Bound To The Enemy Alpha

East Wing

Chapter 4

The east wing, Diana decided within an hour of being left alone in it, had been designed by someone who wanted her comfortable and safe in exactly the way a very nice cage was comfortable and safe.

The rooms were large, well-furnished, better appointed than she'd expected from a house that hated her. A window seat looked out over a stretch of dark forest. A fireplace already lit against the evening chill. Someone — a maid, she assumed, though she hadn't seen one yet — had unpacked her trunks and hung her dresses with careful, precise hands.

And at both ends of the hall, exactly as promised, stood guards who did not meet her eyes and did not speak to her and made it very clear, through posture alone, that they were not there to fetch her anything she might need.

She sat on the window seat until the light went gray, watching the forest, trying to name the thing still humming under her ribs.

It hadn't gone away. If anything, being alone made it worse — a persistent, low-grade static she couldn't place, like a sound just outside the range of hearing that her body kept straining to catch anyway. She pressed a hand flat against her sternum, as if she could feel it from the outside, and felt nothing but her own heartbeat, steady and unhelpful.

It's stress, she told herself. You've been sold to your enemy and marched into a house full of people who'd rather you didn't exist. Of course your body feels strange.

It was a reasonable explanation. She almost believed it.

A knock at the door interrupted the attempt. Not Edwin — she'd have known his footsteps by now, somehow, already, which was its own uncomfortable thought — but a young woman, dark-haired, with wary eyes and a tray of food she set down without quite looking at Diana directly.

"Alpha Odin thought you might want dinner brought up," the woman said. "Since the hall isn't— since it's not really—" She stopped, clearly unsure how to finish a sentence that ended in a place that wants you there.

"Since I'm not welcome at the table yet," Diana finished for her, gently. "You can say it. I'm not going to bite."

The woman's mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but close. "That's more than some people around here would say about you, my lady."

"Diana. Please. 'My lady' feels like something I haven't earned."

"Mira." The woman ducked her head, something in her posture easing slightly. "I'll be attending you. If — I mean, if that's alright. Alpha Odin's orders."

"It's more than alright. Thank you, Mira." Diana studied her for a moment — the careful way she held herself, like someone used to staying small in rooms that didn't want her opinions. "Can I ask you something? Honestly, and you can tell me if it's not my place to ask."

Mira hesitated, then nodded.

"What's he like? Edwin." Diana kept her voice light, curious rather than desperate, though she wasn't entirely sure which one she actually felt. "Everyone I've asked gives me the same three words. Cold. Ruthless. Dangerous. I'd like to know what he's like to the people who actually live here."

Mira was quiet for a long moment, arranging and rearranging the tray with more care than it needed. "He's fair," she said finally. "That's not nothing, here. Alpha Odin rules through fear — always has. Edwin doesn't. He's hard, and he doesn't forgive easily, and he doesn't — he doesn't let people close. Not since—" She stopped herself again, visibly, like she'd walked right up to the edge of something she wasn't allowed to say.

"Since what?"

"It's not my story to tell, my lady. Diana." Mira's eyes were apologetic but firm. "I'm sorry. Truly. But that one isn't mine."

Diana nodded, filing the refusal away rather than pushing it. Whatever had happened to Edwin Odin, it was clearly common enough knowledge inside these walls to be an unspoken rule — we do not discuss it with outsiders — which told her almost as much as an answer would have.

"Thank you for telling me what you could," she said instead.

Mira lingered at the door before leaving, some visible internal debate playing out on her face. "For what it's worth," she said finally, "I don't think you're what any of us expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Someone softer, maybe. Or someone crueler, trying to prove something." Mira shrugged, a small, careful gesture. "You just seem — tired. Like someone doing a hard thing because it has to be done, not because you're happy about it."

"That's the most accurate description anyone's given me since I got here," Diana said, and meant it.

She didn't see Edwin again that night, or the next morning, or through most of the second day — which she told herself was a relief, and mostly believed.

She used the time the way she used every uncertain thing in her life: by mapping it. She walked the halls she was allowed to walk, memorized the guards' rotations without meaning to, catalogued the layout of a keep that clearly wanted her to feel lost in it. She found the training yard on the second afternoon, empty at that hour, and stood at its edge for a long time before she let herself walk onto it.

The blades on the rack here were heavier than Silver Moon's, built for warriors with more raw strength to spare. She picked one anyway and ran through her forms, slow at first, then faster, letting the familiar motion do what it always did — quiet the noise in her head down to something she could stand to live inside.

She didn't hear him arrive. That, more than anything, unsettled her later — Diana heard everything, had trained her whole life to hear everything, and yet Edwin Odin managed to appear at the edge of the training yard without a single sound announcing him.

"You fight," he said, when she finally noticed him, blade lowering on instinct even as her pulse spiked.

"You sound surprised."

"I am." He stepped closer, arms crossed, studying her with the same assessing coldness from their first meeting — though something in it had shifted slightly, recalibrating around new information. "Silver Moon doesn't train its daughters to fight. Not like that."

"Silver Moon didn't train me like that. My father did." Diana kept the blade loose in her grip, refusing to lower her guard fully even now. "Is that a problem for you? A mate who can hold a sword?"

"It's a complication." He said it flatly, without heat, which somehow landed harder than an insult would have. "Everything about you is a complication I didn't ask for."

"You think I asked for this?" The words came out before she could stop them, sharper than she'd meant. "You think I woke up one morning and decided I wanted to marry a stranger who'd rather I didn't exist? I'm not your enemy, Edwin. I'm not even a person to you yet. I'm just the treaty wearing a dress."

Something flickered across his face — too fast to name, there and buried before she could study it. For a moment he looked almost like he might say something real. Then his jaw tightened, and the ice came back down, and whatever had almost surfaced disappeared behind it.

"The ceremony's in two days," he said instead, turning to leave. "I'd suggest you spend the time preparing for that. Not this."

"Edwin."

He stopped, back still to her, shoulders rigid.

"For what it's worth," Diana said, quiet now, all the sharpness drained out of her voice, "I don't want to hate you either. I just don't think either of us gets a say in what this is."

He didn't turn around. He didn't answer. But he stood there a moment longer than he needed to before he walked away, and Diana watched him go, the strange static hum under her skin refusing, stubbornly, insistently, to quiet.