Chapter four
1108 Words
Solenne’s POV
He arrived at the morning assembly.
I almost didn’t go. I had stood at the door of my quarters for a long time, dressed and braced, running the calculation I had been running since I woke: whether the dignity of appearing outweighed the cost of it. Whether showing up meant I was strong, or whether it just meant I was still trying to prove something to people who had already made their decision about me.
In the end I went, because not going would have felt like the sitting down, and I was not ready to sit down.
The assembly was held in the outer courtyard, which was already full by the time I arrived. I found a place at the edge of the gathering and kept my attention forward, and I did not look at Caden, who was standing at the front with his father and Mara Sinthe and the specific, composed expression of someone beginning the work of building a new life over the ruins of an old one.
I was doing that too. It was simply taking me longer.
Alpha Grey had just called the assembly to order when the outer gates opened.
The change in the crowd happened before I saw anything. A ripple, moving from the front backward — not noise, but the absence of it, spreading quickly.
I turned to look.
There were four of them. Black-clothed, unhurried, moving through the parted crowd with so much ease. The three behind were guards. I registered them and dismissed them, because it was the one in front that my eyes had found and could not leave.
He had not changed. That was the first thought, and it arrived with a violence that surprised me. He was older. But the face was the same. The angle of it. The quality of stillness in it. The gold eyes, which were moving across the assembled pack with the unhurried attention of someone reading a room they have already decided they own.
Fourteen years.
I had been seven years old, and I had been very small, and he had been a shape in the dark.
He was not a shape now. He was in full morning light, thirty feet away, and he was completely recognizable, and I had nowhere to hide.
“Do not make a sound, Solenne.” My mother’s voice. Clear as the day she said it.
I pressed my feet into the ground and held absolutely still and breathed through my nose and told myself that I was not seven years old and this was not the Hollow and I was not small. I was twenty-one and I had survived everything this pack had thrown at me and I was still standing. I was still here.
The gold eyes moved across the crowd.
They found me. They stopped.
Something happened in his face. Not much — a fraction of a degree of attention. It was there and then it wasn’t, resolved back into that extraordinary blankness before I could be certain I had seen it.
But I had seen it.
He was looking for me.
The cold moved through me from the feet up, clean and fast, the way real fear moves when it arrives honestly. Not the social fear of humiliation, I had lived with that for years and it felt nothing like this. This was the older kind.
He began walking toward me.
The crowd parted.
I did not move. I had nowhere to move to, and running would have been the worst thing — not because of the pride, though there was that too, but because I understood, with a clarity that the dream had sharpened and last night had made absolute, that whatever was about to happen, I needed to meet it with my eyes open.
He stopped in front of me.
Up close, the gold of his eyes was stranger than it appeared from a distance. It was flatter and more opaque. The eyes of someone who had had no heart.
He looked at me for a moment.
Then he said, quietly, with the same tone as a man completing a thought he had been in the middle of for some time. “There you are.”
Three words.
There you are.
I looked at the man who had killed my parents. I looked at his hands, the scar on the right one catching the morning light.
“You,” I said. My voice came out level. I was proud of it.
His expression did not change.
“You were at the Hollow,” I said. “The day my parents were murdered. I saw you.”
Something shifted in the crowd behind him. I was dimly aware of it, the quality of the silence changing, becoming more careful.
He did not deny it. He did not confirm it. He simply looked at me with those opaque gold eyes and said, “You will come with me.”
“I will not.”
“You…”
“I know what you are.” I kept my voice low, because I was not performing this for the pack. This was between him and me and fourteen years of cold mornings and a dream I could not stop having. “I know what you did. Whatever you want from me, the answer is no. It will always be no.”
The silence around us had become more pronounced than ever.
The King looked at me for a long moment.
Then, for the first time, something crossed his face that I could not immediately name. It was brief. It might have been surprise. It might have been something else entirely.
“You saw me didn’t you,” he said.
It was not a question.
“Yes. I saw every single thing.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, “And you are still standing here.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am because I am not afraid of you.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Something unreadable, and somehow, in its unreadability, more dangerous than anything else that had happened in the last twelve hours.
“Good,” he said. “Then we understand each other. This makes it easier.”
He reached for my hand.
I refused and moved backwards.
“I am not going to play any of your sick games. Not after you killed my parents!”
The crowd gasped but he didn’t look affected. Instead, he looked amused at my outburst.
“Who said anything about playing a game? You are going to fulfil your duty as my Queen.”
- Writer
