CHAPTER SEVEN

The second official courtship meeting arrived with a change of venue that surprised Elena more than she wanted to admit: not the waystation, this time, but Voss pack land itself, at her father's own grudging invitation, extended after a full week of Council pressure and, Elena suspected, at least one very pointed letter from the elder who'd read the prophecy at the bridge.

"I don't like it," Garrick said, for what had to be the fifth time that morning, pacing the length of the great hall while the staff finished setting a long table that had, until a week ago, only ever hosted pack business and family dinners. "A vampire, at my table, under my roof."

"You agreed to it."

"I agreed because the alternative was another dinner on that cursed bridge and another fire, and at least here I control who comes and goes." Her father stopped pacing long enough to fix her with a look that was equal parts warning and something softer he wasn't quite willing to name. "That's the only reason."

"Of course," Elena said, and did not point out that her father had spent the better part of the last week asking careful, roundabout questions about the fire investigation, about Rhys's progress comparing notes with the Ashgrove steward, about whether the Council had made any headway identifying who'd wanted the courtship sabotaged badly enough to risk arson. He would have called it vigilance. Elena, watching him fuss over table settings for a guest he claimed to despise, was beginning to suspect it was something closer to grudging investment.

Damon arrived at dusk, on horseback, with a single guard trailing at a respectful distance, exactly as agreed, and Elena watched from the window as her father met him at the gate with the stiff, formal courtesy of a man determined to be correct even if he couldn't quite manage to be warm.

"House Ashgrove," Garrick said, extending a hand that looked like it cost him something to offer.

"House Voss." Damon took it, shook once, released. "Thank you for the invitation. I understand it wasn't an easy one to extend."

"It wasn't," Garrick agreed, with a bluntness that made Elena, watching from the doorway now, wince slightly. "I buried my brother because of your kind, Ashgrove. I won't pretend that's forgotten just because an oracle says my daughter's future runs through you."

"I wouldn't ask you to pretend anything," Damon said, evenly, and something in the simple honesty of it seemed to catch her father off guard more than any diplomatic softening could have. "I lost my own father to the fallout of that same skirmish, in a manner of speaking. I don't expect you to trust me. I'm only asking for the chance to earn something closer to it, over the months we've been given."

Garrick studied him for a long moment, the particular assessing silence he usually reserved for evaluating a new pack recruit's worth in a fight, and whatever he found in Damon's face seemed to satisfy some baseline requirement, because he stepped back from the gate and gestured him through with only slightly less stiffness than before.

"Dinner's at seven. My daughter tells me you have opinions about soup."

"I have opinions about being watched while I eat it," Damon said, and Elena, still by the doorway, caught the corner of her father's mouth twitching despite himself, the same reluctant almost-laugh she'd coaxed out of him a week before over the exact same joke, and found the coincidence of it, small and strange, oddly hopeful.

Dinner was, against every expectation Elena had walked in with, almost pleasant. Marta had insisted on sitting close enough to interrogate Damon directly, which she did with the cheerful, relentless curiosity of someone who'd clearly been saving up questions for a week, and Rhys hovered near the door in his capacity as pack second, arms crossed, watching Damon with the particular wary attention of a man still deciding whether he needed to intervene.

"So," Marta said, halfway through the second course, "is it true vampires can't cross running water?"

"An old wives' tale. We cross rivers constantly. It's mildly unpleasant, the same way I imagine it's mildly unpleasant for you to shift on a full stomach, but it's not the dramatic barrier the stories make it out to be."

"What about garlic?"

"I like it in moderation. I draw the line at the amount your cook has apparently used in this sauce, which I suspect is less folklore and more genuine culinary enthusiasm."

That surprised a real laugh out of Marta, bright and unguarded, and even Garrick, at the head of the table, allowed himself something that might have been amusement if he'd been willing to admit it. Elena watched the whole exchange with a warmth in her chest she was, by now, tired of pretending was anything but exactly what it felt like.

"You're good with her," Elena said, quietly, during a lull while Marta interrogated the vampire guard at the door about his own opinions on garlic.

"She's easy to be good with. She asks direct questions and actually wants the answers, instead of the answers she's already decided to expect." Damon glanced at her, something warmer in his expression than the careful diplomatic mask he'd worn walking through the gate. "It's a family trait, apparently."

"Careful. That almost sounded like a compliment."

"I have my moments."

The echo of the bridge, of the dinner, of every small callback they'd built up between them over these strange few weeks, landed somewhere warm in Elena's chest, and she found herself smiling before she'd quite decided to allow it.

After dinner, while Marta dragged the vampire guard into an increasingly detailed conversation about pack hunting customs and Garrick retreated to his study with the particular relief of a man who'd survived a trial by fire and wanted to be alone with it, Elena walked Damon out through the kitchen garden, the one her mother had started years ago and that Elena had never managed to keep entirely alive, half-wild now with things that had reseeded themselves without anyone's permission.

"Your mother," Damon said, taking in the tangle of overgrown herbs and half-collapsed trellises with more interest than the mess strictly deserved. "You mentioned her, at the bridge dinner. You didn't say more."

"She died when I was young. Before Thornwood Pass, actually, which my father always found unfair, that he had to grieve her and Uncle Theo both within a few years of each other, without much room to breathe between the two." Elena ran a hand along a rosemary bush gone leggy and half-wild, more out of habit than any real gardening intent. "I don't remember her well. Mostly I remember this garden, and the smell of it, and the fact that I've spent fifteen years failing to keep it the way she had it and refusing to just let it go entirely."

"Some things are worth keeping badly rather than not at all."

Elena looked at him, surprised by the simple, unguarded honesty of it, the way he'd said it like a fact rather than a comfort offered for her benefit. "That sounds like something you've had to tell yourself."

"Ashgrove Hall," Damon said, "has sixty rooms and a staff of forty and has felt empty since my father died. I keep it running anyway. Not because I think I'm doing it well. Because the alternative is letting it fall apart entirely, and some part of me still isn't ready to let go of what it was supposed to be."

They stood together in the half-wild garden a long moment, the dusk settling fully into dark around them, close enough now that Elena was aware of him in a way that had stopped being about strategy or investigation several minutes ago and had become something else entirely, something neither of them seemed inclined to name out loud in case naming it made it too real to walk back from.

"Damon."

"Yes?"

"I don't hate you." She said it plainly, the way she said most things, without dressing it up in more careful language than it needed. "I think I should probably tell you that, since we've spent two dinners now circling around admitting it and I'm tired of circling."

Something in his face, in the careful, guarded lines of it, eased at that, the particular unguarded look she'd caught only glimpses of before, on the riverbank, over cold soup, now allowed to stay a little longer in the quiet dark of her mother's garden. "I don't hate you either," he said. "I'd go further than that, if you'd let me."

"Go further, then."

"I think," Damon said, carefully, like a man testing ice he wasn't yet sure would hold his weight, "that I've spent twenty years being told exactly what kind of man I am by people who decided that answer before I ever had the chance to prove them wrong. And in three weeks, you've managed to make me forget to perform any version of myself at all. I don't entirely know what to do with that. But I don't want it to stop."

Elena didn't have a clever answer for that, which was, she was coming to realize, becoming something of a pattern around him: the sharp, ready wit she used on everyone else falling quiet in his company, replaced by something plainer and more honest than she was used to offering anyone outside her own family.

"Neither do I," she said, simply, and let the silence after it stretch out warm and unhurried between them, the half-wild garden holding both of them steady in the dark, an eclipse still four and a half months away and, for the first time since the letter with the black and gold seal had arrived at her kitchen table, feeling less like a deadline and more like a promise she was starting to want to keep.