THE ROOM NEXT TO HIS

The room they give me is small, plain, and close enough to his that I can hear him breathing through the wall at night.

I do not sleep much that first week. I lie on the narrow cot shoved into the corner of an antechamber off his own room. They could not decide if I am a servant or a prisoner, so they settled on both. I listen to him pace on the other side of the stone.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Some nights it does not stop until near dawn.

"Does he ever sleep?" I ask Nyra one morning. She comes to bring me a change of clothes because apparently that is my life now—being dressed like a doll for a man who thinks I am dead.

"Not much," she says. "Not since—" She stops herself. Chews her lip.

"Since what?"

"Nothing. Just—not much." She will not meet my eyes when she says it.

I let it go. I already know the answer. Not since a woman named Elara drowned in the Silver Vein. I do not need Nyra to finish that sentence. I have been finishing it myself for five years.

---

I learn Kael in pieces. The way you learn a language nobody has taught you properly—badly, slowly, by getting things wrong first.

He takes his meals in silence unless he is asking me something. Even then, only short things.

"Are you warm enough," he asks one evening.

"Yes, my lord."

"Did you eat?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Who gave you that bruise on your wrist?"

I look down at the purple mark. A door caught me. I was not paying attention. I was thinking about him.

"A door," I tell him. "It was a door."

He stares at me. His jaw tightens. "The door hit you?"

"It was my fault. I was not looking where I was going."

"Who does that door belong to?"

I blink. "The castle? I do not understand the question."

"I will have it removed."

"The door?"

"Yes."

"My lord, it is a door. They are everywhere. You cannot remove all of them."

He says nothing. Just looks at me with those silver eyes that seem to see everything except the truth I am hiding.

"Fine," he says. "Then be more careful."

It is the strangest thing I have ever heard an Alpha say to an Omega. It almost sounds like concern. It almost sounds like something else.

---

I learn he does not like the sound of water poured too fast.

The first time I notice it, I am filling his cup at dinner. I pour too quick. The water rushes and splashes against the pitcher's edge. He flinches. A full-body flinch, like something struck him. His jaw goes tight. His knuckles go white around his fork.

"My lord?" I say.

"It is nothing." He does not look up. "Pour slower next time."

I do.

After that, I watch him more carefully. I watch how he goes still every time a servant carries a full basin down the hall. I watch how he refuses to stand near the fountain in the east courtyard. He takes the long way around it even when the short way would save him ten minutes.

He remembers, I think. He remembers exactly how I died, and it is eating him alive.

Some cruel, cold part of me—the part that spent five years dead and furious about it—wants to feel satisfied by that. Wants to think, good, let it eat him.

It does not feel like satisfaction. It feels like something cracking open in my chest that I do not have a name for.

---

The night I find the journal, it is an accident.

I am straightening the papers on his desk. He is out on the training grounds, drilling until his knuckles bleed, like always. A leather book slides sideways. Something falls out from between its pages and lands on the floor.

A flower. Small, pale, dried nearly to dust. Its petals gone thin as paper.

A moon-flower. The kind that only blooms at night. The kind that grows behind the castle, over the burial ground.

I know, before I even pick it up, exactly whose grave it came from.

My hands shake as I lift it. It is so fragile it nearly crumbles between my fingers. I open the journal to see where it had been pressed. I know I should not. Every instinct I have says close it, put it back, pretend you never saw it.

I open it anyway.

The page is dated. Five years back. Just a few weeks after my death.

I am sorry, it says, in handwriting too rushed and jagged to belong to a calm man. I am sorry. I am sorry. I do not know how to stop being sorry.

That is all. Over and over, in different ink, like he had come back to the page again and again across nights I cannot count. Just to write the same three words until the page could not hold any more of them.

I hear his boots in the hall. I shove the journal back where I found it, flower and all. My heart slams so hard I am sure he will hear it through the door.

He walks in. Stops. Looks at me standing too close to his desk.

"Something wrong?" he asks.

"No, my lord." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "I was just tidying."

He studies me a beat too long. Like he can smell the lie on me. He probably can. Wolves are like that.

He lets it go. Crosses to the window instead. Stares out at the dark like it has something to say to him.

I go back to the papers with hands that will not quite stop shaking.

He mourned me, I think. He mourned me while everyone else called me a poisoner and a traitor. He never once said it out loud. I do not know what to do with that.

---

That same week, I meet the wolf who has apparently been assigned to watch me.

His name is Riven. Dark hair cut close. Green eyes that look at me like I am a puzzle he has already decided he does not like the shape of.

"You are following me," I say. It is the third time I catch him lurking near the kitchens while I fetch Kael's breakfast.

"I am not following you." He does not even try to sound convincing. "I am patrolling."

"You patrol the kitchen hallway. Every morning. At the exact time I walk through it."

"Coincidence."

"You are a terrible liar."

That gets the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. More like the ghost of one. Gone before it can fully arrive.

"The Alpha wants eyes on you," he says. "I am the eyes."

"Why me?"

"You tell me." His gaze sharpens. "Nobody just collapses in a kitchen and wakes up different. New scent. New way of holding yourself. New way of looking at people like you are deciding whether they are worth the trouble of lying to." He tips his head. "You want to tell me what happened to you, Rue? Or should I keep guessing?"

My pulse spikes. I keep my face still. Five years dead taught me that much at least—how to keep a face still while everything underneath it screams.

"I hit my head," I say. "That is all."

"Sure." He does not believe me. I can tell by the way he says it. Flat. Unimpressed. "Keep telling yourself that."

He walks off before I can answer. I stand in the hallway feeling like he has peeled back a layer of me I thought was better hidden than that.

---

A week passes. Then two.

Every night, I hear him pace. Every morning, I bring his breakfast and he asks me the same questions. Are you warm enough. Did you eat. Who gave you that bruise. It is a ritual now. A habit he cannot break.

One night, he does not pace.

The silence is worse. I lie awake listening to nothing. It feels wrong. Off. Like a song that stopped in the middle of its note.

I get up. I should not. I know I should not. But my feet carry me to the door between our rooms. I press my ear against the wood.

I hear breathing. Slow. Uneven.

Then I hear a name.

Elara.

My heart stops.

Elara, he says again. Louder this time. Almost a gasp.

Then, soft, broken, barely a whisper at all: Please. Please come back. I am sorry. I am so sorry. Please come back.

I lean my forehead against the cold stone. Tears I did not know were waiting spill down my cheeks.

He is dreaming of me. He is begging a ghost to return.

And I am right here. On the other side of a door. Close enough to touch if I was brave enough to open it.

I am not brave enough.

I go back to my cot. I lie down. I do not sleep.

I listen to him whisper my name through the wall, and I hate the Moon for making me want him even now. Even after everything.

Especially after everything.

---

The next morning, I bring his breakfast.

"Did you sleep well, my lord?" I ask.

He looks up from his plate. There are dark circles under his eyes. His hair is messier than usual, like he has been running his hands through it all night.

"No," he says.

"Bad dreams?"

His gaze snaps to my face. Sharp. Assessing.

"Why do you ask?"

I shrug. I try to look casual. Rue would be casual. Rue would not know about his nightmares. Rue would not be listening at doors.

"Everyone has them," I say. "I just thought—"

"You thought what?"

I should stop. I should close my mouth and leave it alone.

I do not.

"I thought you seemed tired," I say. "That is all."

He watches me for a long time. Then he sets down his fork.

"Tell me something," he says.

"Yes, my lord?"

"When you dream—what do you dream about?"

I freeze. Every muscle in my body goes still.

"Why do you want to know?" I ask.

"Because I see you wake up gasping some mornings. I hear you through the wall." His voice drops. "It sounds like you are drowning."

I cannot breathe.

"Rue." He says my name like it hurts him. "What do you dream about?"

I meet his eyes. I let him see something real. Just a piece of it. Just enough.

"Water," I say. "I dream about water. And someone's face above me. Getting smaller. Farther away. And I cannot reach them."

His face goes white.

"Who," he asks. "Who is the face?"

The name sits on my tongue like poison. I want to say it. I want to scream it.

You, I want to say. It is always you.

Instead I say, "I do not know. I can never see it clearly."

A lie. A small one. But it seems to cost more than all the others combined.

Kael looks at me. His eyes are wet. I have never seen an Alpha cry. I did not know they could.

"You dream about water," he says. "You cannot see the face. And you wake up gasping."

"Yes, my lord."

He nods slowly. Then he stands. He walks to the window. He stands with his back to me the way he always does.

"Rue," he says.

"Yes, my lord?"

"I do not know who you are. I do not know why you came here." He pauses. His shoulders rise and fall with a breath that sounds like it hurts. "But I know you are not lying about the dream. I know that much."

I say nothing. I cannot say anything.

"Leave me," he says. "I need to think."

I curtsy. I leave. I walk all the way back to my room before I let the tears fall.

I am not supposed to love him. I am not supposed to want him. I came back for revenge. I came back to watch him burn.

But he dreamed of me.

He begged me to come back.

And I am starting to wonder if I can hate a man who has been drowning in guilt for longer than I was dead.