MARRIED TO THE HIDDEN LYCAN KING

Chapter 6 — Sundown

(Wren)

Mrs. Renner brought me a dress an hour before sunset — deep green, tailored so precisely it had to have been made from measurements someone had taken without my knowledge, which I decided not to think about too hard because the alternative thoughts were worse.

"You'll want to be in the east garden," she said, fastening the last hook at my back with hands that were cold in a way that made me wonder, again, exactly what temperature ran under everyone's skin in this house. "He'll come to you when the light changes. Don't be afraid of the dark settling in fast. It does that here."

"Cryptic," I said. "Very on brand for this house."

The ghost of a smile crossed her face — the first real one I'd seen from her. "You'll do fine, Miss Ashworth. Better than most, I think."

Most. I filed that word away with all the others I didn't have context for yet, and let her lead me down through the house to a garden walled in old stone, roses gone slightly wild at the edges, the sky already bruising orange toward the horizon.

I was alone there for maybe ten minutes before I felt it — not heard, felt, a change in the air like the moment before a storm breaks, pressure dropping low in my chest.

"You don't have to be brave right now," Kaeryn's voice said, from somewhere in the shadows at the garden's edge, rougher than it had been in the study. "Most people run at this part. I'd understand it."

"Where would I run to?" I turned toward the sound, hands clenched loosely at my sides to keep them from shaking. "You said yourself no one's ever lived to tell the truth about you. Doesn't leave a lot of appealing exits."

"No," he agreed, quiet. "It doesn't."

The light kept dropping. The last color bled out of the sky in a way that felt too fast, unnatural, exactly the way Mrs. Renner had warned me it would, and somewhere in that falling dark I heard something shift — not clothing, not footsteps, but bone, low and terrible and precise, a sound my body understood as danger a full second before my mind caught up and told me to be afraid.

"I need you to stay very still," Kaeryn's voice said, except it wasn't quite his voice anymore, dropped low and doubled with something underneath it that didn't belong to a human throat. "Not because I'll hurt you. Because I need to know you can look at what I am and not run, before I let you see all of it at once."

My heart was slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

"I signed the contract," I said, and my voice only shook a little. "I'm not running."

Something moved out of the shadows at the garden's edge — tall, wrong, beautiful in a way that had no business belonging to something with claws that long — and the last of the light went out of the sky completely just as I finally saw, for the first time, exactly what I had married.