chapter eight

Constance

The woman in violet robes did not offer her name, and I did not ask for it.

She led me through corridors I hadn't walked before, past tapestries so old the dye had gone the color of dried blood, past windows that looked out over a courtyard where guards drilled in tight, silent formations. The keep felt different in daylight. Less like a place I was hiding inside and more like a place that was watching me back.

"You'll wait here," the woman said, stopping before a set of double doors carved with the Blackwood crest, a wolf's head wreathed in thorns. "The regent does not like to be kept waiting, but he likes candidates who arrive flustered even less. Compose yourself."

Then she was gone, melting back down the corridor the way she'd come, and I was alone with the doors and my own heartbeat.

I thought of what William had told me the night before. *Tell him the truth, as much of it as is safe. Do not fill silences just because they make you uncomfortable.* I smoothed the front of the dress Julian had brought me. Dark green, high at the collar,it was plain enough not to draw attention to the fading bruise on my arm, and I made myself breathe the way I had on the examination table. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Count the breaths instead of the fear.

The doors opened on their own, no servant visible, and I understood that was meant to unsettle me too.

Ferdinand's study was nothing like I expected. I had pictured something cold, all stone and iron like the rest of the keep, but this room was warm, firelit, lined floor to ceiling with books whose spines had gone soft with age. A wolf pelt lay across the back of a leather chair. The air smelled of pipe smoke and old parchment.

Ferdinand himself sat behind a wide desk, not looking up immediately, his pen moving across a ledger in small, precise strokes. He was older than I remembered from the first audience, silver threading through dark hair, but there was nothing frail about him. His hands were steady. His shoulders filled the chair like a man half his age.

"Constance," he said, still not looking up. "Sit."

I sat in the chair across from him, folding my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking.

He finished whatever he was writing, set the pen down with deliberate care, and finally lifted his eyes to mine. They were pale, almost colorless, the kind of eyes that made you feel catalogued rather than seen.

"You've had quite the eventful few days," he said. "The purity trial. The private assault in your chambers, which my guards were regrettably too slow to prevent." A pause, weighted. "And now a disturbance in the east corridor, on the very night you chose to keep vigil at my nephew's bedside."

My pulse spiked. I made myself hold his gaze instead of looking away. "I didn't know about the east corridor until your guards mentioned it while they searched the room, my lord. I was as surprised as anyone."

"Were you." It wasn't a question. He rose from his chair and crossed to the window, hands clasped behind his back, studying the courtyard below. "Tell me, Constance. Why did you choose to keep vigil at all? You'd survived a poison trial hours earlier. Most girls in your position would have slept for a week."

I thought of William's warning. Tell him the truth, as much as is safe. "Because I had nowhere else I was welcome, my lord. My own family sold me into this Selection to clear a debt. I have no allies in this keep. Sitting beside a man who cannot judge me for anything I say or do felt safer than sitting alone in a room I didn't trust."

Something shifted in Ferdinand's face, a flicker of what might have been genuine surprise. He turned from the window. "That is an honest answer. I confess I expected something more rehearsed."

"I don't have the energy to rehearse anything anymore, my lord." That much, at least, wasn't a performance.

He studied me for a long moment, and I forced myself to sit still under it, to let the silence stretch without rushing to fill it the way William had warned me not to. Finally, Ferdinand returned to his desk, but he didn't sit. He braced both hands against the wood and leaned toward me, and for the first time I saw something underneath the paternal charm, something colder and far more patient.

"Let me tell you something about my nephew," he said. "William was a gifted boy. Quick, strong, the kind of Alpha the pack elders whisper about for generations after they're gone. And then, eight months ago, he collapsed during a routine border patrol and has not opened his eyes since." His pale eyes didn't blink. "The healers cannot explain it. The witches cannot break it. I have spent eight months holding this territory together with nothing but my own two hands and the hope that somewhere inside that coma, some part of him is still fighting to come back to us."

"That sounds like an enormous burden, my lord," I said carefully, and meant it, even knowing now how much of it was a lie he'd built and was still building in front of me.

"It is." He straightened, and something in his posture eased, like he'd decided something about me in that exchange. "Which is why I take any disturbance near his chamber extremely seriously, Constance. If someone means my nephew harm while he lies helpless, I intend to find them before they succeed. And I intend to protect anyone close enough to him to be caught in the crossfire." His gaze settled on me, deliberate. "That includes you."

I didn't trust the warmth in his voice for a single second, but I let my face show something like gratitude anyway. "Thank you, my lord."

"From today onward,you've been assigned as his companion," Ferdinand went on, moving back around his desk. "I want you to understand what that means beyond ceremony. You will spend time in that chamber. You may notice things a servant would miss, things a guard walking a routine patrol wouldn't think twice about. A scent out of place. A window left unlatched. Anything at all unusual." He sat, folding his hands atop the ledger. "I want you to report anything strange directly to me. Not to Julian, not to the guards. To me."

My stomach turned to ice. He wasn't testing whether I knew something. He was recruiting me to spy on the one person I actually trusted in this entire keep, and doing it wrapped in the language of protecting William.

"Of course, my lord," I said, and hated how easily the lie came out of me now. Three days ago I didn't know how to lie to anyone. Elias had taught me that lesson better than he'd ever meant to.

Ferdinand smiled, and it did not reach his eyes any more than the woman's had in the corridor. "Good. I find candidates who understand the stakes of this Selection tend to fare better than those who don't." He glanced down at the ledger, and something in the gesture told me the audience was drawing to a close, but then his eyes lifted again, and his next words landed like a stone dropped into still water. "One more thing, Constance. Your father. Marcus, is it?"

The floor seemed to tilt slightly under me. "Yes, my lord."

"I understand he's had some financial difficulties these past years." Ferdinand said lightly, almost sympathetically, but his eyes never left my face, watching for something. "Debts that seemed to accumulate rather suddenly, from what I recall reading in the territory's ledgers. Strange how these things happen to certain families and not others." He tilted his head slightly. "Did your father ever mention how those debts began?"

Every instinct in my body went taut. This wasn't idle conversation. This was a man testing exactly how much I knew, or didn't know, about my own family's ruin, and I understood in that moment, with a clarity that made my skin crawl, that William had been right to warn me. Ferdinand noticed everything. And he had just handed me, without meaning to, the first thread of something far bigger than the debts I'd always been told were simply my father's fault.

"No, my lord," I said, keeping my voice carefully even, carefully blank. "He never spoke of it. He wasn't a man who explained himself to me."

Ferdinand held my gaze a beat too long, then nodded slowly, as if satisfied, or as if filing something away for later. "A pity. Families should be honest with their children about the debts they inherit." He gestured toward the door. "That will be all for now, Constance. I trust you'll remember what we discussed."

I rose on legs that didn't feel entirely mine and made it to the door before his voice stopped me one last time.

"Constance."

I turned.

He hadn't looked up from his ledger. "Give my nephew my regards, when you sit with him tonight. Tell him his uncle is doing everything in his power to bring him home."

The doors shut behind me, and I stood alone in the corridor, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat, turning his last words over and over until they stopped sounding like sympathy and started sounding exactly like what they were.

A threat, dressed up gently enough that I wouldn't recognize it until I was already walking away.