Chapter 3: What the Warlord Wants

POV: Cain

I have spent twenty years making myself into something that does not want. It is, I think, the most useful thing I have ever done. A man who wants is a man with an opening, and openings get people killed — my people, specifically, because my people are my responsibility, and so my wants died a long time ago and I learned to call it strength.

She walked into that hall, and my wolf tried to get out of my skin.

Twenty years. One inhale.

I spend the night after the ceremony in the kind of controlled fury that looks, from the outside, like perfect stillness. Bryn, who has served as my Second for six years and knows me better than anyone alive, takes one look at me in the morning and stays three feet away and does not ask questions. This is why she is good at her job.

The Alpha Council meeting is mid-morning. All four of us around a table with the King and his advisors, going through the Selection's protocols with the thoroughness of men who have done this before. I have read the documents. I know the timeline. I am not listening to the documents.

Rose sits across the room during the opening portion — candidates observe the first session, a tradition, another opportunity for assessment on both sides. She sits with her hands folded and her expression neutral and she does not look at me once. I watch her not look at me, and I am more unsettled by this than I would be if she stared.

Luca is talking to her after the session, which I notice with a feeling I refuse to name. Dorian is watching her from the window with that careful analytical expression that means he has already concluded something and is deciding whether to act on it. Rafe is not in the room.

I engineer a moment alone with her in the garden that afternoon. Not accidentally. I am not a man who does things accidentally.

She is sitting on the stone bench near the eastern wall, reading. She does not look up when she hears me coming. She finishes her sentence first, and then she looks up, and her expression gives me absolutely nothing.

You felt it, I say.

A pause. She says she does not know what I mean.

That is a lie.

Is it? She tilts her head slightly. You are very certain for a man who has known me for thirty-six hours.

I have known you since the moment you walked into that hall and my wolf tried to get out of my skin.

She holds my gaze for a moment. Something moves behind her eyes — not surprise, she had clearly been expecting this conversation — but something else, something more complicated. Then she says: That sounds like your problem, not mine.

She stands, closes her book, and walks back toward the Cradle. I let her go.

It costs me more than any battle I have ever lost.

Alone in the garden, I allow myself the honest version of my own assessment. I have felt attraction before. I have felt the kind of territorial possessiveness that sometimes comes with proximity to someone your wolf finds interesting. I have never felt this — this bone-level recognition, this absolute infuriating certainty. And what makes it stranger is the texture of it. It is not the sense that she belongs to me, which is what I would expect from pack bonding instinct. It is the sense that I belong somewhere that she is. The distinction matters. I turn it over and do not know what to do with it.

I go back to my chambers. I try to work. At midnight, I am still at the desk when Bryn knocks and comes in with the expression she wears when she has information she would rather not have.

What? I say.

The candidate who withdrew last night, Bryn says. I overheard two of the King's household guards talking this morning. In the eastern service corridor. They thought they were alone.

And?

They did not say family illness. Bryn is careful with this, precise. The phrase they used was managed.

I set down my pen. Managed.

Yes.

I sit with that word. Managed. It is not the vocabulary of illness or departure. It is the vocabulary of problems being solved. I do not know what it means precisely. I know it is not good. I know it concerns a young woman who entered a royal Selection and no longer appears to be in it.

I tell Bryn to find out everything she can about the previous Selection — the one four years ago, the heir who died, anyone who can be reached quietly. She nods and leaves.

It is past two in the morning when I finally move to the window. I am not sure what draws me to look at the old wing — the closed section of the palace that has been shuttered since the last Selection —, but I do look, and there is a light there. A single light, moving slowly behind the glass.

I watch it. Someone is moving through the old wing at two in the morning, which is closed, which should be empty.

As I watch, the figure stops. Turns. And looks directly at my window.

From this distance, I can see nothing of their face. They stand perfectly still for a long moment, looking at precisely the spot where I am standing, as if they knew I was there. Then the light goes out.

I stand in the dark for a long time after that. Something has already started that I do not have the full shape of yet. I can feel it the way I feel weather changing — in the chest, in the instincts, in the particular quality of stillness before something breaks.

I go back to my desk. I do not sleep.