Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Ten: The Door I Chose to Open

POV: Elara Voss

I told Bex three days before the next full moon that I wasn't staying in my chamber this time, and she looked at me the way you look at someone who's just told you they mean to walk into the sea.

"You don't understand what you're asking," she said. "No one has been in that room with him during the change. Not once. Not in ten years."

"Then it's time someone was."

"It could kill you, Elara. Whatever's left of him in that first hour, it doesn't know you. It doesn't know anyone. It only knows pain, and pain doesn't ask who's standing closest before it lashes out."

I thought of Mira's clouded eyes in that silver-lit chamber below the castle. The curse doesn't break because a witch's descendant sets foot in this castle. It breaks because she loves the man wearing it. I hadn't told Bex any of that — hadn't told anyone but Kael, three nights ago on the cliff path, in words that hadn't used the word love but had meant it regardless. But I understood, standing in that corridor with Bex's frightened eyes on me, that loving someone from a safe distance wasn't loving them at all. It was just a kinder shape of the same fear everyone else in this castle had already perfected.

"I'm going," I said. "I'd rather you help me than have Draven catch me on the stairs again."

Bex was quiet a long moment. Then, quieter still: "I'll get you as close as the outer door. That's the most I can do without answering to him for it."

Kael didn't know. I want to be honest about that, because I've thought since about whether I should have told him, given him the chance to refuse me the way he'd have certainly tried and I've decided, every time I've turned it over, that I made the right choice keeping it from him. He would have sent me away out of love, and I had watched that particular shape of love do nothing but keep him alone in the dark for ten straight years.

The moon rose the color of old bone, and the low vibration I'd noticed my very first night in that castle built beneath my feet like something enormous turning over in its sleep. Bex walked me to the outer door of the King's private chamber a different room than the one I slept in, deeper, warded, iron-banded in ways that made my skin prickle just standing near it and stopped there exactly as she'd promised, hand shaking on the latch.

"Whatever you hear," she said, "whatever you see remember it isn't him. Not yet. Not for the first hour."

I went in alone.

The chamber beyond was larger than mine, stripped of anything soft or breakable, the walls scored deep with old claw marks gone pale with age, layered ten years thick in places. Kael stood at the center of it already, jaw clenched, sweat standing out along his throat despite the cold, and when he saw me his whole body went rigid with a horror that had nothing to do with the moon.

"Get out." His voice came rough, already fraying at the edges. "Elara, get out, now, before"

"No."

"You don't understand what's about to happen to me"

"I understand you've done this alone every month for ten years and it hasn't gotten easier once. I understand Bex thinks it might kill me and I came anyway. I understand you're about to argue with me instead of saving your strength, which seems like a poor use of the time you have left before this room stops being safe for arguing at all." My voice shook more than I wanted it to, but I didn't move toward the door.

Something broke across his face not anger, something closer to grief, and then the moon took the rest of the choice out of both our hands.

I will not try to describe the change fully. I've tried, since, and language keeps failing me the same way it failed me the first night I only heard it through stone. It is not fast. It is not clean. It is a man's body being unmade and remade by something that doesn't care how much it costs him, and I watched every second of it from three feet away with my back against cold stone and my heart trying to climb out through my throat, and I did not run.

When it was over when the wolf that had been my king stood where a man had been, black-furred, enormous, breathing hard through bared teeth, I did the only thing I could think to do.

I held out my hand.

Not to touch him. Just to show him it was empty. Show him it wasn't a weapon, wasn't a threat, wasn't anything but a girl standing very still in a room she'd chosen to walk into.

The wolf's head came around toward me, ancient gold eyes finding mine, and for one endless moment I understood exactly how easily this could go the way Bex had feared. Every muscle in that enormous body coiled. A low sound built in its throat that I felt in my teeth more than heard.

And then, impossibly, it stilled.

It came closer slow, deliberate, the way you'd approach something you didn't trust yet but wanted to and lowered its great head until its muzzle rested, feather-light, against my open palm.

Something moved through me at the contact, the same sudden warmth I'd felt the night he first closed the manacle around my wrist, except larger now, deeper, like a door swinging open somewhere in my chest that I hadn't known existed. The wolf made a sound low in its throat that wasn't a growl at all, something closer to relief, to recognition, to a decade of unbearable loneliness finally finding the one thing it had been waiting for.

I stayed with him the rest of that night. I won't pretend it wasn't frightening, there were hours where the animal in him surfaced hard, restless, pacing the length of the room with a violence that made me press back against the wall and hold very still until it passed. But it never once turned that violence toward me, not fully, not really, and somewhere past the third hour I understood that the low vibration I'd felt in the castle stone every night since I'd arrived had gone quiet, for the first time in ten years, sometime after his muzzle touched my palm.

Dawn found me asleep against the wall, and Kael a man again, exhausted, human, bleeding from a dozen small wounds the change always left behind sitting beside me with my hand still folded carefully in both of his, watching me sleep like he couldn't quite believe I'd stayed.

I woke to his voice, rough and low, barely more than a breath.

"You stayed," he said. Not a question. Something closer to disbelief still trying to become certainty.

"I told you I would."

"Nobody's ever" He stopped. Started again. "I don't have the words for what that meant. I'm not sure they exist yet."

Outside, past the warded windows, I heard shouting, distant, urgent, the particular pitch of a household waking to something wrong. Kael's whole body went taut beside me, exhaustion burned away in an instant by something sharper, and I understood, before either of us had said a single word about it, that whatever this quiet dawn had given us, it was already, somewhere below in the yard, being taken away.