Chapter 8: The Question She Can't Answer
1019 Words
By the time Kane returned to the locked room, the eastern sky had begun its slow gray shift toward dawn, and Wren was sitting on the edge of a dust-sheeted chaise, still wrapped in the blanket Elder Maren had pressed into her hands sometime in the long hours she'd been made to wait, listening to muffled shouting she couldn't fully interpret and trying not to imagine the worst.
She stood the moment he entered, searching his face for answers before he'd said a single word, and whatever he saw in her expression made something in his chest tighten uncomfortably, made him wish, absurdly, that he could have brought her better news.
"Tell me," she said. Not a request. Something closer to a demand, and he found he didn't mind it.
"There was an intruder. Vale colors." He watched the words land, watched her go pale in the gray pre-dawn light filtering through the high window. "He's dead. Killed himself before we could question him properly. But he was carrying a message confirming that someone here — inside this house — already told Vale's people what happened last night."
"That's not possible. It's been hours, Kane. A handful of hours between Maren saying that name to me and now."
"I know exactly how long it's been, Wren. That's the entire problem." Kane crossed the room, stopping close enough that she had to tip her head back to hold his gaze, close enough that she could see the exhaustion carved into the lines around his eyes, the particular strain of a man who'd spent the last several hours doing math he desperately didn't want to be doing and arriving at the same grim answer every time. "Someone in this house is loyal to Vale, or paid by him, or simply frightened enough of him to sell information the moment it seemed valuable. Someone heard what Maren said to you, or saw the mark for themselves, or pieced together enough fragments to be dangerous — and they didn't hesitate for even a moment. That tells me everything I need to know about how quickly this ends badly if we don't move faster than they can."
"Move how?" Her voice had gone thin, stripped of its usual careful control, the composure she wore like armor finally starting to crack under the weight of everything she'd learned in less than a day. "I don't even know what I am yet, Kane. Yesterday I was a maid who brought you water. Today you're asking me to survive a war I don't understand, over a bloodline I only learned I might belong to a few hours ago, in a house full of people I don't know I can trust."
It was the first time she'd said his name without the title in front of it. He noticed — of course he noticed, he'd noticed everything about her since the moment she'd walked into his study without a trace of fear on her face — and he suspected, from the flicker of something startled in her own eyes, that she'd noticed the slip too, a moment too late to take it back.
"I'm not asking you to fight a war," he said, quieter now, some of the Alpha's flat authority softening into something more careful. "I'm asking you to trust me long enough to survive the next few days. After that, I promise you — you'll have choices again. Real ones. Right now you don't, and I would rather you be angry with me for being honest about that than comfortable with a lie that gets you killed."
"Trust you." She laughed, short and humorless, and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders like it might offer some protection against everything closing in around her. "I met you yesterday, tearing apart your own study with your bare hands. I don't even know if the things you're telling me are true, or if I'm just a very convenient answer to a mystery you've apparently been carrying since you were seven years old."
The accusation landed harder than she'd probably intended it to, and for a moment something behind his eyes flickered — old, private grief he usually kept buried far too deep for anyone in this house to see, let alone a maid he'd known for two days.
"You're right not to trust me," he said finally, and the honesty in it seemed to cost him something. "I wouldn't, in your position. I'd assume the worst of anyone offering me answers this convenient, this fast. But I'd ask you to consider one thing before you decide I'm lying to you."
"What's that?"
"My father spent twenty-two years believing your entire bloodline was dead, because he made absolutely sure of it, personally, with his own hands. If I wanted you gone, Wren, the easiest thing in the world would have been to say nothing at all last night. Let Maren keep her suspicions to herself. Let whatever happens to unclaimed threats against this treaty happen to you, quietly, without my involvement, without my name anywhere near it." His jaw tightened, the words coming harder now, like he was forcing himself through something he'd rather not say aloud. "Instead I opened a door that's been locked since before I could grow a beard, and I've spent the entire night trying to find out who wants you dead badly enough to burn down my own wall just to confirm it. That's not the behavior of a man protecting a secret, Wren. That's the behavior of a man trying to protect a person."
Wren didn't answer right away. In the gray, thinning dark, she studied his face — the exhaustion, the barely restrained tension still coiled beneath his skin, the particular rawness of a man who'd clearly meant to say less than he had and found himself unable to stop — and felt something in her careful, guarded chest crack open just slightly, against every single instinct she'd spent her whole life obeying without question.
"Okay," she said finally, so quietly it was almost lost to the room entirely. "What happens now?"
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