BOUND IN ASH

CHAPTER SIX: THE DINNER OF TWELVE

Kael did not sleep.

He lay awake through most of the night, staring at the ceiling of his chambers, replaying the feel of her skin so close to his mouth, the way his wolf had gone utterly silent for the first time in weeks the moment her scent filled his lungs. He had spent every night since the naming ceremony fighting a restlessness he could not name. One night in that garden, and it had gone quiet.

He hated how much that terrified him.

By morning, he had built the wall back up brick by brick, the same way he always did, burying the memory of the garden beneath duty and distance until it felt almost survivable again. He told himself the moment had meant nothing. He told himself a great many things that morning that he did not fully believe.

He found Elara in the corridor outside the kitchens, carrying a tray toward the candidates' wing, and something in him seized at the sight of her before he crushed it back down.

"You are late," he said, though she was not.

Elara stopped so quickly the tray nearly tipped in her hands. Her whole body went taut the moment she registered his voice, the same way it always did now, some instinct beneath her skin bracing itself before her mind had even caught up. She did not understand it. She only knew that whenever he was close, something in her chest reacted without her permission, and she hated it, hated that her body would not simply behave the way the rest of her wanted it to around the man who had destroyed her family.

"My lord," she said, eyes dropping instantly to the floor. Fear first. It was always fear first with him, sharp and immediate, the kind that lived in her stomach and did not fully leave even after he walked away.

"The candidates are waiting for their morning service. I expect better discipline from my household staff."

It was unfair, and she knew it was unfair, but she had learned quickly that pointing out unfairness earned punishment rather than correction in this palace.

"Yes, my lord," she said, voice carefully flat, carefully empty. "I will try to disappoint you less."

Something flickered across his face at that, gone before she could read it, and then he turned and walked away without another word, leaving her standing in the corridor with the tray shaking slightly in her hands and her heart still beating too fast for reasons she refused to examine.

She told herself it was only fear. She told herself that every single day now, and some days she almost believed it.

***

The courting dinner that evening was a slow, gilded torture for everyone involved, though for very different reasons.

The great hall had been transformed for the occasion, long tables set with silver and candlelight, the twelve candidates arranged carefully around Kael's seat at the head, each one dressed to outshine the others, each one competing for a fraction of his attention that he seemed entirely unwilling to give.

Elara served that night, as she had been ordered to, moving silently along the edges of the hall with pitchers of wine, refilling glasses, clearing plates, doing everything in her power to remain invisible in a room where invisibility was the only safety she had left.

It did not entirely work.

"You there," Bianca called out partway through the meal, gesturing sharply toward Elara with two fingers. "My glass."

Elara crossed to her immediately, refilling the wine without meeting her eyes, careful and quick, the way she had learned to move around anyone in this palace who held power over her.

"What is your name," Bianca asked, once the glass was full, watching her with a sharpness that made Elara's skin prickle.

"Ash, my lady."

"Ash." Bianca repeated it slowly, gaze flicking once, briefly, toward Kael at the head of the table, who had gone very still despite pretending to be engaged in conversation with the candidate beside him. "How poetic."

Elara said nothing, retreating as quickly as courtesy allowed, uneasy without fully understanding why, only sensing that something had passed in that exchange that she was not meant to understand.

Further down the table, two of the other candidates were far less subtle in their cruelty.

"I heard she is the last of some fallen pack," one murmured to another, not troubling to lower her voice much. "Ashryn, I believe. Practically royalty once, and now look at her. Serving wine like a common girl."

"How the mighty fall," the other agreed, laughing softly behind her hand. "Do you suppose she still thinks herself a princess underneath all that? Some of them never learn."

Elara's hands tightened around the pitcher she carried, knuckles white, though her face remained carefully blank. She had absorbed worse from Petra, from the maids, from the smaller cruelties woven through every day in this palace. It still stung. She simply no longer let it show.

Kael, watching from the head of the table with a candidate's voice washing over him unheard, caught the exchange, caught the way Elara's shoulders went rigid, and felt something hot and unfamiliar twist low in his chest, something dangerously close to protectiveness that he strangled back down before it could fully form.

He said nothing. He told himself it was not his place to say anything, that intervening would only draw more attention to something he was actively trying to bury, and he sat through the rest of that dinner watching twelve candidates compete for a throne he had already privately decided none of them would ever actually sit beside him on, while the one person in that hall who unsettled him most stood silently against the wall, absorbing insult after insult with a stillness that cost her more than anyone in that room understood.

***

The dinner finally ended near midnight, candidates retiring to their chambers in a rustle of silk and gossip, and Elara stayed behind to help clear the hall long after the last of them had gone.

She was gathering the final plates when she felt him behind her, a sudden warmth prickling along the back of her neck that told her he was close before she ever heard his footsteps. Her whole body reacted instantly, breath catching, pulse climbing, and she hated it, hated the way her feet nearly turned toward him on instinct before she forced herself still.

"You handled tonight well," Kael said, voice quieter than it had been in the corridor that morning.

Elara did not turn to face him immediately, focusing hard on the plate in her hands instead, on anything that was not the low pull toward him she could not explain and did not want. "Thank you, my lord."

He did not leave. She could feel him standing there behind her, close enough that awareness prickled hot across her skin, and it took everything in her not to shiver, not to lean back toward whatever it was in him that her body seemed to want despite everything her mind knew about him.

"Look at me," he said, quiet, almost rough.

Elara froze. Every instinct told her not to. Every lesson this palace had taught her said obedience was safer than defiance, and yet turning to face him now felt like a different kind of danger entirely, one she did not have a name for.

She turned anyway.

His gaze was dark, unreadable, fixed on her with an intensity that made her breath catch in her throat, and for a moment neither of them moved, the space between them charged with something neither understood nor wanted to.

"Why do you look at me like that," she asked before she could stop herself, voice barely above a whisper, more afraid of the question than of him in that moment.

Something shifted behind his eyes, guarded instantly, and whatever answer had almost surfaced disappeared behind the same wall he always retreated to. "Get some rest," he said instead, voice hardening back into command. "Long day tomorrow."

He turned and walked away, and Elara stood alone in the empty hall, tray forgotten in her hands, her heart still hammering from nothing more than the weight of his gaze and a nearness she could not explain.

She pressed a shaking hand to her chest, furious at her own body for responding to a man who had taken everything from her.

She did not understand what was happening to her. She only knew, standing alone in that hall with candlelight guttering low around her, that it frightened her more than the chains ever had.

***