THE LYCAN KINGS SILENT MATE

Chapter 9

The battle ended an hour before dawn.

Eva didn't see the end of it, Reyna had pulled her back into the keep the moment she'd said the words I saw myself, tonight, and refused to let her anywhere near the walls again until Alistair himself came to find her, blood-streaked and hollow-eyed, and confirmed with his own presence that whatever she'd seen hadn't come true. Not yet. Not tonight.

Now she sat wrapped in a blanket someone had pressed into her hands, in a stone room three floors above the courtyard, listening to the fortress exhale around her voices calling the wounded count, the slow scrape of debris being cleared, the particular hush that came after violence when everyone left standing understood exactly how close it had come to going the other way.

Alistair found her there an hour later, freshly washed, the gold gone from his eyes, looking more human than she'd seen him look all night which was, she was beginning to understand, its own kind of disguise.

"You should be resting," he said, closing the door behind him.

"You should be resting. I just touched a lot of hands and felt like a bystander in someone else's war." Eva pulled the blanket tighter. "How bad?"

"Eleven wounded. Two we lost." His voice was carefully even, the way it got when he was working hard to keep something else out of it. "It would have been worse. Considerably worse, without you sorting the line."

"That's not exactly comforting."

"I didn't say it to comfort you." He crossed the room and sat, not beside her exactly, but close, close enough that the silence settled over her again, familiar now, almost soothing after a night spent drowning in other people's futures. "I said it because it's true, and because I think you need to hear the truth more than you need to be managed. You've had enough of people deciding what you can handle."

Eva looked at him for a long moment. "That's oddly perceptive, for a man who kidnapped me twelve hours ago."

"I've had a very educational twelve hours." The ghost of that almost-smile returned, there and gone. Then it faded into something more careful. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly, even if the answer is one I don't want."

"Okay."

"The vision. Of yourself." He said it like each word cost him something. "Tell me exactly what you saw."

Eva closed her eyes, made herself walk back through it even though every part of her wanted to leave it buried. "Blood on stone. You, screaming my name, but far away like I was already past the point where it mattered. And Julian's face. Watching. Pleased." She opened her eyes. "That's all I got. It doesn't show me when exactly, not precisely just soon. Tonight, maybe. Maybe the next."

Alistair was quiet for a long moment, jaw tight, and Eva watched him do the thing she was starting to recognize as entirely particular to him taking something that would have broken most people and turning it, deliberately, into a plan instead of a spiral.

"Then we change it," he said finally.

"You can't just decide to change a vision. Believe me, I've spent six years wishing that were true."

"I'm not talking about fate. I'm talking about Julian." His eyes met hers, steady, certain. "Every vision you've ever had has been about someone dying at the hand of a threat already in motion. Julian was in the courtyard tonight. Julian touched you tonight. That's not prophecy, Eva that's a plan he's already made, and plans can be broken."

Eva let that settle, felt something in her chest loosen slightly for the first time since the vision had hit. "You really believe that."

"I have to." He said it simply, without performance, and something about the honesty of it undid her more than any of his fury had. "I've spent centuries being told what I am a hybrid, an aberration, a king who shouldn't exist by either bloodline's rules. I stopped believing in fate a long time ago, because fate never once seemed to be arguing in my favor. I believe in what I can control. And I intend to control every version of tonight that doesn't end with you bleeding on my stone."

Eva studied him really studied him, in the quiet, without the adrenaline of battle or the sharp edges of the Council chamber to blur it. Up close, in low light, he didn't look like a king at all. He looked tired. Human, almost, in the specific way that had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with how long a person had been carrying something alone.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Anything."

"Earlier. In the Council chamber. You said your bond doesn't care what I want." She hesitated. "Julian said something similar, in the alley. That it's a trap. That it doesn't care what either of us wants, it just decided what we are to each other and expects us to fall in line." She wrapped the blanket tighter, suddenly unsure she wanted the answer. "Is that true? Would you feel this whatever this silence is for anyone the bond happened to pick? Or is it actually me?"

Alistair was quiet for a long moment, and Eva braced herself for something diplomatic, something careful and kingly and designed not to hurt.

"The bond found you," he said instead. "That part, yes that's fate, or biology, or whatever word feels least ridiculous tonight. But the bond didn't make me want to know what you were thinking in that Council chamber before you spoke, or notice the exact moment your hands started shaking after the third vision tonight, or spend the last hour more afraid of what happened to you than what almost happened to my kingdom." His voice dropped, rougher now, stripped of every careful edge he usually kept around it. "That's not the bond, Eva. That's just you."

The room went very still.

Eva was aware, distantly, that she should say something something careful, something that kept a reasonable amount of distance between herself and a man she'd known for less than a day, a king with a war at his gates and a target already marked on both their backs. Instead she found herself leaning forward, slow enough that he could have stopped her, could have said something to break it, and didn't.

Their first kiss wasn't dramatic. It wasn't the desperate, bruising thing she might have imagined for a man who fought like the end of the world. It was careful, almost hesitant, his hand coming up to rest against her jaw like he still couldn't quite believe he was allowed to, and the silence that came with it wasn't just the absence of visions anymore.

It was the first quiet Eva had felt inside her own head in six years that wasn't born out of fear.

She pulled back first, breathless, and found him watching her with an expression that had nothing guarded left in it at all.

"That complicates things," she said.

"Considerably," he agreed, and there was real warmth in it now, low and unguarded. "I should tell you before this goes any further, before you decide whether you want it to go further at all there's something about the bond I haven't told you yet. Something the Council was arguing about long before Damon ever sent his letter."

Eva's stomach tightened. "That sounds like the kind of sentence that comes right before very bad news."

"It's not bad news, exactly." Alistair hesitated actually hesitated, for the first time since she'd met him, like a man choosing his next words very carefully. "It's that fated bonds this strong, this immediate they're not just rare between a Lycan and a human. They're not supposed to be possible at all. Which means either the bond made an exception for you." His eyes held hers, dead serious. "Or you're not entirely human to begin with, and no one including you has ever known it."