8
1064 Words
Chapter 8
Sera's POV
I couldn't sleep.
It wasn't the bed; the bed was the most comfortable thing I had slept in or near since arriving, which admittedly wasn't saying much given that I'd spent my first night folded into an armchair. It wasn't the room either. The east wing chamber had settled around me over the past few days in the quiet way that spaces did when you stopped fighting them, the stone walls and the cold firelight becoming familiar in the specific way of things you hadn't chosen but had decided to accept.
It was the letter.
It had been six days since Bram handed it to me in the corridor and I had read it standing on the staircase with my heart doing something complicated in my chest. Six days of carrying it in my boot, of feeling its presence against my ankle every time I sat down at Edda's desk or crossed the courtyard or stood at my window watching the Blackridge forest go dark at the tree line. Six days of pretending, very successfully I thought, that everything inside me was perfectly settled.
It wasn't.
I got up around midnight, pulled on my clothes without the boots, and went out.
The main hall was empty and dim, the long table bare, the fireplace burned down to a faint glow that threw more shadow than light. I moved through it without a destination, which was not something I did often; I was a person who moved toward things, not around them and usually had my plans or destinations structured out, but tonight I just needed the Keep to be a place I was moving through rather than a place that was holding me still.
The door beside the fireplace was the one I hadn't opened yet.
Every other door on the ground floor I had been through at least once in the course of the past week's work. This one had no administrative function I could identify: no label, no obvious purpose, slightly smaller than the others with iron hinges gone green at the edges. It was open a c***k.
I pushed it, what could possibly go wrong if the door opens easily?
The smell hit me before the dark did. Old paper and leather and years of woodsmoke absorbed into fabric and binding. I stood in the doorway and let my eyes adjust and made out the shape of shelves running both walls floor to ceiling, a reading table in the centre, two armchairs by a fireplace that hadn't been lit recently.
A library. Definitely wasn't expecting it.
I went in. Found a lamp on the mantle and matches beside it and lit it low, just enough to read spines by. The shelves were dense and serious — territorial histories, pack law volumes, reference texts with cracked spines that fell open at the same pages every time because someone had returned to them so often the binding had memorised it.
I ran my fingers along the lower shelf and read titles quietly and felt, for the first time in six days, something that wasn't the weight of the letter or the noise of an unanswered question.
Just books. Just the smell of old paper and the low lamp and the quiet.
I pulled one volume — Northern Territory Histories, Volume III — and carried it to the reading table and sat down and opened it to the first page.
I read two paragraphs, it was quite intriguing and I was engrossed, and that's exactly why the voice interrupting my concentration startled me
"What are you doing in here?" It definitely did not sound like a question. More like a statement that just needed clarification or repitition
I looked up, immediately.
Alpha Nikolai stood in the doorway. He was still dressed which told me he hadn't slept either, though nothing about his expression suggested that was information he intended to share. He looked at me at his reading table with his lamp lit and his book open and his expression said several things in rapid succession — none of them warm.
"The door was open, Alpha," I tried explaining.
"That isn't what I asked."
"I...I..I couldn't sleep." I stuttered, removing the gaze of my eyes from his and him entirely.
He looked at the book., at the lamp then at me.
"This is not a common area," he said squarely.
I closed the book. Stood up gently and carried the lamp back to the mantle and blew it out and set it back exactly where I'd found it. In the dark I moved to the door, which meant moving past him, which I did without looking up.
"Sera."
I stopped but I didn't turn. "Yes, Alpha?"
"The corridor outside your room has a window seat," he said. "If you need somewhere to sit at night, use that." I said nothing.
"Go to sleep now." he said.
I left the library with immediate effect, afraid a reply would probably trigger emotions from him that I'm not sure I would know how to deal with.
Back in my room I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and looked at my boots on the floor and thought about nothing in particular for a long time.
Then I reached down, picked up the left boot, and slid the letter out from the lining.
I didn't open it. I had read it enough times that the words were already there when I closed my eyes — the careful handwriting, the introduction, the warning, the last line that had been sitting in my chest like something I didn't know how to put down.
I held it between both palms in the dark.
Whoever had written it had known my mother. Had been looking for me for years. Had found me here of all places, in a territory that wasn't mine, in a room that had belonged to a dead woman, working for a man who had told me to my face I was a liability.
And they had said I wasn't safe.
The Keep was quiet around me. Stone and dark and the faint sound of wind through the outer walls.
I folded the letter and put it back in the boot and lay down and stared at the ceiling and waited for sleep that took a very long time to come.
- Writer
