THE CRIMSON MOON PACT

The First Blade

The attack came eight days later, in the hour before dawn, when the palace was at its quietest and Wren was at her least prepared for it.

She had fallen into an uneasy rhythm since the conversation in her rooms, mornings spent enduring court etiquette lessons from a woman named Old Miren who clearly considered the entire assignment beneath her, afternoons spent walking the palace gardens alone because it was the only time of day the corridors were empty enough to think, evenings spent at dinners where Alaric had begun, cautiously, to talk to her about matters more substantial than politeness. She had not decided what to make of him yet. She had decided even less what to make of the fact that she had stopped dreading those dinners the way she had the first night.

She woke to the sound of her window shattering.

There was no time to think, only to move, the way nine years of training had drummed into her body long before her mind caught up. She rolled off the bed and hit the floor as a second object came through the broken glass, something that struck the wall above her headboard and released a cloud of pale smoke that stung her eyes and throat even from across the room.

Wolfsbane. She recognized the smell half a second before her vision started to swim, and understood, with the cold clarity of someone whose life depended on getting the next several seconds right, that whoever had thrown it through her window knew exactly what would incapacitate a wolf fastest.

She dragged herself toward the door on hands and knees, lungs burning, and had just enough presence of mind left to get it open before a figure dropped from the broken window into her room, moving with a speed that marked them as vampire rather than human. Wren did not wait to see whether they were friend or enemy. Nobody friendly came through a window at this hour behind a cloud of wolfsbane smoke.

She threw herself into the corridor and screamed, not a word, just sound, loud enough to carry through stone, and heard answering shouts somewhere down the hall almost immediately. The figure came through the doorway after her, faster than she could outrun in her current state, vision still swimming from the wolfsbane, and she barely got an arm up in time to deflect the blade aimed at her throat, catching it instead across her forearm in a line of fire that told her immediately how close that had come to being fatal.

Then the corridor was full of motion, and someone was between her and her attacker, moving with a speed and violence Wren had not expected from the controlled, careful man she had been having dinner with all week. Alaric had the attacker's blade arm pinned against the wall before Wren had fully processed that he was there at all, and whatever happened in the next several seconds happened too fast for her wolfsbane-clouded vision to follow clearly, ending with the attacker crumpled on the floor and Alaric standing over them, breathing hard, blood on his hands that was not his own.

"Wren." His voice cut through the ringing in her ears, sharper than she had heard it, edged with something that was not quite panic but stood close enough to see it from where he was standing. He crossed to her in two steps and caught her by the shoulders as her knees started to give out, lowering her to sit against the wall rather than let her fall. "Look at me. How much of that smoke did you breathe in."

"Enough." Her voice came out rougher than she intended. "I'll live. Arm's worse than the smoke."

He examined the cut on her forearm with hands that were, she noted distantly, not entirely steady despite how composed his voice remained, and swore under his breath at whatever he found there. "This needs a healer, now, not in an hour. Can you stand?"

"Give me a second." She let her head fall back against the wall, breathing through the wolfsbane haze, and became aware, gradually, of guards flooding into the corridor around them, Seraphine's voice somewhere in the chaos giving orders in a tone that suggested she was furious and frightened in roughly equal measure.

The attacker on the floor was dead, she realized once her vision cleared enough to take in the scene properly, and dead in a way that would make identifying them, or interrogating them, considerably more difficult than it should have been. Alaric had not simply subdued him. He had made very sure the threat would not survive to answer questions, and looking at the controlled fury still visible in his face, Wren understood that this had not been an accident of combat.

"You killed him," she said, once the healer had arrived and begun working on her arm, once the immediate danger had passed enough to let her think clearly again.

"He came through your window with wolfsbane and a blade meant for your throat." Alaric's voice was flat, final. "I am not currently inclined to apologize for that."

"I'm not asking you to. I'm asking why someone who was clearly trying very hard not to leave evidence bothered sending an attacker who could be traced back to them at all, unless they were confident the attacker would never be questioned in the first place." She held his gaze, ignoring the healer's hands on her arm. "Which means either the assassin was disposable enough not to matter if he failed and got questioned, or someone in this palace made very sure he never would be."

Something shifted in Alaric's expression, understanding arriving slow and unwelcome. "You think I was set up to kill him."

"I think it's a very convenient thing, that the one person positioned to end the threat before it could be questioned happened to be you." Wren kept her voice low, aware of how many guards were still in the corridor. "I'm not accusing you. I'm telling you what it will look like to anyone in this court who wants it to look that way."

He was quiet for a long moment, and she watched the realization settle into him the way it had settled into her, the shape of a trap with more than one layer, each one designed to look like something else until it was too late to matter. "Malachi," he said finally, low enough that only she could hear it.

"I don't have proof. Neither do you." She let the healer finish binding her arm, wincing as the wound pulled tight. "But someone just tried to kill me in a palace your uncle effectively runs, using a method specific enough to a wolf's weaknesses that it wasn't chosen carelessly, and the one witness who might have told us who sent him is dead on my floor because the man protecting me had no time to think about anything except keeping me alive."

Alaric's jaw tightened, and for a moment the composed, careful heir she had been having dinner with all week fell away entirely, replaced by something rawer, angrier, more frightened than she had expected him capable of showing in front of her. "I am not going to apologize for choosing to keep you alive over keeping him breathing long enough for questions."

"I'm not asking you to," Wren said again, quieter this time. "I'm telling you we're out of time to pretend this is only politics. Whoever did this wanted me dead tonight, and wanted it to look like exactly the kind of chaos that would either break the pact outright or hand your uncle a war to hide behind. We survived it. That doesn't mean we understand it yet."

He looked at her for a long moment in the wreckage of her ruined room, blood on his hands and fear still not entirely gone from his face, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with duty or the thread the binding was supposed to tie between them, something that felt, uncomfortably, like the first honest thing either of them had let the other one see.

"No," he agreed finally. "We don't. But we're going to find out, together, before the next attempt succeeds where this one didn't."