BOUND IN ASH

CHAPTER THREE: THE HEAD MAID

The guard came for her at dawn, unlocking the cuff from the wall but leaving the chains connecting her wrists together, tight enough to bruise.

"Move," he said, and did not wait to see if she would.

Elara stumbled after him through corridors she did not recognize, stone halls that gave way to wider ones, tapestries bearing the Ironclaw crest hanging on walls that had probably been paid for in blood not so different from her own family's. She kept her eyes forward. She had learned that much already, in one night in a cell. Do not look like prey. Do not look like anything at all.

They stopped outside a low door near the kitchens, and the guard knocked twice before shoving it open and pushing her through.

The woman waiting inside was tall, sharp featured, gray threading through dark hair pulled back so tightly it looked painful. She looked Elara over the way one might look over a horse before purchase, assessing, unimpressed.

"So this is her," the woman said, more to the guard than to Elara. "The Ashryn girl."

"Alpha's orders," the guard said. "She serves under you until further notice."

The woman's mouth thinned into something that was not quite a smile. "Wonderful."

The guard left without another word, and the woman circled Elara slowly, taking in the chains, the dirt still clinging to her clothes from the cell floor, the hollow look in her eyes that no amount of sleep would fix.

"My name is Greta," the woman said finally. "I run this household, and every soul that works within it answers to me before they answer to anyone else, alpha included. You will call me Head Maid Greta, or Mistress Greta, depending on my mood that day. You will not call me anything else."

Elara said nothing.

"You will also learn to speak when spoken to," Greta continued, circling back around to face her. "Silence is not obedience here, girl. It is only silence, and I have no patience for it."

"Yes," Elara said, the word tasting like ash in her mouth. "Mistress Greta."

Something flickered in the older woman's expression, something that might have been surprise at how quickly she'd complied, before it smoothed back into cool authority.

"Good. You learn fast. That will serve you well, because I promise you, girl, no one in this household is going to make your life easy simply because you were born a princess somewhere else. Here, you are nothing. You are Ash. You will scrub floors, you will carry water, you will empty chamber pots, and you will do it all without complaint, because complaint earns punishment, and punishment in this pack is not gentle."

Elara held her gaze, and for the first time since the cave, something other than grief moved through her. Something colder. Something that filed away every word Greta said not as a threat, but as information. Every rule was a shape of the cage. And every cage, no matter how well built, had a door somewhere.

She would find it. Whatever it took, however long it took, she would find her way out of this, and she would make certain that when she did, the man responsible for burning her family alive understood exactly what it felt like to lose everything.

"Strip her chains," Greta called to a younger maid hovering near the doorway. "She cannot scrub floors in shackles. But girl—" she turned back to Elara, voice dropping lower, sharper, "—do not mistake removing them for freedom. There is nowhere in this territory you could run that Ironclaw wolves would not find you before you cleared the outer wall. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Mistress Greta."

"Good."

***

The work started immediately and did not stop.

By midmorning, Elara's hands were raw from scrubbing stone floors with lye soap that stung every crack in her knuckles. By midday, her back ached from hauling buckets of water up three flights of stairs, over and over, while household staff walked past her without so much as a glance, as if she were furniture that had simply always been there.

She did not complain. She had meant what she told herself in that cell. Every rule was a shape of the cage, and she intended to learn every single one of them.

It was near evening, carrying a stack of linens down a long corridor she had not walked before, when she turned a corner too quickly and nearly collided directly into someone coming the other way.

She looked up, already halfway into an apology, and the words died in her throat.

Kael Draven stood in front of her, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze, close enough that theverything0 had felt in the courtyard roared back to life instantly, low and violent in her chest, her wolf surging forward beneath her skin with an intensity that frightened her.

He felt it too. She could see it in the way his jaw tightened, the way his gold-flecked eyes darkened, the way his whole body went rigid as if bracing against something.

Neither of them moved for a long moment.

"Watch where you are going," he said finally, voice low and controlled, giving away nothing of what had just passed between them.

"Yes, my lord," Elara said, dropping her eyes the way she had learned to that morning, though every instinct in her screamed to keep looking at him, to study him, to memorize the face of the man who had ended her entire world.

He did not move immediately. She could feel his gaze on her, heavy and unreadable, lingering a beat too long before he finally stepped around her and continued down the corridor without another word.

Elara stood frozen for several seconds after he had gone, linens clutched to her chest, heart hammering so hard she was certain he must have heard it.

She hated him.

She hated him for her mother's hands, still and pale on the kitchen floor. She hated him for her father's blood pooling dark beneath the study door. She hated him for Rowan, caught forever between man and wolf, gold fading out of his eyes before he ever got to finish becoming either.

She hated him.

So why, she thought, resuming her walk down the corridor with shaking hands, did some traitorous part of her chest still feel the ghost of his gaze like warmth she had no right to want?

She pushed the thought down hard, burying it beneath the promise she had made herself in that cave, the one she repeated now like a prayer with no god listening.

I will make him pay. Whatever this bond is. Whatever it wants from me. I will not let it stop me.

She just wished, walking alone through a corridor that was not her home, in a body that suddenly did not feel entirely like her own, that she believed herself completely.

***