Chapter 7: Four Walls Come Down
1098 Words
POV: Rose
They arrive, all four of them, in the space of about twenty minutes. Rafe, I invited. Cain followed Rafe's scent through the corridor with the territorial instinct of a man who had spent too long circling the edges of a situation and finally decided to come in. Dorian was already in the hallway — he had been looking at my door, which I only found out later. Luca heard voices from the adjacent room and chose the door over his own thoughts, which I understand.
My room is not designed for five people. We manage. They arrange themselves with the unconscious efficiency of people who have been doing this for years, which none of us have, which no one mentions. Cain takes the wall near the door. Dorian takes the chair. Luca sits on the floor with his back to the bed, as if it were perfectly natural. Rafe stands near the window, arms crossed, watching.
I open Lysa's journal to the first marked passage, and I read it aloud.
The room is very quiet while I read.
Lysa was twenty when she entered the Selection. She found her mark at twelve, hid it, and entered voluntarily because she believed the prophecy meant she was meant for it. She describes partial bonds with two candidates — tentative, incomplete, nothing like what I have been experiencing. She describes being watched. She describes the King's private audiences, his warmth, and his questions, always slightly too specific. She describes a growing certainty that she has made a mistake.
Her last entry ends mid-sentence. The King sent for her, she writes, and then the ink stops.
I close the journal. The silence holds for a moment.
Dorian speaks first. He lays out everything he found in the library — the struck names, the removed pages, the cross-referenced file number, the document labeled Completed Cases. He does it without hedging, without softening the conclusion. When he finishes, Cain says three words that I will not repeat. Luca is very still, which is its own alarm signal. I have learned that Luca's stillness means the thing underneath the warmth has come to the surface.
Rafe looks at me. He asks how long I have known it was the King.
Since the first private audience, I say. The way he looked at me. Not at what I am, but at what he has decided to do about it.
You have been there alone with him. Cain's voice is very quiet. That is the version of him I have learned to pay attention to.
I am still here, I say.
He looks at me for a moment. He does not say anything else.
We make a plan. It is incomplete, built on insufficient information, constrained by the fact that we are inside the King's palace and cannot move freely or loudly without triggering exactly the response we are trying to prevent. But we agree on four things, and four things are more than we had an hour ago: share everything learned, move no one alone, give the King no signal that we know, and find the Old Temple that Lysa referenced in the journal's early pages. The one place in Ironmoor, she wrote, that has not been altered to suit the story the King wants to tell.
We talked until well past midnight. At some point, Luca gets water from the bathroom and distributes it with the matter-of-fact ease of someone who is used to being useful in small ways. At some point, Dorian produces the notes he has made over three days, and we go through them systematically. At some point, Rafe stops standing near the window and sits on the floor near Cain, both of them listening with the concentrated attention of men used to planning under pressure.
I am aware, throughout, of the bond — not as a distraction, but as an orientation. The specific weight of each of them in my sense of the room. It is strange, and it is becoming less strange, which is its own strange thing.
We are going through Dorian's timeline notes when I hear it. Footsteps in the corridor, particularly in their rhythm — I have memorized the guards' rotations. These are not the guards.
I stop talking. The room still goes with me. After a moment, the footsteps pause.
We wait. Eleven seconds. Then the footsteps continue, moving away.
When they are gone, Luca says quietly that she stopped outside the door for eleven seconds. He counted.
Selene, I say.
Yes.
No one asks how he knows. We file it alongside everything else: Selene in the corridor at two in the morning, pausing outside my door, either reporting to the King or trying to understand what she stumbled into. Her ambition has always cut both ways. I do not know which way it is cutting tonight.
In the morning, I am summoned to breakfast with the King.
We had agreed I would go — a refusal would signal awareness, and we cannot afford that yet. I go alone, which costs Cain something visible, and I choose not to address it because we do not have time.
The breakfast was pleasant. Aldric is warm, attentive, asks about my comfort, my sleep, and whether I have found the city interesting. I answer everything appropriately. I count the exits. There are two, and both are guarded.
Near the end, almost as an afterthought, he sets down his cup and mentions that one of the candidates withdrew unexpectedly. He asks if I knew the girl. Petra, he says, was her name.
Not well, I say. We spoke briefly on the journey.
A shame, he says warmly. She had such potential.
The warmth in his voice does not reach the sentence. The sentence is something else entirely — deliberate, calibrated, designed to land on me in a specific way. He wants me to understand, without being able to prove I understood. He wants me to know what he is capable of, and to be afraid, and to behave accordingly.
I look at him. I let a trace of the appropriate worry show — just enough, just the kind a young woman in my position might feel being reminded of how easily people disappear. I thanked him for breakfast. I stand, I smile, I walk out of the room with even steps, and I do not run until I am around the first corner and out of the eyes of his guards.
Then I walk very fast back to the others, because we have less time than we thought.
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