Chapter 5: The Charmer's Tell

POV: Luca

Here is the thing about grief: after a long enough, you stop feeling it as sadness and start feeling it as weather. It is just the climate you live in. Sometimes it is mild, and you almost forget it is there. Sometimes it rolls in fast and you cannot see six feet in front of you. You learn to function in both conditions, and eventually, people stop noticing you are functioning in any condition at all, because you have gotten so good at the surface.

Elena died three years ago. Ruling: accident. The truth is something I have never said out loud to anyone, not because I cannot prove it but because proof in this court is what the King decides it is, and I have spent three years learning exactly how that works before I do anything with what I know.

I came to this Selection because the summons was a summons. I also came because something in my intelligence network — which is small, careful, and known to absolutely no one — told me the timing was wrong. Four years since the last Selection. That heir died, and here we are again, and I do not believe in coincidences.

Rose, I decide within twenty minutes of meeting her, is the most interesting person in this building. She listens the way people do when they are actually listening, not waiting to speak. She asks one question per person, and it is always the right one. When I talk to her in the garden on the second day, I end up telling her something true by accident — nothing incriminating, just something real, a detail about Elena I had not planned to share — and I wait to see what she does with it.

You do not have to tell me anything, she says.

I know, I say. That is why I did.

We sit in comfortable silence for a while, which is not nothing. Comfortable silence is rarer than people pretend.

The bond has been building toward me the way the weather builds. I have been pretending it is something else — warmth, interest, the particular quality of attention she has — but sitting in the garden I run out of alternative interpretations. It settles into me with a finality that I would describe as peaceful if I were not so frightened of it.

Luca, she says, after a moment. Just my name. Not a question, not a prompt. Just an acknowledgement.

I say I am terrified. It comes out without armour on it.

That is reasonable, she says.

I laugh — real, involuntary, the kind that surfaces when you have given up on managing the situation. I ask whether she is going to tell me it is going to be fine.

I do not know if it is going to be fine, she says. I would rather tell you the truth.

I think about Elena, who also told me the truth, even when it was inconvenient. I think about how rare that is. I think about how much it cost her.

I lost someone, I say. I have not said this plainly to anyone. Before this. Someone I was beginning to bond with.

She looks at me with those grey eyes that seem to see further than they should. She asks what happened.

The King's court ruled it an accident. I let the space around those words do its work.

She hears it. I see her hear it. She says nothing for a moment, and then she asks how long I have known about the previous candidate. Lysa.

My turn to pause. I ask how she found out.

Wardrobe shelf, she says.

I was at the last Selection as a territorial witness, I say. I saw her — bright girl, nervous energy, pack insignia from the southern lowlands. She was escorted out mid-ceremony. I never saw her again, and I told myself it was a coincidence, and I knew it was not.

Why did you not — she begins.

Do what? I ask. Not bitterly. Genuinely. Go to whom with what? I had a bad feeling about a girl who officially withdrew from a voluntary ceremony. That is not evidence. That is a hunch. I look at her. What do you have?

More than a hunch, she says. Not yet enough.

My contact's message arrives that afternoon. I am in the garden alone, and a palace courier delivers it as ordinary correspondence — my contact is meticulous about cover. I open it under the guise of reviewing documents. Five words. They know what she is. Get her out.

I fold the letter. I sit in the garden with the sun on my face and my mind running very fast behind my expression, which I keep warm and idle, and pleasant. Three feet away, a palace guard does his rotation. I nod at him when he passes.

They know. The King knows what Rose is. Which means the timeline I had — vague, speculative, months — is wrong. The timeline is now.

Mira finds me that evening, close to midnight, with tears on her face and her hands shaking. Someone had been in her room. Nothing taken. But on her pillow, left deliberately, a small carved token — the kind used in traditional pack death rites. A marker for the dead.

She does not understand what it means. I do.

I talk her down. I sit with her until she sleeps, and then I take up position outside her door, back against the wall. In the quiet I send one message to my contact through the method we have established. Short, direct. How long do we have?

I wait in the corridor, and I do not get an answer that night, and the not-having of an answer is itself a kind of answer. I watch the shadows and I think about how much I am willing to lose again, and how the honest answer is: nothing. I am not willing to lose anything again.

Which means I am going to have to do something about it.