chapter five

Constance

I stopped breathing.

William's arm was an iron bar across my back, his hand splayed flat between my shoulder blades, holding me pinned against his chest under the quilt. His heartbeat thudded against my ear, too fast for a man who was supposed to be a corpse waiting. My own pulse slammed so hard I was sure it would give us away before Julian even crossed the room.

"My lord?" Julian's voice, cautious, feeling out the silence. "Forgive the intrusion. I've brought the physician's report and your morning broth."

Porcelain clinked against a tray. Footsteps, soft-soled, moving closer.

William did not stir. Not a twitch, not a breath out of rhythm, nothing to mark him as anything but a man locked in a coma. In that frozen second I understood how he had fooled them all. He still didn't act. He simply stopped being a person and became a shape on the bed.I tried to do the same. Eyes shut, face pressed into the curve of his neck, I prayed the heat in my throat stayed hidden.The footsteps stopped an arm's length from the bed.

"“Lady Constance,” Julian said. My breath caught. “I did not realize you were still with him.”, doing my best impression of a woman who had simply fallen asleep sitting up. "I must have drifted off," I said, my voice rough with real exhaustion, which helped the lie land. "“I was keeping vigil. I didn't want to leave him unattended too.

Julian's eyes moved over me,then over William, then, very deliberately, over the quilt bunched at my waist and the bruise still darkening on my arm. Something flickered across his face. Not suspicion exactly. Calculation.

"Of course," he said carefully. "Vigil is admirable. Though I'd advise you to keep to the chair, my lady. Should the King's regent walk these halls and find you sharing a bed with an unconscious Alpha, the rumors would not be kind to you."

The warning under the words was clear enough to bruise. He knew something was wrong with this picture. He was choosing, for now, not to ask what.

"I'll remember that," I said.

Julian set the tray down on the side table with a click that felt loud as a gunshot. "I'll have a servant bring you fresh linens and something to eat. “You look exhausted, my lady, if you don't mind me saying.”

"I don't mind," I said. "It's been that kind of day."

He lingered a moment longer, his gaze flicking once more to William's slack, sleeping face, then to the door, as if counting who else might walk through it. "I'll leave you to your vigil, then," he said. "Ring the bell if you need anything."

The door shut. The bolt slid home from the outside.

I did not move for a full ten seconds, counting my heartbeats to make sure they had actually slowed.

"He knows," I whispered the second I was sure we were alone. "Julian knows something is wrong."

William's arm loosened from around me, and I finally rolled away, putting a careful foot of distance between us on the mattress. He sat up slowly, dragging a hand down his face, and for the first time since I'd met him, he looked tired instead of dangerous.

"Julian has served this family since before I could walk," he said. "He suspects more than he lets on about most things. That is precisely why he has survived this long in my uncle's court." His gold eyes, dimmed now to a deep amber, cut to me. "He will not say anything. Not yet."

"Not yet," I repeated. "That's supposed to be reassuring?"

"It's supposed to be honest." William swung his legs off the bed and stood, and I realized with a jolt that I had not actually seen him upright before now. He was taller than I'd braced for, broad through the shoulders in a way that made the four-poster look almost small behind him, and even barefoot in a borrowed sleeping shirt he carried himself like a man used to a room going quiet when he entered it. "Julian's loyalty is to this family, not to my uncle. But loyalty and safety are not the same animal, Constance. If Ferdinand pressures him hard enough, in the right place, even Julian will break."

"What's the right place?"

Something shut behind his eyes. "That is not your concern."

"Everything in this palace is my concern now," I said, sitting up straighter despite the ache still living in every muscle I owned. "You made it my concern the second you grabbed my wrist and told me to pretend."

He turned to look at me properly then, and for a long moment neither of us said anything. The candlelight caught the sharp line of his jaw, the exhaustion he didn't bother hiding once the door was locked and there was no audience left to perform for.

"You want to know why it's you," he said finally. It wasn't a question.

My mouth went dry. "Yes."

"So do I." He crossed back toward the bed, slower this time, and crouched down until we were eye level, his forearms braced on his knees,“In three hundred years of recorded history, the anchor bond has surfaced eleven times in this bloodline.”Eleven, Do you know what that means?

"That I'm rare," I said. "Not that I'm safe."

"No," he agreed quietly. "You are the opposite of safe. The moment anyone connects what you did to me last night to what you are, every enemy my family has ever made will want you dead, or worse, will want to control you the way they tried to control the others." His eyes held mine, unflinching. "I need you to understand exactly what you've walked into before you decide to stay in this room again."

"I already understand," I said. "My father sold me for a debt. Elias sold me for a bed with my stepsister. I know exactly what it looks like when someone decides I'm worth less than what I can be traded for." My voice did not shake, and I was almost proud of that. "You're not the first man to tell me I'm in danger, William. You're just the first one who bothered to warn me before he used me."

Something crossed his face I couldn't name. No pity. Something closer to respect, buried under three hundred years of a family that had probably never earned it honestly.

"Then hear this clearly," he said. "If you stay, you stay because you choose to. Not because Ferdinand forced you here, and not because I commanded it. The moment this becomes something done to you instead of something you decide, you tell me, and I will find another way to survive this binding, even if it kills me trying."

I opened my mouth to answer him.

The bolt on the door scraped again, hard and fast, not Julian's careful hand this time but something urgent, and both our heads snapped toward the sound as a voice I did not recognize barked from the hallway beyond it.

"Open in the name of the Acting Regent. We have reason to believe the heir's chamber has been compromised."

William was on his feet before I'd even processed the words, his whole body going rigid, gold bleeding back into his eyes.

"Get under the covers," he said, low and fast. "Now."

The door handle rattled once, hard, testing the lock.