MOONBOUND TO THE MERCILESS KING

DINNER FOR ONE

KAEL

I did not eat with her.

I had been very clear about that with Maren.

Seraphine was to have her meals brought to the dining room, a comfortable but contained space near the east wing.

I ate in the study, as I always did, because meals taken alone were efficient and meals taken with other people were opportunities for exactly the kind of entanglement I had spent eleven years avoiding.

Tonight, however, I could not eat.

I sat at my desk with food going cold at my elbow and read the same page of the territorial report three times without absorbing a single word, because part of my attention — an infuriatingly large and growing part — was occupied by the low, persistent hum of the mate bond pulling southwest toward the east wing.

She was awake. I knew that without question. And she was thinking hard about something, because the bond, when it was active, transmitted emotion rather than words, and what I was receiving from her direction was the particular quality of silence that meant someone was turning something over and over in their mind, examining it from every angle.

She had found the book.

I had known she would eventually — Maren had never quite managed to be as subtle as she believed, and Seraphine struck me, even in our limited interactions, as the kind of person who looked at the spaces between official narratives and asked questions about what had been left out.

Still.

The speed of it had been somewhat startling.

She'd been here less than forty-eight hours.

I pushed the report aside and stood, moving to the window.

The north tower was visible from here — my private space, the place where Lysa's portrait still hung on the wall because I had never been able to order it removed, and also the place where I kept the records the official histories had purged.

Seraphine's instinct had been correct.

The answers were there.

I had told her to stay out of it.

She was not a woman, I was beginning to understand, who treated instructions as commands.

She treated them as data.

She would weigh them, consider them, and then make her own determination about whether following them was consistent with her own judgment.

This should have annoyed me.

Instead I found myself standing at the window with my hands clasped behind my back and experiencing something dangerously close to interest.

She was afraid.

I had felt that in the throne room — the spike of it when my guards brought her in, carefully controlled but present.

She was afraid, and she had come anyway, and once she was in front of me, she had decided that fear was less useful than her spine, and she had used the spine.

I wasn't offered. I was sold.

Nineteen years old. From a pack whose Alpha had barely enough power to keep the lowland wolves from absorbing them.

She had no allies here, no power base, no information, and no leverage, and she had stood in my throne room and told me the truth about her situation without a single instinct toward softening it.

Lysa had been like that.

The thought arrived without warning and I shut it down immediately, the way I had learned to shut things down over years of practice — not with force, which left bruises, but with deliberate, controlled redirection.

I turned from the window and picked up my report again.

The Southern Pack boundaries needed reviewing. There had been incursions from across the border for the third time in as many months, and my Beta, Cassius, had requested permission to post a permanent watch.

I approved it.

Made notes on the proposed watch rotation. Moved to the next report.

The bond hummed, southwest

Don't,

I told it, with the part of me that had gotten surprisingly good at arguing with things it could not actually speak to.

It hummed again, with the particular quality of something that had no interest in my instructions.

I set down the pen.

Eleven years. In eleven years, I had rebuilt the pack from the inside of grief outward.

I had razed the Sovereign Court and created something better in its place — advisory councils with distributed power, so that no single faction could ever again accumulate enough to act as the Court had acted.

I had made the Vael Mountains the single most stable political territory in the wolf world.

I had done it alone, by choice, because alone was the only configuration in which I could guarantee no one would die for my sake.

And then the Moon Goddess — with what I could only characterise as catastrophically poor timing — had decided that was enough suffering, or perhaps that I had become tediously stable and needed disrupting, and had sent me a nineteen-year-old omega from Cresthaven with dark eyes and a spine made of iron.

My wolf had not been quiet since the throne room.

He paced, even now, restless in the way he only ever was when something he wanted was within range and he was being prevented from having it.

He had paced like this for three days eleven years ago, between the moment I found Lysa and the moment she died.

I remembered it with perfect, horrible clarity.

The difference was that Lysa had been gone before I could do anything to prevent it.

Seraphine was alive. Was here. Was three floors below me and one wing over, turning over everything she'd read in the library and clearly planning something.

I needed her to leave.

The thought was immediate and honest and came directly from the part of me that remembered, with complete accuracy, what it felt like to hold someone and feel them stop.

If she stayed — if the bond deepened, the way bonds did when mates shared space over time — I would not be able to maintain the distance. And without distance, she was in danger.

Every enemy I had ever made knew the only way to wound me was through the people I cared for. I had eliminated the Court, yes.

But there were others.

There were always others.

A knock at the study door.

"Enter."

Cassius. My Beta was a broad man with a soldier's economy of expression and the rare quality, in a subordinate, of knowing when honesty was more useful than comfort.

He had been with me for eight years. He was the only person in the Keep allowed to enter without announcement.

He surveyed the cold meal on my desk and said nothing about it.

"The southern watch rotation has been sent," he said. "And." He paused. "The girl."

"Her name is Seraphine."

A brief pause. Cassius was too disciplined to show surprise, but I felt it in the half-second before he continued.

In eleven years, I had never bothered to give any of the Keep's staff their full names in conversation.

"Seraphine," he said carefully. "Maren reports she spent three hours in the library today."

"I know."

"She went directly to the historical section."

"I know."

"And Maren believes she found the Steward's account."

"She did. I intercepted a conversation." I looked at the report without reading it. "She knows about Lysa."

Cassius was silent for a moment. "Is that — "

"I don't know yet." I set the report down.

"She's more perceptive than I anticipated. More direct. She doesn't defer reflexively the way most omegas from tributary packs would." I considered. "She told me this morning she was going to find out what happened."

"And your response?"

"I told her to stay out of the north tower."

Cassius looked at me steadily. "So she'll be in the north tower by end of week."

"Almost certainly."

My Beta studied me for another moment. Then: "Kael. The bond."

"Not a conversation I'm having."

"It needs to be — "

"Cassius."

He stopped. Held my gaze for the three seconds it took both of us to acknowledge he would not push further tonight.

"Get some sleep," he said finally. "You look like you haven't."

He left. The study settled back into silence.

Southwest, the bond hummed with the particular rhythm of someone finally falling asleep.

I sat in my chair in the dark for a long time, and did not sleep at all, and tried very hard not to think about the fact that for the first time in eleven years, I had told someone Lysa's name.

Her name, and that she had died.

And the girl from Cresthaven hadn't looked at me with pity.

She had looked at me like she understood something about carrying weight that was too heavy, and like she had decided — without asking my permission — that she was going to help me set it down.

I didn't know whether to be furious or undone.

I suspected, by morning, I would be both.