THE ALPHA'S REVENGE BRIDE

Episode.8

WHAT THE LETTER ASKED

The hawk was healing well by the second week, and I'd taken to visiting the aviary most mornings before the day's fittings began, less because the bird needed me and more because it was the only hour that felt entirely mine.

It was there, kneeling beside the enclosure with a strip of dried meat balanced on my palm, that one of the younger maids found me and pressed a folded scrap of paper into my hand without a word, her eyes darting once toward the door before she hurried away entirely.

I didn't need to open it to know who it had come from. The paper itself told me, cheap and coarse in a way nothing at the palace ever was, the kind of paper only used by someone who wanted a message to look as though it had come from nowhere important at all.

I opened it anyway, because I already knew I wouldn't be able to stop myself.

‘Khanna will visit under the pretense of a wedding gift. Listen to what she brings. Your family's survival depends on it. — C.C.’

I read it twice, then a third time, my hands steadier than I expected them to be, though something underneath my ribs had gone cold and tight the moment I recognized my father's economical, slanting hand.

I burned it in the aviary's small brazier before Greta arrived to collect me, and told myself the shaking in my fingers as I did it was only the cold.

Khanna arrived three days later, exactly as the note had promised, announced formally as a visiting sister come to witness her sibling's approaching wedding, permitted through the gates under an exception the decree hadn't quite anticipated, family present for ceremonial occasions rather than private conversation.

I met her in the receiving room Greta had arranged, a smaller, warmer space than the formal halls, and for one unguarded moment when Khanna stepped through the door, I forgot every careful thing I'd rehearsed and simply crossed the room to embrace her, real relief cutting through the caution I'd been carrying since the note arrived.

"You look well," she said, pulling back to study me, something searching in her expression that hadn't been there before. "Better than I expected."

"I've had little choice but to adjust." I gestured toward the chairs near the window, aware of the guard posted just beyond the door, aware that whatever we said here would likely be relayed to someone eventually, though I doubted it would be word for word. "How is Father?"

"Confined. Furious. Planning something, though he tells me very little of what." She lowered herself into the chair, arranging her skirts with the particular precision she always used when she wanted a moment to think before speaking. "He asked me to bring you something."

"I assumed as much."

She produced a small wrapped box from the folds of her cloak, wedding gift dressing over whatever actually waited inside, and set it on the table between us without opening it herself.

"He wants to know everything you've learned," she said, quiet now, the performance of a casual visiting sister dropping away entirely. "Palace routines. Who Alkane trusts. Whether the northern packs have committed troops to him formally or simply pledged loyalty in name. He believes there's still time to salvage something, if he moves carefully enough, and quickly enough."

"Khanna."

"I know what you're going to say." She reached for my hand, gripping it tighter than the gesture required. "But Mara, listen to me. If he fails, if this rebellion he's building collapses before it starts, there won't be anything left of House Clifton at all. Not the name, not the lands, not any protection for the people who still depend on us. Bess. Harwin. Everyone who stayed loyal when it would have been easier not to."

The names landed exactly where she'd intended them to, and I felt the careful composure I'd built over two weeks in this palace begin, quietly, to fracture.

"He's not asking you to betray your husband," Khanna continued, her voice softening into something closer to pleading. "Not truly. He's asking you to protect what's left of the family that raised you. That's all. Small things. Nothing that would put Alkane himself at risk. Just enough to give Father room to negotiate from strength instead of ruin."

I sat with the box unopened between us for a long moment, turning over everything I'd learned since arriving, corridors and schedules and the particular hour Alkane preferred to walk the training grounds alone before the day's council session, small unremarkable details I hadn't even realized I'd been cataloguing until Khanna's question made me count them.

It would be so easy. That was the thing I hadn't expected, sitting there with my sister's hand still wrapped around mine. I had told myself, in the days since arriving, that loyalty to Alkane wasn't the question at all, that my only real loyalty was to honesty itself, to being a woman who didn't lie regardless of who benefited from the lie.

But Bess's face in my doorway the morning the horns sounded. Harwin's hands pressed that small wooden wolf into mine. The pup, who I hadn't seen or heard from since I left, who might already be gone for all I knew, sold or abandoned or simply forgotten by whoever inherited the kennels now that House Clifton no longer controlled them.

My father had built his entire strategy on knowing exactly which threads to pull, and I hated sitting there, how well he still understood me despite everything.

"I don't know if I can do this," I admitted, quieter than I meant to, the honesty slipping out before I'd decided whether I trusted her enough to hear it.

Khanna's grip tightened. "You don't have to decide today. Just take the box. Think about it. No one has to know what you choose until you've chosen it."

I took it.

I want to be honest about that, because it would be easier to tell this differently, to say I refused outright and sent her away with nothing, the way a braver woman might have. But I took the box, and I carried it back to my chambers that evening, and I sat with it unopened on the table for the better part of an hour, staring at the careful wrapping paper as though it might tell me something the letter hadn't.

I thought of Alkane's question in the courtyard, blunt and direct in a way I'd almost respected at the time. ‘If your father approached you, would you do it?’

I don't know, I'd told him. And I had meant it then, the honest uncertainty of someone who genuinely didn't know her own limits until they were tested. I hadn't expected the test to arrive so soon, or to feel so much like love rather than betrayal.

That was the part I hadn't accounted for. It would have been simpler if my father's request felt like cruelty, easy to refuse, easy to resent. Instead it felt like Khanna's hand around mine, like Bess's frightened face, like every ordinary kindness this house had shown me even while it prepared me, all along, to be spent.

I opened the box eventually, unable to sit with the uncertainty any longer.

Inside, beneath a folded silk scarf that served as the actual wedding gift, lay a small blank ledger and a short list of questions in my father's hand, precise, specific, each one carefully calibrated to seem harmless in isolation. Which advisors attended private council sessions. Whether the King slept with guards posted inside his chambers or only at the doors. How often he rode the northern border himself rather than sending generals in his place.

Nothing that would immediately endanger him, I told myself, reading through the list twice. Nothing that couldn't be explained away as idle curiosity if anyone found it. Small things, the way Khanna had promised. The kind of small things that could still, if I let them, become something considerably larger.

I didn't sleep well that night, turning the ledger over in my mind long after I'd hidden it beneath a loose floorboard near the window, the same instinct that had made me hide my mother's ring in my underskirt, guiding my hands now toward concealment rather than immediate honesty.

I told myself I hadn't decided anything yet. I told myself keeping the ledger wasn't the same as using it, that there was still time to burn it the way I'd burned the note, still time to walk into Alkane's study and tell him plainly what my father had asked of me.

But I didn't do that, not that night, and lying awake with the moon painting the same silver light across my ceiling that had greeted me my first morning here, I understood something uncomfortable about myself that I hadn't fully faced until now.

I wasn't simply a woman caught between two men fighting a war neither of them had asked my permission to drag me into. I was, despite every honest thing I'd told Alkane in that courtyard, still my father's daughter in at least one respect. I had learned, the same as he had, how to hold a secret close and let no one see the shape of it until I'd decided what to do with it.

I thought of Alkane at breakfast, direct and unflinching, admitting without hesitation that he intended to make my life difficult and offering no apology for it. I thought of the particular, careful honesty he seemed to expect from me in return, the honesty I'd been so quick to promise him in the courtyard.

I hadn't lied to him yet.

But I understood, staring at the ceiling until the candles burned down to nothing, that I hadn't told him the whole truth either, and the space between those id things had already begun to feel considerably more dangerous than either one alone.