Dear, God! NO!

The Trap That Bites

I did not leave the keep for two days.

Not because Victor forbade it. Not because the raw skin around my wrists still wept when I flexed my fingers. I stayed because I was thinking, and thinking required stillness, and stillness required swallowing the fury that wanted to send me sprinting back toward Carlin's throat.

Someone had told them I was coming. Someone who knew about the passage beneath the willow, or who knew I would try to reach Vivienne, or both. The list of people who could have done it was terrifyingly short.

Father. Vivienne. Laoise.

I sat cross-legged on the stone ledge in the main hall with my charcoal map spread before me, tracing lines and erasing them. Laoise perched on a broken column near the entrance, mending a tear in her sleeve with thread Mariae had given her. She had not asked me what happened in the cell. She had not asked about the kiss. She waited the way water waits, patient, present, inevitable.

"It wasn't me," she said on the second morning, without looking up from her stitching.

"I didn't say it was."

"You've been staring at the back of my head for an hour. Your heartbeat changes every time I move." She bit the thread clean. "I am bound to your cause, Lila. If I betray you, I cease to exist. That is not metaphor. The river unmakes what it has made."

I believed her. Not because the words were comforting but because Laoise had no reason to elaborate on a lie. She could simply have said nothing.

"Then it's Vivienne or my father," I said. "Or Carlin has someone I haven't considered."

Laoise folded the mended sleeve across her knee. "There is a fourth possibility. Carlin didn't need a spy. He needed a trap. A candle lit in an empty room. A bed freshly made. He anticipated you, not because someone told him your route, but because he knows you."

The thought was worse than betrayal. It meant Carlin had studied me the way I was studying him, and he had predicted my weakness before I recognized it myself.

"Then we use that," I said slowly.

Laoise raised an eyebrow.

"He thinks I'm desperate. Reckless. That I'll keep throwing myself at walls until I break." I pressed my thumb against the charcoal line marking the estate. "So we let him believe he's right. We let the failed attempt look exactly like what he expects, a grief-stricken sister making stupid choices. He'll relax. Pull resources from the forest perimeter because he thinks I've been frightened back into hiding."

Laoise's mouth curved with something that might have been admiration. "And while he relaxes?"

"Sterling's intelligence keeps flowing. Your network keeps building. And Carlin toasts his own cleverness while we map every crack in his foundation."

I sent Laoise to the tributary that afternoon with instructions: reach Sterling, tell him the attempt failed, tell him Carlin's men are confident and careless when they think they've won. Ask Sterling to watch for any loosening of patrols in Dunmore, any shift in guard rotations, any opportunity that Carlin's overconfidence might create.

She also carried a second task. I needed her to trace the information backward.

Who had been in the house that night besides the guards? Had Vivienne been moved before I arrived, or after? Was the candle in her room lit by her hand or someone else's?

Laoise could ask the water, she said. The river remembered what flowed through it, including whispered conversations near its banks.

After she left, I turned my attention to the keep itself.

The ruins were defensible in theory but vulnerable in practice. The walls had gaps wide enough for a man to step through. The tower listed at an angle that suggested one strong wind might finish it. The eastern approach was entirely exposed so anyone coming from Cuitridge could see the smoke from our fire pit a mile out.

I found Mariae sharpening arrowheads by the southern wall and told her what I wanted: a perimeter. Not just sentries but physical barriers. Deadfall traps on the eastern approach, trip lines of braided vine along the northern ridge, and a second fire pit inside the tower where smoke could be vented through the existing cracks without rising visibly above the canopy.

Mariae studied me for a long moment. "You've done this before."

"No. But I've had a lot of time to think about what happens when you don't."

She nodded once and went to find Rorik.

By afternoon, the camp was transformed. Not dramatically, we had eleven people and limited materials, but the intention had shifted. Tomas strung vine lines between trees with surprising deftness, his not-quite-human fingers nimble and sure. Rorik directed the placement of deadfall from a seated position, his one hand gesturing with military precision while his smoke-colored wolf lay beside him like a second sentry. Even the other beings, the quiet ones whose names I was still learning, moved with renewed purpose.

Victor was absent for most of this. He had left before dawn without explanation, which was not unusual, but by the time the light began to amber through the canopy, I noticed his absence like a missing tooth.

He returned as I was hauling a fallen branch toward the eastern gap. I heard him before I saw him, the particular weight of his step, the way undergrowth parted rather than resisted. He emerged from the tree line carrying a dead stag across his shoulders as if it were a scarf.

He dropped the kill near the fire pit. Tomas whooped. Victor ignored the boy, scanned the camp with narrowed eyes, catalogued every change I had made, and then found me.

"You've been busy."

"Someone had to be."

He crossed the clearing toward me. I was filthy, dirt on my arms, bark dust in my hair, sweat darkening the linen tunic Mariae had made. My bandaged wrists ached. I looked nothing like the woman in the wedding gown and nothing like the woman chained in the dark.

Victor stopped close. Closer than necessary. His amber eyes tracked across my face with an expression I couldn't categorize, not predatory, not protective, something searching.

"Your perimeter is good," he said. "The eastern deadfall needs to be twenty paces further out. And the vine lines should be ankle height, not knee."

"Show me."

He did. We worked side by side as the sun descended, adjusting Tomas's lines, reinforcing the deadfall triggers. Victor moved with the economy of someone who had survived alone for over a decade, every gesture purposeful, and I found myself watching his hands more than the work. Those massive scarred hands that had crushed iron and then cradled my bleeding wrists like they were made of glass.

He caught me looking. I didn't glance away fast enough.

"Your wrists," he said.

"They're fine."

"Let me see."

He took my hands before I could protest, turning them palm-up. His clawed thumbs pressed lightly beside the bandages, testing for swelling. The touch was clinical. My reaction to it was not.

"The skin is knitting," he said. "Laoise's salve."

"Mariae's, actually."

"Hm." He didn't release my hands. His thumbs moved in slow circles against my palms, an absent motion, as if he were thinking about something else entirely while his body acted on its own. Then he seemed to realize what he was doing and stopped. His fingers tightened once, briefly, and let go.

"You kissed me," he said. Flat. Like he was reporting weather.

"You had your mouth on my throat. I responded proportionally."

The corner of his lip twitched. Not quite a smile. "Proportionally?"

"Would you prefer I apologize?"

"No." The word came fast. He turned away to adjust a trip line that didn't need adjusting. His shoulders were tense in a way that had nothing to do with physical effort. "I have not...it has been a long time since anyone..."

He trailed off. I waited.

"Eleven years," he said finally, still facing away. "In the forest. With wolves. You lose the language for things. You lose the—" He made a rough gesture with one hand. "The knowing of what to do when someone looks at you like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I am not a monster."

The words hung between the trees. Somewhere behind us, Tomas laughed at something Rorik said. The normal sounds of camp, of people surviving together, framed the silence.

"You're not a monster, Victor."

"You haven't seen everything I am."

"I've seen enough."

He turned back. The amber of his eyes was softer in the fading light, the vertical pupils dilated to something almost round. He looked at me the way he had looked at me in the cell after I kissed him, uncertain, disarmed, stripped of the predator's confidence.

"I don't know what this is," he said. "I don't have the words for it yet."

"Then don't name it." I stepped closer. Close enough to feel the heat radiating from him like a banked furnace. "We have less than fifteen days and a war to fight. We don't need words."

His hand rose, slowly, deliberately and his knuckles brushed my cheekbone. The claws that could tear a man apart ghosted across my skin with impossible gentleness. I leaned into his touch without deciding to, the way a body turns toward warmth.

"Lila." My name in his mouth was a sound I wanted to hear again.

Mariae's voice rang across the camp. "Food's up. If you two are done staring at each other, the boy's eaten half the stag."

Victor dropped his hand. I stepped back. We returned to the fire pit like two people who had not just redrawn the boundaries of what they were to each other.

Laoise returned after dark with three messages tucked into her bodice, delivered through the river network from contacts I had never expected to respond. A miller in Buckton who remembered my father's fairness. A retired magistrate's clerk in Dunmore who had copies of land transfers Carlin thought were destroyed. And a brief, unsigned note from Sterling himself: He's pulling men from the western road. Confident you've been scared off. Patience.

I read them by firelight while Victor sat across from me, close enough that his knee nearly touched mine.

The trap had worked. Not the one Carlin set for me, the one I was setting for him. Let him believe I was broken. Let him drink his wine and pull his mistress onto his lap and congratulate himself on keeping me caged.

I traced the edge of Sterling's note and felt Victor's gaze on me like a physical weight.

Fourteen days. The web was thin but it was growing, and every thread Carlin ignored was one more strand around his throat.