If the king finds out I spoke to you—”

She cuts herself off, presses her lips together, and moves toward the door.

She stops with her hand on the frame but doesn’t turn around. The silence stretches, and then, so quietly I almost miss it, she says: “You should pray your memories never return.”

And then she’s gone.

***

Your memories.

I’ve never been here before—I would know, I would remember a place like this, a man like him. Except I think about the dreams, and the certainty begins to unravel at the edges.

I’ve had them since I was eighteen, vivid and insistent and detailed in ways that ordinary dreams aren’t. Running through a forest so dense it swallowed all sound, the ground beneath my feet feeling not alien but ancient and familiar. A man with dark blue eyes watching me from across a distance that somehow felt like none at all, his expression something I could never quite read before I woke. And sometimes blood. Betrayal. The specific, nauseating sensation of having done something irreversible. I had always called them nightmares, told myself the brain manufactures its own strange cinema and none of it means anything real.

But the man in my dreams has dark blue eyes, and Caspian’s eyes are the same impossible shade I have been seeing behind my eyelids for five years.

The door doesn’t open so much as explode inward. Caspian fills the frame, and every other thought dissolves. There’s blood on his shirt—not a smear from something incidental but the kind that comes from something terrible, spattered across the collar and darkened down the front. His face is a perfect mask of cold fury held in place by sheer will, his hands fisted at his sides with knuckles gone white. He looks at me and the hatred in his gaze is so complete it steals the breath from my lungs, and beneath it I catch one flicker of something complicated and pained before it vanishes, buried under everything else he refuses to let me see.

“Get up,” he says flatly. “You’re coming with me.”

“I’m already standing,” I say, and I don’t know where that comes from.

Something tightens in his jaw. He crosses the room in three strides and closes his hand around my arm with a grip that leaves no room for argument, pulling me toward the door. I have no choice but to move with him or fall. He walks us out into the corridor and the cold morning air hits me all at once, his stride demanding mine keep up without once accommodating it.

Then he speaks, low and precise in a way that is somehow worse than shouting.

“I want you to see what happens when my people are slaughtered.”

His grip tightens. He turns his head just slightly, just enough to look at me from the corner of his eye, and what I see there makes my stomach drop.

“And I want you to remember,” he says, spitting the next words like they taste like poison, “that your kind has always brought death to mine.”