Marked In The Dark

CHAPTER 6

At ten to seven, Rowan knocked.

I had changed into the only properly formal thing I owned, a dark green dress, simple cut, high collar. I had considered the collar for five minutes before putting it on. It was not a deliberate choice to hide the mark. The mark was sealed under my skin now, invisible to any eye. But I was aware of that part of my neck in a way I had never been aware of any part of my body before, and I wanted fabric there.

Rowan walked me through the hall to a smaller room off the main corridor. Not the formal dining hall I had expected but a study with a long table at one end. Books on two walls. A fire in the grate.

Caden was already standing at the window with his back to the door when I entered.

He turned when he heard us.

He had changed as well. Different jacket. The same stillness.

His eyes went to me. Nothing in his face moved.

"Thank you, Rowan," he said.

Rowan left and closed the door.

We looked at each other across the room.

I had been preparing words since four in the afternoon. Careful, neutral, civil words that would get us through dinner without anything going wrong. Thank you for the offer. I understand the arrangement. I will be cooperative.

What came out of my mouth instead was: "How long have you been looking for her?"

He did not move. "Looking for who?"

"Your marked mate." I held his gaze. "Rowan said you marked someone recently. He didn't say that, but the way he talked around it…" I stopped. "I'm not asking to start something. I just want to know what I'm walking into."

Caden studied me for a long moment. Then he came to the table and sat down. He gestured to the chair across from him.

I sat.

"Several days," he said. "I marked her on Mating Night." He poured water into both glasses on the table with a precise movement. "She was gone before morning."

"She didn't know who you were?"

"No."

"Did you know who she was?"

"No." Something shifted behind his eyes. "I could not see her face clearly."

I lifted my glass and took a careful sip.

"How have you been searching for her?" I said. "If you don't know her face."

He looked at me for a moment. The look of a man deciding how much to say.

"Her wolf," he said finally. "A fated bond should produce a signal I can follow. A pull, a direction, a sense of where she is." He paused. "Hers does not work that way."

"Why not?"

"Because her wolf is suppressed," he said. "Not dormant. Suppressed. There is a difference." He set down his glass with the precise movement of someone who has explained this before and is choosing his words carefully. "A dormant wolf has simply not woken. A suppressed wolf has been held back by something, trauma, circumstance, something buried deep enough that the wolf cannot get through it." He looked at the table. "A suppressed wolf produces a bond signal at a fraction of its full capacity. I know she exists. I know the mark sealed between us. But finding her through the bond is" He stopped. "Difficult."

"So you came to the gathering," I said carefully, "looking for a suppressed wolf."

"I came to the gathering having spent three days searching for one," he said. "Rowan contacted every pack within range of Clearwater's forest. Every unmated female with a wolf that does not respond the way it should." He paused. "I needed to be in the same room as the right woman for the signal to be strong enough to mean anything."

I set my glass down.

The gathering. The lineup. The moment he had stopped in front of me and his eyes had gone to my neck before I had said a single word.

He had not been browsing.

He had been searching.

And my wolf, suppressed and quiet and producing a signal too faint to follow from a distance, had been loud enough to find in a room.

I held very still and made sure none of this reached my face.

"And at the gathering," I said. "Did the signal mean anything?"

He looked at me.

The look lasted one second longer than was comfortable. My pulse said he knows. My brain said you are looking for patterns that are not there.

"That," he said quietly, "is what I am trying to determine."

Silence.

The fire shifted in the grate.

"Why does it matter to you?" he asked. "How I found her."

"Because you're about to formally bind yourself to me under treaty," I said. "And if you find her before that ceremony, I want to know what happens."

Reasonable. Practical. The question of someone thinking about her own position.

Not the question of someone who already knew the answer.

"I will find her," he said. Not a threat. A statement.

"Okay," I said.

"When I do, the treaty binding will be…" He paused. "I would not dishonor you. There would be a formal dissolution of the arrangement, respectful and settled."

I nodded.

I was looking at the table.

"Nora."

I looked up. My name in his voice landed the same way it had yesterday, the same way it had in the dark by the river, though I had not known it was the same voice then.

"Are you afraid of me?" he asked.

I thought about it honestly.

"I think," I said slowly, "I'm more afraid of the things around me than of you specifically."

Something changed in his expression. A small shift, the way the light changes at the edge of a cloud. Not warmth exactly. More like recognition.

"Eat," he said. He lifted his fork.

I lifted mine.

We ate in silence, and the silence was not comfortable exactly but it was not hostile. It was the silence of two people thinking very hard about the same problem from opposite sides of it.

After, when the plates had been cleared, he said: "Do you need anything? For your rooms?"

"No. They're fine. Rowan was very thorough."

"If you need something and you can't find Rowan, you can find me."

"Okay."

He stood. I stood. We faced each other on opposite sides of the table.

"The binding ceremony is in three weeks," he said. "Until then…" He paused, searching for the word.

"We learn each other," I said.

His eyes held mine.

"Yes," he said.

I walked back to my rooms with Rowan, who appeared silently in the corridor the moment dinner ended as though he had been waiting outside the whole time, which he probably had been.

At my door, he said: "How was it?"

"Fine." I touched the door handle. Then I stopped. "Rowan. The search you ran before the gathering. For a suppressed wolf."

He looked at me carefully. "Yes."

"How many did you find?"

"Within range of Clearwater's forest?" He paused. "One confirmed report."

I kept my face very still. "From which pack?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved in his expression. Not surprise exactly. The specific quality of a man who has just understood that the conversation he is having is not the conversation he thought it was.

"Clearwater," he said quietly.

The corridor was very still.

"Goodnight, Rowan," I said.

"Goodnight, Nora."

I closed my door and stood with my back against it and my hand pressed over the mark on my neck.

One confirmed report.

From Clearwater.

He had come to that gathering with a description and a signal and three days of searching and he had walked along a lineup of women and stopped in front of the one whose suppressed wolf had been the closest thing to what he was looking for.

He did not know it was me.

Not for certain.

Not yet.

But Rowan had found one report.

From Clearwater.

And Caden had stopped in front of me.

And the mark had blazed.

And his eyes had gone to my neck before I had spoken a single word.

I pressed my back harder against the door.

I had exactly three weeks before a binding ceremony.

And the man on the other side of this arrangement was not looking for a treaty wife.

He was looking for me.

He just did not know he had already found her.