Their first meeting
763 Words
The servant leading Lydia shot her a look sharp enough to silence her at once.
Lydia let that sit with her for three steps before asking, “Brought me for what?”
No one answered.
Of course they didn’t.
She kept walking anyway, her chin high, her pulse harder now than she wanted to admit. The silence here was not the peaceful kind. It was too deliberate. Too aware of itself. It felt like walking through the center of a held breath.
At the next turn, two more guards stood watch outside a set of carved double doors. Unlike the others she had seen in the front halls, these men were armed heavily, swords at their sides and knives strapped to their thighs. Their eyes flicked from Lydia to the servant, then toward the doors behind them.
Neither man made any move to open them.
The servant stopped several feet away, as if crossing the remaining distance required more courage than she could afford.
“One of you can announce her,” she said.
The older guard gave a short, humorless laugh. “Not a chance.”
The younger one said, “You were the one ordered to bring her.”
“And I brought her.”
Lydia looked from one to the other. “Is everyone in this palace determined to speak in circles?”
Neither guard met her eyes.
That irritated her more than their fear. Fear could be honest. This wasn’t. This was the kind of evasive behavior people used when they knew the truth would sound worse aloud.
She stepped forward.
The older guard shifted immediately, not toward her but back, as though her moving closer to the doors put all of them at risk.
Lydia noticed that.
She noticed everything.
“Open them,” she said.
The younger guard stared at her. “My lady—”
“Don’t call me that if you’re going to stand there and treat me like bait.”
His jaw tightened.
For a second, she thought he might actually refuse. Then the older guard muttered something under his breath and reached for the handle.
The doors opened inward with a low scrape.
The room beyond was large but strangely bare. Not empty—there were bookshelves along the far wall, a fire burning low in a stone hearth, a desk near one of the windows—but bare in the way rooms became when no one dared clutter them with unnecessary things. There were no flowers. No rich tapestries. No silver ornaments set out to soften the cold lines of the space.
Nothing decorative.
Everything useful.
Lydia stepped inside.
The doors closed behind her almost immediately.
The sound settled hard in the room.
She turned.
He was there.
For one stupid second, her mind supplied all the wrong details first. Tall. Broad shoulders. Dark hair. Hands braced loosely against the edge of the desk behind him, as if he had been standing there for some time and had no intention of moving just because she’d arrived. He Not wild. Not snarling. Not chained to the wall like a beast in some childish story meant to frighten servants. Nothing about him was visibly monstrous.
And that was the problem.
Whatever everyone feared about him was not obvious on the surface. It was hidden. Contained so tightly she could feel the pressure of it just standing in the room with him.
No one had prepared her for that.
“You should not have come farther than the hall,” he said.
His voice was low, even, without the slightest trace of strain.
Lydia almost laughed at the absurdity of it. “That would have been difficult, considering no one here seems interested in what I should or should not do.”
His gaze returned to her then, briefly, and she saw it more clearly this time. Gold eyes, not warm, not cruel. Watchful. Controlled to the point of unnatural stillness.
He pushed away from the desk and straightened.
Every instinct Lydia had told her not to move.
Not because he had threatened her. He hadn’t. But because the distance between them—still several feet—felt intentional. Chosen. Like he knew exactly how close he could allow himself to get without something changing.
That made her angrier than it should have.
“They brought me here under guard and refuse to answer a direct question,” she said. “So let me try one on you. Am I supposed to know who you are?”
A quiet beat passed.
Then, “No.”
- Writer
