Chapter 2: Four Walls and a Fault Line

POV: Rose

The King's name is Aldric, and he shakes my hand like a grandfather meeting a grandchild — warm, slightly too long, eyes that say something different from his mouth. I notice the disparity. I do not let it show on my face.

He moves through the four of us with practiced grace. Mira he makes me laugh immediately. Selene he compliments on her territorial affiliation, which lands exactly as he intended. When he reaches me, he tilts his head slightly, like he is listening for something. He says my name as if testing its weight and asks how I am finding Ironmoor.

Cold, I say. Beautiful, though.

He laughs. It reaches his eyes, which makes it more dangerous, not less. He says it grows on you. I thank him and keep my face open and pleasant.

The four Alphas are presented in the second half of the ceremony. I am careful to give each of them the same measured attention — the same slight nod, the same neutral expression. The one from the far end of the row is introduced as Cain Ashveil, Alpha of the Northern Wilds. When they say his name, he turns to look at me again, just for a second. I hold his gaze for exactly as long as I would hold anyone's, and I look away first, which I suspect surprises him.

The bond is still humming under my skin. I have been managing it for twenty minutes now. I am very tired already.

The reception after the ceremony is where people reveal themselves, because ceremony is scripted and receptions are not. I take a glass of something and stand near the window and watch.

Luca Ferryn appears at my elbow after I have been standing there five minutes. Alpha of the Western Shore. I had clocked him as charming from across the room, and he is —, but there is something else there too, something careful underneath the ease.

You look like you are running calculations, he says.

I am just standing here, I say.

No. You have looked at every exit in this room, and you have clocked every guard rotation, and you are doing it all with that exact expression. He gestures at my face. Which is very convincing, by the way. Very I am just standing here.

I look at him properly. He is grinning, but his eyes are level. You are not what I expected, he says.

What did you expect?

Someone more — he gestures, searching for the word — decorative.

Disappointing, I say.

He laughs — startled, genuine, a sound that has nothing performed in it. I decide he is probably the least dangerous person in this room. I will turn out to be wrong about that, but not in the way I am imagining.

I do not feel the bond with him. Not the way I felt it with Cain. There is warmth, interest, something that might become something with enough time and proximity, but not that seismic recognition, that bone-deep click. I am not sure if this is a relief.

Dorian Vale finds me when I move to the window. He arrives the way he seems to do everything — precisely, without excess. He does not offer pleasantries. He stands beside me and looks at the room for a moment, and then he says that I have a remarkable way of being in a room without appearing to be in it.

Thank you, I say, as if it is a compliment.

He looks at me like he knows it is not one. His eyes drop to my collar — just once, the briefest flicker — and then back to my face. He does not say anything about it. He asks me something bland and perfectly sociable, and the conversation continues, and I spend the rest of it wondering exactly what he saw.

Rafe Dusk is at the edge of the room all evening. He speaks to no one. He has a glass he does not drink from and a posture that communicates, efficiently and without ambiguity, that he would rather be absolutely anywhere else. I watch him from across the space and feel nothing — no pull, no recognition, none of that subsonic hum. Nothing.

I wonder, for the first time, if I imagined what happened with Cain.

Then I pass Rafe in the corridor on the way back to the Cradle.

The air between us does not just tighten — it contracts, fast and total, like a fist closing. I have to stop walking. I cannot help it.

He stops too. We look at each other in the dim corridor, and I understand, with absolute certainty, that I did not imagine anything.

Keep moving, he says. His voice is low and compressed, like a man talking himself back from something.

I keep moving. I keep my steps even all the way back to my room and then I sit on the floor with my back against the door, and I breathe until the feeling stops feeling like it might knock me over.

The note comes an hour later. A folded square of paper slipped under the bathroom door I share with the adjacent room. I unfold it slowly.

Three words, in small careful handwriting. Do not show them the mark.

I sit with it for a long time. Petra. The quiet girl from the carriage, the one who said almost nothing, the one I was cautiously interested in. She knew. From the moment she saw me, somehow, she knew what I was carrying under my collar. And she is frightened for me.

I go to her room to find out why.

Her room is empty. The bed has not been slept in — the covers smooth, the pillow undisturbed. Her bag is gone. I stand in the doorway and look at the room for a moment, and then I go to find a guard.

Miss Petra withdrew from the Selection last night, he tells me. Family illness, I believe.

I watch his face when he says it. He will not meet my eyes.

Of course, I say. Goodnight.

I go back to my room. I sit on the bed, and I think about Lysa, scratching her name into the underside of a shelf. I think about Petra, who knew something frightening and tried to warn me, and is now gone. I think about how this Selection keeps losing women.

I do not sleep. But when morning comes, I am ready.