The Rogue’s Stolen Bride

Chapter Seven: The Dreaming

Kaida

“Just a few bites,” Maggie said, for what felt like the hundredth time. She was crouched in front of me, holding a bowl of hot soup under my nose as though the smell alone might tempt me. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’re never hungry when you’re anxious, and you’re always anxious, so by that logic you’d never eat at all.” She pushed the bowl closer. “Eat.”

I turned my face away. The smell of the soup, which was perfectly good soup, turned my stomach. Two days. I had two days left of my own life before my father loaded me into a carriage and sent me off to a vampire’s keep like a parcel.

I pushed the bowl away gently but firmly. Maggie gave me the look — the one that was equal parts exasperation and love — and set it on the table beside my bed.

“At least drink some water,” she said.

I drank some water. It seemed easier than arguing.

She moved around my chamber quietly after that, banking the fire, drawing the heavy curtains against the last pale light of evening, laying out my nightgown. Maggie never needed to be told what to do. She just did it, efficiently and without fuss, and I was so grateful for her in that moment that my throat tightened.

“Maggie.”

“Mm?”

“Whatever happens—”

“Stop,” she said firmly, not turning around.

“I just want you to know—”

“Kaida.” She turned then, and her dark eyes were very bright. “Nothing is going to happen. Not to you. Not on my watch.” She crossed the room and took my face in her warm hands, the way she had done since I was a girl waking from nightmares. “Now get into bed.”

I got into bed.

She tucked the blankets around me with more force than was strictly necessary, smoothed my hair back from my face, and pressed a firm kiss to my forehead. “Sleep,” she ordered, and blew out the candle.

But I didn’t sleep.

I lay in the thick darkness listening to the sounds of the manor settling around me. The distant bark of one of the yard dogs. The creak of old timber. The wind finding its way through the gap under my window that the carpenter had been promising to fix for two years. My mind refused to be still, turning over the same thoughts again and again like stones in a river, wearing them smooth without resolving anything.

Two days.

I thought about Ben’s face when he’d told me to just be good. I thought about Riley’s fierce, helpless fury. I thought about Lord Vance’s cold smile and his untouched cup of wine, and the way he had said I am now your son in law as though it were already done, already inevitable, as though I had never had any say in the matter at all.

I thought about a rogue mercenary sitting alone in a dark corner of a tavern with no money in his pocket and dark eyes that seemed to be laughing at me.

Outside my window the sky slowly lightened from black to the deep blue of early dawn. The yard dogs fell silent. The wind dropped. The manor held its breath.

And finally, against every intention, I slept.

At first there was nothing. Just the soft, weightless dark of deep sleep.

Then, slowly, the darkness changed. It thickened and deepened, becoming something richer and more textured than ordinary night. It had a quality to it, like velvet, or like deep water. Beautiful and suffocating in equal measure.

I was standing in a room I had never seen before.

It was vast and cold, with ceilings so high they disappeared into shadow. The walls were pale stone, hung with tapestries so old their colors had faded to ghosts of themselves. Tall candles burned in iron stands, but their light seemed to go nowhere, swallowed by the darkness before it could reach the corners. Everything was still. Everything was silent. The kind of silence that had been there so long it had become its own presence.

And then I felt him.

I didn’t see him at first. I just felt him, the way you feel a change in the weather before the clouds arrive. A pressure in the air. A drop in temperature. Something ancient and magnetic and deeply, deeply dangerous pressing against my consciousness like a hand against glass.

Lord Vance materialized from the shadows the way shadows sometimes do, as though he had simply decided to take a different form. He was exactly as I remembered him. Tall, pale, impossibly elegant. Those golden eyes found me immediately, and something moved in them that made my breath stop in my chest.

He knew I was here.

Not only did he know, but he wasn’t surprised.

“There you are,” he said softly. His voice was even more beautiful here, in this place, stripped of the awkward mechanics of the waking world. It moved through me like music. Like something I hadn’t known I was hungry for until I heard it. “I wondered when you would come.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said. My own voice sounded thin and far away.

A faint smile curved his lips. “And yet here you are.” He moved toward me and I should have stepped back. I meant to step back. My feet refused to cooperate. “Do you know what you are, little wolf?”

“I’m Kaida Hawkins,” I said, which was possibly the most foolish answer I had ever given to any question.

Something flickered in those golden eyes. Amusement, perhaps. Or something older and harder to name. “You are so much more than that,” he said softly. “You are something I have been searching for, for a very long time.”

He was close now. Too close. I could feel the cold radiating from him, but it wasn’t unpleasant the way I expected it to be. It was like stepping into a cool room on a fever-hot day. In the dream light he was almost unbearably beautiful, more beautiful even than he had seemed in my father’s hall. Every feature was so perfectly sculpted it seemed less like something that had been born and more like something that had been carved — by a hand that had taken its time and spared nothing. He was flawless in the way that only things without warmth or breath can be truly flawless. My wolf stirred uneasily inside me, but even she seemed confused, torn between the instinct to flee and something else, something I didn’t have a name for yet.

His hand came up slowly and his cool fingers brushed my jaw, tilting my face up toward his. And the terrible thing, the thing that shamed me most when I thought about it later, was that I didn’t pull away. I stood there in the cold and the candlelight and I let him touch me, and some traitorous part of me found it beautiful. He was like a masterpiece hanging in a gallery — something you could lose yourself in, forgetting entirely that it had no heartbeat.

“You could stop fighting,” he murmured. “You could simply—”

And that was when I felt it.

Something warm.

It came from nowhere and everywhere at once, cutting through the cold beauty of Vance’s dream like a shaft of sunlight through deep water. My wolf lifted her head. Every instinct I had swung like a compass needle finding north, away from the cold golden pull of the vampire and toward something else entirely.

I saw it for only a moment.

A wolf. Enormous and black as a moonless night, standing at the very edge of my perception. Just standing there. Watching. Its eyes were midnight blue, steady and achingly familiar in a way I couldn’t explain, and the sight of them hit me somewhere so deep and so fundamental that Vance’s spell shattered like glass.

I gasped and wrenched myself backward.

“Interesting,” Vance said softly, behind me. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded thoughtful. Almost pleased. “Very interesting indeed.”

I ran toward the warm darkness and the black wolf and I woke up.

I sat bolt upright in my bed, my heart hammering, the blankets twisted around me. Grey morning light was pressing through the curtains. My skin was cold and damp with perspiration.

I sat there for a long moment, breathing.

Vance’s face faded quickly, the way dreams do. But the wolf stayed with me. Those midnight blue eyes, looking at me like they knew me. Like they had always known me.

I pressed my hand against my chest and felt my heart gradually slow.

Outside my door I could hear Maggie beginning to move around. The ordinary sounds of morning. Real and warm and blessedly alive.

I didn’t tell her about the dream.