Chapter Four: Smoke and Pine

(Alondra's POV)

He dragged me back through the hallway like I weighed nothing.

My feet barely touched the carpet. One of his arms was still locked around my waist, the other pressed flat against my mouth, and my whole body had gone limp in a way that horrified me. I had spent the whole walk through the east wing telling myself I was brave. That I could do this. That I would fight back if anyone tried to stop me.

I was not fighting back.

I was being carried.

He pushed open the door to my room with his shoulder and stepped inside without slowing down. He kicked the door shut behind us and the sound of it closing made my whole body flinch against his chest.

Then he let me go.

Not gently.

He dropped me onto the bed like something he was returning to a shelf. I bounced once on the mattress and scrambled back against the headboard, dragging the blanket up to my chest with both hands. My teeth were chattering so hard I could feel them in my jaw. My whole body was shaking. The cold from the stone staircase had settled deep under my skin and refused to leave.

I looked at him for the first time.

He was tall. Taller than any man I had ever stood next to. He stood at the foot of the bed with his hands in the pockets of his black trousers, and the dim light of the room fell across him in a way that made him look like he had been carved instead of born.

Black curly hair, longer at the top, brushed back from his forehead. A sharp jaw. A mouth that did not look like it knew how to smile. And eyes that stopped my heart for one full beat. Blue. Not the soft blue of a summer sky but the cold blue of deep water, the kind of blue you find at the bottom of something you should not be swimming in.

He was older. Forty, maybe. But quite handsome.

And he was watching me the way a man watches a problem.

"You are lucky," he said.

His voice was quieter than it had been in the hallway. That somehow made it worse.

"You are lucky you did not get caught by the wrong hands tonight. If anyone else in this house had been the one to find you on those stairs, you would have wished you never took a single step out of this room."

I could not answer him. My teeth were smashing against each other so hard I was scared I would chip one.

"Lucky for you," he said, "I found you."

The word lucky sounded strange in his mouth. Like he did not entirely believe it himself.

I clutched the blanket tighter. I knew I should not speak. I knew that every smart part of me was telling me to be silent, to nod, to wait for him to leave so I could fall apart in peace. But the suspense was eating me alive from the inside out and I could not stand one more second of not knowing.

"Are you my groom?"

The question slipped out before I could stop it.

He went still.

For a long moment, he did not answer. He just looked at me. His head tilted very slightly to one side, the way the silver-cane man's had done that afternoon, and I realized with a small sick lurch in my stomach that they shared the same exact tilt. The same exact stillness. Two animals from the same forest.

"No," he said finally.

Just the one word.

I waited for more. He did not give me more.

"Then who," I whispered. My voice came out cracked and small. "Who are you?"

His mouth moved. Into something amused in a way that had nothing to do with kindness.

"You will figure that out tomorrow, little bride."

He took one step closer to the bed.

I pressed myself back against the headboard so hard the wood bit into my spine. My breath caught somewhere between my throat and my chest and refused to come out the rest of the way. He stopped at the edge of the mattress and looked down at me, and the cold in his blue eyes felt like a hand pressed flat against my heart.

"Do not try what you tried tonight again," he said. "Not unless you have a death wish."

I nodded.

I could not even pretend to be brave. I just nodded, fast, like a child being scolded.

He leaned down.

Slowly. Like he had all the time in the world. One of his hands came up and braced flat against the headboard beside my head, and the other rose to my chin. His fingers were warm. Too warm. He tilted my face up toward his with a touch so gentle it did not match anything else about him, and for one long second I forgot how to breathe.

He was so close I could see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw. I could see a thin pale scar running just under his lower lip. I could smell him. Something dark and clean.

 Smoke and pine and something else I did not have a name for.

His thumb brushed across the corner of my mouth.

"Look at you," he murmured. "Trembling like a leaf. Did no one ever tell you, little bride, that running only makes the wolf hungrier?"

I could not speak.

He held me there a moment longer. His blue eyes searched my face slowly, taking in every part of it, like he was committing me to memory for a test he planned to take later. Something shifted in the back of his expression. I did not understand what it was. I only knew that whatever it was, it scared me more than the coldness had.

Then he let go.

He straightened up and stepped back from the bed and the cold air rushed into the space he left behind. My whole body sagged against the headboard. My hands were shaking so badly I had to grip the blanket just to keep them still.

He walked toward the door without looking back.

His hand was on the handle when he stopped.

"One more thing," he said.

He turned his head only slightly. Just enough that I could see the line of his profile in the low light. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the wall.

"Take note I was never here."

"Do you understand". 

I nodded again. I do not think he saw it.

"Say it, Alondra."

The sound of my name in his mouth went straight down my spine.

"I understand," I whispered.

He nodded once, satisfied. Then he opened the door, stepped through it, and closed it behind him with the softest click I had ever heard. 

He was gone.

I sat there frozen for a long time.

The shaking did not stop. If anything it got worse. My teeth would not stay still. My heart was beating so fast and so loud I could feel it pounding in my fingertips. I tried to breathe slowly the way my mother had taught me to when I was a little girl and the thunderstorms scared me, in for four, out for four, in for four, out for four.

It did not work.

My body gave up before my mind did.

The edges of the room started to go soft. 

I just fell.

When I woke up, it was already dawn, and three women were standing at the foot of my bed holding a white dress between them.

And there, on the inside of my left wrist, where his hand had wrapped around me on the stairs, was a small dark bruise in the shape of a thumbprint.

He had been real.