CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS ALPHA KING

chapter 8

Chapter Eight: Kael

I found the training yard by accident, wandering around the grounds the next morning because my room felt like it was too small and the rest of the castle was easier to handle when I had somewhere to walk toward. A dozen wolves were sparring in pairs, bare feet on packed dirt, and off to the side a man stood watching with his arms crossed, calling out corrections that sounded like insults and somehow didn't land as offense.

He clocked me before I'd figured out whether to keep walking or turn back.

"You're the King's intended." Plain, no edge to it, which after Ashby and the advisor woman felt almost like a break. "Kael Voss. Run his guard, when I'm not making his life harder in other ways."

"Elara."

"I know." Almost a smile. "Everybody knows. You've been the only thing anyone's talked about all week."

I didn't have much to say back, so I just watched the sparring instead, glad for something to look at that wasn't a person sizing me up.

"You don't have to just stand there being polite," Kael said after a minute. "Ask whatever it is you're clearly trying not to ask."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Sure you do." He tipped his head at the yard without really looking at it, still mostly watching me. "Everybody in that castle's got a theory about why the King asked for you by name. Half think it's politics. Half think he's lost it. You want to know which one I go with."

"Do you."

"Neither." Said easy, like it cost him nothing, though something in his face told me it wasn't that simple. "I think he's got his reasons and he's not telling me either, which is new. Damian doesn't usually keep things from me."

My pulse ticked up at that word, *usually*, the way he said it like it meant something.

"How long have you known him?"

"Since we were pups. Longer than most anybody running this place now." Kael's face went a little more guarded. "He wasn't always like this. The reputation, I mean. That came later. Cost him plenty to build it."

"What happened?"

He looked at me, weighing something, and I could tell he was deciding how much of it wasn't his to give away. "Not my story to tell. Ask him, if you've got the nerve."

"I've tried asking him things. He doesn't say much."

"No." Kael's mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "He wouldn't. Not with you. Not yet."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He didn't answer right off, just called a correction across the yard, something about keeping a guard up on the left, and I got the sense he'd used it on purpose, buying a second to decide what came next.

"Means he's careful," Kael said finally. "More careful with you than he's been with anybody in a long time. That's not nothing, coming from him. Whatever you're trying to figure out about why you're here, I'd pay more attention to that than to whatever he won't say out loud."

I thought about that the whole walk back through the castle, turned it over next to everything else I'd been turning over since that first night in the war room. Careful. More careful with me than anybody in a long time. It didn't answer anything, not really, but it sat different than Ashby's needling or the advisor's disapproval, and I found myself holding onto it the rest of the day.

Damian found me that evening in a small library off the east wing, the first quiet room in the whole castle that didn't feel like somebody was watching me in it. I'd pulled a book off a shelf without really reading the title, more for something to hold than something to read, when I heard the door and looked up and found him standing there.

"Kael says you two talked," he said.

"You have him report on me?"

"No." Something flickered across his face, fast. "He tells me things because we're friends, not because I ask him to. There's a difference."

"He said you're careful with me. More than usual." I set the book down, made myself hold his eyes the way I had that first night. "Wouldn't say why."

"Because it's not his to say."

"Then say it yourself."

He came further in, slow, the same way he'd crossed the war room that first night, moving like a man used to being careful around things he wasn't sure wouldn't break.

"You want the honest answer or the diplomatic one," he said.

"I've had plenty of diplomatic answers this week to last me a while."

That almost got a real smile out of him, gone fast, but real while it was there. "Fair enough." He stopped a few feet off, hands loose at his sides, and for a second he looked less like a King and more like a man working out how to say something he'd been avoiding. "I don't let people close. Haven't in a long time. Easier that way. Safer too, for reasons that aren't mine to get into tonight."

"That's still not an answer."

"I know." He held my eyes, steady. "Honest answer is, from the second I asked for you, some part of me already knew I wasn't going to keep the same distance I keep with everybody else. Don't know what to do with that yet. Working it out same as you are."

It wasn't a confession. Wasn't the truth I kept circling, the one I still had no proof of, the one that would explain the scar through his eyebrow and the rough edge his voice fell into whenever he forgot to be careful. But it was more honest than anything he'd given me since I got here, and something in my chest loosened hearing it, even while another part of me stayed braced, waiting on the rest of it he still wasn't saying.

"Ashby thinks there's a story behind why you asked for me," I said. "Wants to know it."

"Ashby wants a lot of things he isn't getting." Something hardened in his face, brief but real. "Wanted his daughter in your spot. He's not going to forgive either of us for that, whatever version of the story he decides to believe."

"Is he dangerous?"

"He's ambitious, which is worse most days." His jaw tightened. "Ambitious men don't need a good reason to make trouble. Just an opening. I'd rather you didn't give him one."

"I'm not trying to."

"I know." His voice softened back into that quieter register from the night before, nothing about it matching the stories people told about him. "Not warning you because I think you've done something wrong. Warning you because he'll go looking for a reason even where there isn't one, and I'd rather you saw it coming."

We stood there a second, the space between us smaller than when he'd first walked in, and that same pull from the mountain climbed back up through my chest again, quiet but unmistakable, the same thing I'd felt across a war room table two nights back and told myself I imagined.

"Why does it feel like this," I said, quieter than I meant to. "Standing near you. Why does it feel like I already know you, when I've only met you twice."

Something crossed his face I couldn't name, gone before I could try. For a second I thought he might actually answer, might finally give me the one true thing I'd been circling since that first night, and my whole body went still waiting on it.

"I don't know," he said instead, and it was the first thing he'd said to me that sounded like a lie.

I didn't call him on it. Too tired, and some part of me wasn't ready to hear what came after if I pushed and he actually broke. I let him leave the library without another word, watched the door shut behind him, sat there a long while with the book still closed in my lap, thinking about how his voice had changed the second I asked the one question that actually mattered.

He knew something. I was sure of it now in a way I hadn't quite let myself be sure of before, sure enough that the doubt didn't feel like grief playing tricks on me anymore.

I just didn't know yet what it would cost either of us once he finally said it.