Silver Eyes: The Alpha Kings Secret Heir

Chapter 15. Nell - A New Routine

I sat on the edge of the bed with my hand wrapped around Rory’s ankle, the only part of him I could reach without getting in the way, and watched his breathing slowly against his father’s chest. Every morning, I told myself I’d get used to it. Every morning, I didn’t.

Five days had passed since Hollis named Rory his heir. Our days had settled into a routine. Breakfast by the window, then Maelor at ten. His hands were always cold, and he always had more questions. I sat behind Rory during the examination, letting him lean against me when he needed to.

Between surges, Rory didn’t need Hollis holding him. Maelor said the bond was strong enough to carry him from dawn to dusk, as long as Hollis stayed within reach.

Afternoons were for lessons, if you could call them that. Rory asked questions and Hollis answered. Then supper. The evening hold was harder. Rory turned his face into Hollis’s shirt the way he used to turn it into mine. I counted the minutes until I could carry him to bed. Then we tried to sleep. If any of us could. Twenty nights remained until the blood moon.

Each hold took a little longer than the one before. I watched Hollis grip the bedpost on his way to his chair and said nothing. He watched me watch him and said nothing back.

The day before, I’d noticed something else. The silver fur along Rory’s spine had spread a little farther across his shoulders. Not much. Barely the width of my fingernail. I showed Maelor. He examined it twice before telling me to keep watching.

On Wednesday, Hollis had come back from the library carrying a stack of books so high he had to peer around them to see where he was going.

“Found something you might like,” he said, setting them on the rug.

Rory spotted the dinosaur on the top cover and dropped to his knees beside the pile. “That’s a stegosaurus!” He looked up at Hollis. “Did you get all these for me?”

“Yes, every one is for you.”

Rory grinned and pulled a book into his lap. Hollis settled beside him, and soon Rory was pointing out dinosaurs I’d never heard of. By Thursday, he’d decided his father needed lessons. He explained the difference between a stegosaurus and an ankylosaurus, then informed Hollis that a pterodactyl isn’t a dinosaur.

“Are you sure?” Hollis asked.

Rory gave him a look of complete disbelief. “Dad. It’s a flying reptile.”

Now they were lying on their stomachs on the rug, heads bent over a book about Australian dinosaurs.

“What’s that one?” Rory asked, pointing at a picture.

Hollis studied it. “A muttaburrasaurus?”

Rory beamed. “You remembered!”

The smile Hollis gave him was one I hadn’t seen before.

A week earlier, Rory had never met his father. Now he was teaching him about dinosaurs.

I was glad. I was, but there was a strange ache in watching my son find his place here so easily when I still didn’t know where I belonged. I left them to their books and headed downstairs.

I hadn’t been back to the kitchens since we arrived.

I took the servants’ stairs out of habit, but something had changed. The servants looked at me now. Some nodded. A young maid stepped aside to let me through. Six years earlier, I could walk these stairs without anyone giving me a second glance. Now, I wasn’t quite sure what I was.

“My lady,” the maid whispered as I passed.

“I’m not…” I started, but she was already gone, hurrying up the stairs, her tray of clean glasses rattling.

The kitchen was worse, because there I knew everyone. Old Davey at the oven, who used to let me scrape the scone tray. The two Harker sisters, peeling potatoes in their usual spot by the window. Mrs. Pell at the big table, rolling pastry.

When I walked in, the room went quiet. Davey took off his cap. Mrs. Pell put down her rolling pin, wiped her hands on her apron and curtsied. Just a dip of the knee, the one she gave the Council ladies. I stood in the doorway of the room where I’d learned to make pastry, where I’d cried over burnt bread and had my ear pulled for stealing currants, and watched the woman who did the pulling curtsy to me.

“Miss Adair,” she said.

“Don’t.” It came out rougher than I meant it to. “Please. You taught me to make that pastry. You don’t curtsy to me.”

Mrs. Pell studied me a long moment. Her face was kind and closed, both at once. “That was before,” she said.

She picked up her rolling pin and went back to work. Slowly, the room started moving again, careful, the way water moves around a rock.

I went back upstairs. This time, I didn’t take the servants’ stairs.

That night, I couldn’t sleep.

The evening hold had taken nearly five minutes. Afterward, Hollis had sat with his eyes closed, his hand opening and closing on the armrest as if checking it still worked.

I lay awake in the room, listening to Rory breathe through the open door. It was past midnight before I started counting again. Nineteen nights left, and Hollis was already this tired. At four o’clock, I gave up, pulled a jumper over my nightdress and went down.

The kitchen was the only part of High Crest that hadn’t changed. The ovens ticked as they heated. The air smelled of yeast and woodsmoke. Davey sang to himself in the larder. Nobody else was up.

I found the flour where it always was. The salt. The big bowl with a chipped rim. I didn’t let myself wonder whether I was allowed. I measured and mixed, and when the dough came together, I turned it out onto the table and sank my hands into it.

My hands remembered before I did. Heel of the palm, push, fold, turn. Push, fold, turn. The dough was cold and sticky, then smooth, then warm and alive under my palms. For the first time in a week, my shoulders dropped away from my ears, and somewhere inside me, my wolf turned around twice and settled, like a dog by a fire.

When I looked up, Mrs. Pell stood at the end of the table in her dressing gown, her grey plait over her shoulder, watching me.

I stopped kneading. She looked at the dough, my hands, then my face. She took an apron from the hook and held it out. “You’re getting flour all over that jumper,” she said. “Silly girl.”

I took the apron. My eyes stung. I tied it behind my back, and she pulled up a stool. Neither of us said a word while I finished the bread.

The rolls were cooling on the rack when the sun cleared the kitchen yard wall, and I realized I’d missed the dawn hold. His scent reached me before I turned around. Cedar, leather and mountain pepper, and under it, an exhaustion I could almost feel.

Hollis was leaning in the doorway, barefoot, in the previous day’s shirt, his hair a mess.

“Is he…”

“Asleep,” he said. “Out like a light after the hold. You weren’t in your room.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He looked past me at the rack, at the rows of golden rolls, and something in his face changed.

I knew what he was remembering. That last summer, whenever he rode out on dawn patrol, I’d left two warm rolls wrapped in a cloth on the kitchen yard windowsill. I never said they were from me, and he never asked. He’d eat them on the walk to the house, and sometimes he’d glance back at the window. I always ducked out of sight.

He came across the kitchen. On her stool, Mrs. Pell suddenly found the fire fascinating.

Hollis picked up a roll and turned it over in his hand.

“Still warm,” he said quietly.

“They’re always warm. That’s the point.”

He looked at me. He was close now, close enough that I could see the grey in his stubble that hadn’t been there a week before. His hand lifted, slowly, towards my face, and for one wild second I thought he was going to touch me, but he stopped an inch from my cheek.

“You’ve got flour,” he said. “Just there.”

I wiped at it with the back of my wrist. My hand wasn’t quite steady.

Behind us, Mrs. Pell dropped a saucepan lid on the floor with a clang that could wake the whole house.

Hollis stepped back. He kept the roll.

I stacked the rest on a tray. Mrs. Pell draped a cloth over them without a word, and Hollis picked the tray up before I could.

“I can carry that.”

“I know.”

On the back stairs, I stepped over the one that creaked, the way I had every dawn that summer. Behind me, Hollis did the same. Rory was just waking when we reached his room.

He ate three rolls. He had butter on his chin, crumbs in his lap and Spike beside his plate, and chattered at his father about the muttaburrasaurus until Hollis begged for mercy.

After breakfast, I took him into the bedroom to dress him.

“I like it here,” he told me while I brushed his hair.

I kept brushing.

“I like Dad,” he said. He’d been calling him Dad for three days, as easily as if he’d always had one. “I like Mrs. Pell too, and the books. Can we stay?”

“We’re staying until the blood moon,” I said. “Remember?”

“I mean after.”

I put the brush down. He wanted to stay in the house I’d spent six years trying to forget. I searched for something to tell him, but he’d already gone looking for Hollis.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.

That afternoon, while Rory napped and Hollis met with his captains, I went looking for the walled garden.

I took the long way, down the west colonnade, and let my feet decide. They took me where they always used to, to the green wooden gate in the high stone wall at the end of the orchard. On the other side were the frangipani and the magnolia, and the bench where Hollis had once tucked a flower behind my ear and told me I matched the garden.

The gate was locked.

Not with the old latch, which you could lift with a fingernail. With a heavy iron padlock, new and black, its shackle as thick as my thumb.

I tried it anyway. It didn’t move.

On my way back through the kitchen, I asked Mrs. Pell. Her rolling pin paused, just for a second.

“It’s not my place to say,” she said.

I asked Davey. He studied his boots. I asked one of the Harker sisters, who turned pink and said she’d never been there. When I passed Ezra in the colonnade, he looked at me with real sympathy.

“I’m sorry, Nell,” he said. “That’s not mine to answer.”

Somebody in this house had the key to the garden where Hollis and I began.

Nobody would tell me who.