Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Thirteen: What the Curse Answers To

POV: King Kael Ashgrave

I felt her fear before I heard her scream.

I don't know how else to explain it, and I've stopped trying to, because whatever bond had cracked open between us that night in the warded chamber apparently didn't close again once the moon set, I was three corridors away, deep in a tedious accounting of guard rotations with Draven, when something in my chest seized so violently I was on my feet before I'd consciously registered why.

"Kael"

"Elara." I was already moving. Draven was half a step behind me before I'd finished saying her name, and whatever question had been in his face died the instant he saw mine, because ten years of brotherhood has taught him to recognize exactly what it looks like when the wolf in me surfaces without any moon at all to force it.

Her voice found us in the servants' corridor near the barracks one scream, cut short, muffled through a barred door and I did not slow down to consider strategy. I hit the storeroom door with my full weight, wood and iron both, and it gave on the second strike hard enough to splinter the bar clean off its bracket.

Garrick had her by the hair, rope half-looped around one wrist, and for one suspended, terrible second the room held completely still his eyes going wide at the door caving in, hers finding mine across the space between us with a look that wasn't quite relief yet, because the danger hadn't finished happening.

I do not fully remember the next several seconds. I remember the wolf in me rising without the moon's permission for the first time in ten years, something the curse had never once allowed before, some old and starving thing finally given cause enough to break its own rules. I remember Garrick's face when he understood what was crossing the room toward him. I remember Draven's voice somewhere behind me, sharp with something that might have been alarm at what he was watching me become without a full moon to explain it.

I remember, most clearly, stopping.

Some last thread of the man in me held, right at the edge, close enough that Garrick would carry the marks of exactly how close for the rest of whatever life he had left to live, and I wrenched him off her instead of through her, threw him hard enough into the stone wall that the room shook, and turned human again, or close enough to it, breathing like I'd run the length of the castle twice to find Elara already reaching for me before I'd fully reached for her.

"You're not hurt," I said, hands moving over her the way hers had moved over me three nights before, needing to confirm it with my own senses rather than trust the word alone.

"Not badly." Her voice shook, but her eyes found mine steady despite it, and I understood, holding her, that whatever fear had just torn through this room hadn't broken the thing between us. If anything it had welded it tighter.

Draven had Garrick pinned against the wall by then, blade at his throat, and the whole ugly truth came out of him faster than I expected once the fight had gone out of him entirely. Renata's coin, the wards sabotaged from inside, and worst of all, delivered with the flat, resigned honesty of a man who understood he'd already lost everything worth protecting by staying quiet.

"She's witch's blood," Garrick said, nodding at Elara with something between fear and grim satisfaction, like even facing execution he wanted the truth to land as heavily as possible. "Renata already knows it. I told her myself, the night of the attack, before the wards ever went down. Whatever you think you've bought yourselves with one soldier's capture, it's already too late for secrecy. Veyloth isn't sending soldiers after Ashgrave anymore, Your Majesty. They're sending them after her."

The words landed like a second blow, harder than the first. I felt Elara go very still beside me, and understood, in the silence that followed, that whatever fragile peace we'd built in a warded chamber three nights ago had just become the single most valuable, most hunted thing on either side of this border not the curse. Not the crown. Her.

"Take him to the lower cells," I told Draven, my voice coming out steadier than I felt. "Full guard. No visitors, no exceptions, not even me, until I've decided what his information is worth trading for."

Draven hauled Garrick out without another word, and I turned back to Elara, who stood in the wreckage of that storeroom with her father's small wooden wolf still clutched hard enough in one fist that her knuckles had gone white around it, and I understood that the danger I'd promised to end with one traitor's capture had, instead, only just properly begun.

"They know what I am," she said quietly. Not quite a question.

"They do now." I reached for her hand, folded the wooden wolf more securely into her palm with both of mine, the way she'd once folded a chain around her own wrist and trusted me not to hurt her with it. "Which means from this moment forward, Elara Voss, you are not simply my tithe, or my guest, or anything this court has a polite word for. You're the reason Veyloth's about to stop circling this castle and start attacking it in earnest, and I intend to make certain that reason survives whatever they send next, whatever it costs me."

Outside the shattered storeroom door, the castle had gone quiet with the particular held-breath stillness of a household that already sensed, correctly, that the worst of this was still ahead of them and somewhere beyond Ashgrave's walls, past the Blackwood and the border it had guarded for two centuries, I knew Renata was already reading Garrick's silence as its own kind of answer, and preparing whatever came next.