THE KING'S UNWANTED MATE

WHAT THE PALACE LOOKS LIKE AT FIVE IN THE MORNING

Chapter Three

She woke before dawn without knowing why.

No sound. No movement. Just the particular alertness of a body that had decided sleep was finished whether she agreed or not. She lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling of a room she didn't recognise, and then she remembered and the remembering settled over her like something physical. Like weight.

She sat up.

The room was dark except for the light coming under the door — warm, low, the lighting of a corridor kept on through the night. Her phone was on the bedside table. She didn't remember it arriving. Someone had brought it while she was asleep, left it without waking her, and she found she had a complicated feeling about that — about the efficiency of it, the consideration, the complete absence of any requirement that she acknowledge it.

She was used to people requiring acknowledgment.

She picked it up.

Eleven missed calls from Kara. Three from a number she didn't recognise. A text from Kara that said *where are you I am losing my mind* and another that said *Selene I swear if you don't answer me* and a third, sent much later, that said only *okay. okay I think you're okay. call me when you can.*

She typed: *I'm okay. I'll explain later. I promise.*

She set the phone down.

She got up.

---

The corridor outside her room was empty.

She had half-expected someone stationed there — a guard, a attendant, someone whose job was to monitor where she went. There was no one. The corridor stretched in both directions, lit at intervals, the particular quiet of a large building between the hours when the night staff had finished and the day staff hadn't yet begun.

She walked.

Not because she had a destination. Because she had always thought better in motion and her mind had a great deal to work through and standing still in a room she didn't know felt worse than moving through a palace she didn't know.

The palace at five in the morning was different from what she imagined it would be in the day. Quieter, obviously. But also more itself — stripped of the performance that large formal spaces required of the people inside them, the way a face looked different when it wasn't arranged for company. She found a staircase. Took it down. Found a corridor that opened into another corridor that opened into a room that was clearly a library — she could smell it before she saw it, the specific dry warmth of many books in an enclosed space.

She went in.

---

It was the largest room she had ever been in that wasn't a hall.

Floor to ceiling on three walls. A fireplace on the fourth — cold at this hour but with the residual warmth of something that had been burning recently. A reading table in the centre with a lamp that someone had left on, a low warm circle of light in the dark.

She ran her hand along the nearest shelf.

The books were real — not decorative, not arranged for appearance. The spines were worn in different places on different books, the specific wear of books that had been taken down and replaced many times. Margins annotated, she could see through the glass of one half-open volume on the table, in small precise handwriting.

She picked it up.

*A History of the Moon Covenant: Disputed Accounts.*

The annotation in the margin, in that small precise hand, read: *the dispute is the point — see p.347.*

She looked at it for a moment. Then she set it down exactly where she had found it.

She sat in the chair beside the lamp and pulled her knees up and looked at the library around her. At the three walls of books and the cold fireplace and the annotated history and the low circle of light.

She thought about what she was doing here.

Not in the philosophical sense — she understood the practical chain of events that had brought her to this chair in this library at five in the morning. She meant the larger thing. The decision she had made, or that had been made for her, or some combination of both that she hadn't fully sorted out yet.

She had gotten in the car.

She had come to the palace of the Alpha King.

She had fallen asleep in his guest room holding his business card.

She pressed her face into her knees.

*"The library,"* said a voice from the doorway, *"is one of the better rooms."*

She turned.

Draven was leaning in the doorway.

He was dressed but barely — dark shirt, no jacket, the specific quality of someone who was up because they were always up at this hour and not because anything required it. He was looking at the room rather than at her, which she appreciated without knowing why.

*"How long have you been there?"* she said.

*"I wasn't. I heard someone in the corridor."* He looked at her then. *"You wake early."*

*"You do too."*

*"I don't sleep much,"* he said.

*"Why not?"*

He looked at the room for a moment. *"Too much to manage,"* he said. It wasn't self-pity. It was simply a fact stated in the tone of someone who had made peace with a fact long ago.

*"Does it help?"* she said. *"Walking around at five in the morning."*

*"Sometimes,"* he said. *"Does it help you?"*

She thought about it honestly. *"I don't know yet. I've only been doing it for ten minutes."*

He looked at her for a moment. Then he came into the library.

He didn't sit at the table. He went to the far shelf, took down a book with the ease of someone who knew exactly where everything was, and sat in the chair on the other side of the lamp. Not across from her — angled away, looking at the book, giving her the option of conversation or silence without requiring her to choose immediately.

She watched him do this.

*"You know this library very well,"* she said.

*"I've read everything in it,"* he said.

*"Everything."*

*"It's a long life,"* he said, the way someone said something they had said before to other people's surprise, *"and I don't sleep much."*

She almost smiled. She stopped herself for reasons she couldn't fully justify.

*"The book on the table,"* she said. *"The annotations are yours."*

It wasn't a question. The handwriting and the person matched in some way she couldn't articulate — precise, economical, interested in the things underneath the surface of things.

*"Yes,"* he said.

*"You think the dispute is the point."*

He looked up from his book. *"You read my margin."*

*"It was open."*

*"Yes,"* he said. He considered her for a moment. *"The official history of the Moon Covenant has three disputed passages. Most scholars spend their energy arguing which version is correct. I think the dispute itself is more informative than either version."*

*"Why?"*

*"Because someone went to considerable effort to create two versions,"* he said. *"Which means one of them was changed deliberately. Which means someone had a reason for changing it."* He paused. *"History that has been altered is more interesting than history that hasn't. The alteration tells you what someone needed people not to know."*

She looked at him.

*"That's a very particular way of thinking,"* she said.

*"Yes,"* he said. *"It is."*

He went back to his book.

She stayed where she was with her knees drawn up and the lamp between them and the library pressing in warmly on all sides and thought about a man who read disputed histories at five in the morning because he didn't sleep and thought the alterations were more interesting than the text.

*"Draven,"* she said.

He looked up.

*"Last night you said you'd tell me the real reason you came to the parking lot. When you understood it better yourself."* She held his gaze. *"Do you understand it better yet?"*

He looked at her steadily.

*"No,"* he said.

*"But you have a theory."*

A pause. *"Yes."*

*"Tell me the theory."*

He closed the book. Looked at it for a moment. Then looked at her.

*"When my border patrol reported you,"* he said, *"I was in a meeting. With three senior advisors and the representative of Valedorn's ruling council, discussing a trade dispute that has been ongoing for four months and will likely continue for four more."* He paused. *"I excused myself from the middle of that meeting, got in the car, and drove to the Silverstone border. I have been Alpha King for seven years. In seven years I have not left the palace for anything that was not a scheduled engagement."*

She looked at him. *"Something told you to go."*

*"Yes."*

*"And you don't know what."*

*"I have a theory about what,"* he said. *"I'm not ready to tell you the theory because it requires context I haven't given you and I don't want to give you the context until I'm certain it's accurate."*

*"That's very controlled."*

*"Yes,"* he said. *"It is."*

*"Does it ever exhaust you?"* she said. *"Being that controlled."*

He looked at her for a long moment.

*"Yes,"* he said.

It was the most honest thing he had said, she thought. Not because the other things hadn't been true — they had been, she was increasingly certain of that — but because this one came from somewhere slightly less managed. Slightly closer to the actual person rather than the position.

She noted it and didn't draw attention to it, because she suspected drawing attention to it would make him put it back.

*"I want to leave today,"* she said. *"You said the car would take me wherever I wanted to go."*

*"Yes."*

*"I want to go to my friend Kara's apartment. In the city."*

*"Of course."*

*"And I want to come back,"* she said.

He was still.

*"Not because of whatever theory you have that you're not ready to tell me,"* she said. *"Because I have no apartment and no job and I need time to think and I don't have anywhere else to think that isn't inside the situation I'm trying to think about."* She held his gaze. *"One week. I'll stay one week, in the guest room, not as a— not as anything formal. Just as a person who needs somewhere to be while she figures out what comes next."*

*"Yes,"* he said.

*"Just like that?"*

*"Yes."*

*"You're not going to ask me anything? Set any conditions?"*

*"Should I?"*

*"Most people would."*

*"I'm not most people,"* he said. It wasn't arrogance. It was simply — accurate. *"One week. The guest room. No conditions."* He paused. *"Though I'd ask that you tell Sera if you leave the palace grounds. Not because I'll stop you. Because I'll know you're safe."*

She looked at him.

*"That's a condition,"* she said.

*"That's a courtesy,"* he said. *"You can decline it."*

*"No,"* she said. *"It's reasonable."*

He nodded once.

She looked at the library. At the three walls of books and the annotated history and the man on the other side of the lamp who had left a meeting with the representative of Valedorn's ruling council to drive to a parking lot in the rain for reasons he wasn't ready to explain.

*"Draven,"* she said.

*"Yes."*

*"Are you always this—"* She searched for the word. *"Careful?"*

He thought about it. *"Careful is one word for it."*

*"What's another?"*

He looked at the cold fireplace. *"Practiced,"* he said. *"I've been doing this a long time."*

*"Doing what."*

*"Managing things,"* he said. *"People. Situations. Consequences."* A pause. *"It becomes a habit."*

*"Does the habit ever turn off?"*

*"Not often,"* he said.

*"When?"*

He looked at her.

*"Not often,"* he said again.

She heard what he wasn't saying. She didn't push it. She had learned — somewhere in three years with a man who said one thing and meant another — to tell the difference between someone who wasn't saying something because they were hiding it and someone who wasn't saying something because they hadn't found the right words yet.

Draven struck her as someone who was very careful about words. Who said what he meant with precision and did not say the things he couldn't say precisely.

She could work with that.

She didn't know what working with that meant yet. She didn't examine it too closely.

*"I'm going back to sleep,"* she said. She unfolded herself from the chair. *"Or trying to."*

*"The room is comfortable?"*

*"It's bigger than my apartment,"* she said.

*"Was."*

*"Was,"* she said. The word sat in her mouth differently than she expected — not as painful as it should have been. More like something that had already happened and was therefore a fact rather than a wound.

She moved toward the door.

*"Selene."*

She stopped. Turned.

He hadn't moved. He was sitting with the closed book in his hands and the lamp between them and the library around him and he looked — not different from before, not suddenly open or readable, but there was something in the way he was looking at her that hadn't been there in the parking lot. Something that had arrived quietly at some point in the last forty minutes.

*"The book on the table,"* he said. *"Page three forty-seven. If you find yourself awake again before the morning."*

She looked at the annotated history.

*"What's on page three forty-seven?"*

*"The part that was changed,"* he said. *"And a footnote that shouldn't exist but does."*

She looked at him. He looked back. The lamp burned between them.

She picked up the book.

She took it back to her room.

She read page three forty-seven with the specific attention of someone who has been told something is worth reading by a person they are not yet sure they trust but are not yet sure they don't.

The footnote was remarkable.

She read it three times.

Then she lay in the dark with the book on her chest and the lamp off and the palace quiet around her and thought: *whoever he is, he is not simple.*

She wasn't sure yet if that was a comfort or a warning.

She suspected it was both.