Moon-bound to my enemy

Chapter 6

Seraphina's POV

He took me to the east garden, not the formal courtyard near the main hall where pack members crossed constantly, not the training ground where Damon's voice still carried from somewhere beyond the wall. A smaller space. Stone benches worn smooth by weather, a low wall covered in something climbing and green, the kind of place that felt like it had been forgotten about on purpose.

He didn't explain why he chose it. He just walked and I followed and neither of us spoke until the sounds of the estate fell back enough that I could hear my own breathing.

He sat on the edge of the low wall. Not on the bench. On the wall, like someone who hadn't decided yet how long they were staying.

I sat on the bench across from him and we looked at each other in the full morning light for the first time without a table or a crisis or someone else's agenda sitting between us.

"Ask me what you need to ask," I said.

His eyes moved over my face for a moment before he answered. There was something in his expression that he hadn't been wearing inside the study. Something less controlled. Like the careful distance he maintained with everyone had developed a specific small gap in this particular direction.

"What did you know," he said. "Before you came here. About what you were."

"Nothing." The word came out clean and flat because it was true. "My father told me I was representing the pack in a peace arrangement. He didn't tell me what that meant and I didn't ask too many questions because when Gregor Voss has already made a decision, questions are just delayed." I paused. "I knew there was something about me that was different. I've known since I was young. I just didn't know what it meant."

"Different how."

"I could feel things other omegas couldn't. Not emotions exactly. More like — weight. When someone was lying. When something was wrong before it happened. My father thought it was anxiety." I looked at him. "What about you. The dreams."

"My whole life." He said it without drama, which made it worse somehow. "I thought I was going mad. I managed it. I didn't tell anyone because there was no version of that conversation that didn't end with someone trying to remove me from power."

"So you just carried it."

"I am very good at carrying things I shouldn't have to carry alone."

He said it without self-pity and without seeking any from me and I felt something move in my chest that had nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the particular exhaustion in that sentence. The way it matched mine.

"I'm not going to pretend this is simple," I said. "Any of it. A week ago I was in Ironblood territory being managed by a father who treated me like a chess piece. Now I'm sitting in an enemy pack's garden being told a dead god left my name in an ancient document and a council is planning to kill one of us if we don't cooperate." I pressed my hands flat against my knees. "That is a significant amount of information to process."

"It is," he said.

"And yet you're remarkably calm."

"I'm not calm," he said. "I've been running the same three thoughts in a loop since Mara showed me that page and exactly none of them are calm. I am simply very practiced at not showing the loop."

I looked at him. He was looking back at me with that direct, unguarded attention he'd been giving me since the study and I didn't know what to do with it. It wasn't exactly. It was more like precision. Like he looked at everything carefully and he was currently looking at me the same way and finding whatever he was looking for.

"What are the three thoughts," I said.

A pause. Like he was deciding.

"That the Council spent twenty years engineering my life to produce this outcome and I am furious about that in a way I don't have room for right now." He counted it off. "That the document said I was never meant to carry this alone and I have been alone with it for thirty-one years and there is something about that sentence that I can't stop returning to." Another pause. "And that when you read those four lines from Kaelith's instruction and you looked up at me, I understood something I didn't understand before. About what this is. What it could be." He stopped. "That last one is the loudest."

The bond was very still between us. Not pulling. Just a present. Like it was listening.

"What did you understand," I said quietly.

"That he wasn't building a mechanism," Caden said. "He wasn't building a system or a framework or a method of control. He was building an argument." He held my gaze. "For the idea that even a god could be made whole by choosing something."

The morning was quiet around us. The climbing green on the wall moved slightly in a breeze.

I had spent my entire life being someone's least valuable option. The one left over. The one handed off. And I was not naive about what this was — a bond neither of us asked for, a prophecy written before we existed, circumstances designed by people with agendas we hadn't fully mapped yet.

But I was also sitting across from a man who had carried thirty-one years of silence alone and told me about the loop running in his head like it was the most natural thing in the world, like I was someone worth being honest with, like he had looked at me in the study and made a decision about me that had nothing to do with what I was supposed to represent.

"I don't know what I want yet," I told him honestly. "I know what I don't want. I don't want to be managed. I don't want to be a solution to someone else's problem. I don't want to be handed to something the way I was handed here."

"That's fair," he said immediately.

"But I also don't think you're the enemy I was told you were."

He was quiet for a moment. "I'm not," he said. "I'm something considerably more complicated than that, but I'm not that."

Something shifted between us. Not dramatic. Not the cinematic pull the bond sometimes made itself into. Just a quiet, cellular readjustment. Two people decide at the same moment to stop treating each other like variables.

"Brennan arrives in two days," I said.

"Yes."

"We need a plan."

"We do." He looked at me and for just a moment the control in his expression let something else through. Not vulnerability exactly. Closer to recognition. "We should probably start by agreeing that whatever we decide, we decide together. Not because the bond says so."

"Because we choose to," I said.

"Yes."