Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Another attack

FARAH

I wake with a gasp, my body drenched in sweat and my hands already shaking before I’m fully conscious.

The dream clings to me the way they never used to—vivid and immediate and wrong in the particular way of something that isn’t quite a dream at all. I was standing over him. Caspian, asleep, his face unguarded in a way I have never seen it waking, and I had a sword in my hands and I could feel the weight of it, the familiar grip of it, the absolute cold certainty in my chest that what I was doing was right and necessary and already decided. I had looked at him sleeping and felt nothing that resembled hesitation.

And then I brought it down.

I sit up and press my back against the cold wall and wait for my breathing to slow, staring at my hands in the grey early light like they might tell me something. They’re ordinary hands. They’ve held books and bread and the worn leather strap of my bag, but they have never held a sword, and I have never killed anyone, and none of what I felt in that dream belongs to me. I know this. I know it the way you know things that you are trying very hard to keep knowing in the face of something that keeps pushing back.

But the conviction I felt—the absolute, bone-deep certainty that it was right—that’s the part I can’t dismiss. Because it didn’t feel like the logic of a nightmare. It felt like memory. And if it is memory, if there is some part of me that once stood over a sleeping man with a sword and felt nothing but certainty, then I begin to understand what Caspian sees when he looks at me. What he has always seen.

A murderer wearing a borrowed face.

***

Morning light comes slowly through the barred window, thin and pale and reluctant. I stand on unsteady legs and cross to it, pressing close enough to feel the cold radiating off the glass, and from here I can see a portion of the courtyard below. People move through it with the unhurried rhythm of people settled into their routines—two women talking near the far wall, a group of men carrying supplies across the open space, a child running ahead of someone who calls after them with the particular exasperation of a parent who has said the same thing a hundred times already.

I watch them for a long time.

I had imagined, in the days before I knew any of this was real, that werewolves would be something else entirely. Something monstrous and alien and immediately, obviously dangerous. But the people moving through that courtyard below me look like people.

They look like families. They look like a community that has known each other long enough to move around one another without thinking, and three of them are dead this morning because of enemies I don’t understand, and somewhere among them is a man named Viktor who will never be returned to anyone who loved him.

And I am the outsider here. The enemy in their midst, or as close to one as makes no difference.

The lock turns and I step back from the window.

Elara enters carrying a breakfast tray, her expression arranged into something careful and neutral that doesn’t quite manage to conceal the wariness beneath it. She sets the tray on the small table without quite looking at me directly and straightens with the posture of someone preparing to leave again immediately.

“Good morning,” she says softly.

“Thank you.” My voice comes out rougher than I expect, scraped raw from disuse and the crying I apparently did at some point in the night without fully registering it. “Elara.”

I say her name before she can move toward the door.

“Can I ask you something?”

She goes still. The fear that moves across her face is quick but unmistakable, there and gone in the space of a breath.

“I can’t—the Alpha said—”

“Please.” I hate how desperate it sounds and I say it anyway, because I am past the point of having the luxury of pride. “Just tell me what Serapha did. That’s all. What did she do to him?”

The silence stretches long enough that I’m certain she won’t answer. Her hands find her apron and twist into the fabric, and she looks at the door and then at the floor and then at somewhere that is neither of those things. When she finally speaks, it is so quiet I have to hold very still to catch it.

“She was supposed to save him,” Elara says. “Instead, she destroyed him.”

The words land somewhere deep and stay there. I open my mouth to ask what that means, what form the saving was supposed to take, what the destruction looked like, and Elara is already moving toward the door with the quick efficiency of someone who has said more than they intended and knows it. She pauses at the threshold though, her hand on the frame, and glances back at me with an expression that is exhausted and sad in equal measure.

“He wasn’t always like this,” she says. “The Alpha. Before her, before the curse had fully taken hold of everything—he was different.”

A pause, and something moves across her face.

“Kinder. He had something in him that was still—” She stops and seems to reconsider the word she was reaching for. “She took it from him. Whatever was good, whatever was still soft enough to be reached. She took all of it and left only what’s left now.”

The door closes. The lock turns.

And I stand in the middle of the small room with those words arranging and rearranging themselves in my head, and I think about dark blue eyes that hold something frightened beneath all the fury, something that looks almost like love when he thinks no one is watching his face.

He was different. Kinder.

I make myself sit down. I make myself eat, even though the food tastes like nothing, because I need to be practical and I need to be clear-headed and I need to stop sitting with my feelings like they are the most important thing in this room. They are not. My survival is the most important thing in this room, and I have been so busy being frightened that I have not yet been strategic about it.

I eat and I look at the room properly for the first time. The bars on the window are iron but they’re old, slightly pitted with rust along their lower edges where moisture has collected over years. I file that away. The door is solid and the lock sounds serious, but the hinges are mounted on this side, which is a mistake someone made a long time ago, and I file that away too. I have no tools, no pins, nothing useful, but I am in a room and not in a chair with my wrists bound, and that is already a different situation than the one I woke up in yesterday.

I pace when the eating is done, because the room is too small for anything else and my mind needs to move with my body or it starts turning on itself. If Serapha was supposed to save Caspian—if that was the design of it, whatever it was, whoever designed it—then something went wrong in the middle. Some point at which saving became destroying, at which whatever she felt for him curdled into something that could stand over his sleeping body and lift a sword without flinching. I need to understand that point. Not because I believe I am her, but because he does, and what he believes about me is the thing most likely to determine whether I survive this.

Why did she do it? What happened in the space between saving and destroying?

Why do I have her face and her dreams and none of her answers?

The sun drops toward the horizon and the light in the room goes amber and then grey, and I am still pacing when the shouting starts.

I stop.

It comes from somewhere deeper in the palace—urgent voices, the particular cadence of orders being issued and people moving quickly to follow them. I cross to the door and press my ear against the wood, straining to separate sounds from one another. Running footsteps, more than one set, and then Marcus’s voice rising above it all with the kind of authority that doesn’t leave room for anything but immediate compliance.

“Lock down the palace. No one in or out.”

I press closer, my heart climbing into my throat. More footsteps, closer now, and then a voice I don’t recognize—younger, ragged with something that might be panic—cutting through the corridor just outside my door.

“There’s been another attack,” the voice says. “Three sentries dead at the north gate.”