CHAPTER 5

Murielle's POV

I stood in that hallway long after his footsteps faded, staring at nothing, and let myself finally admit the thing I'd been avoiding since the moment he'd left me on that road three years ago. 

The brother who used to carry me on his shoulders through the training yard wasn't coming back. Whatever wore his face now had buried that boy a long time before he ever buried the truth about who really leaked that battle plan.

It didn't feel like the kind of thing that should happen quietly, in an empty hallway, with no one around to see it. It happened anyway.

I didn't sleep that night, not really. Prison had a way of stealing that from a person permanently, not just for the years you spent inside it. Every time I came close, some part of me startled awake convinced I'd hear a guard's boots, or feel a hand closing around my arm, and I'd lie there afterward in the guest room's narrow bed, staring at a ceiling that wasn't mine, waiting for morning to make itself useful.

Nobody had saved me anything for breakfast. Nobody was waiting for me at the table either, which didn't surprise me half as much as it probably should have.

I walked into the kitchen myself.

The staff went quiet the second I crossed the threshold. Nobody looked at me. Hands kept moving, chopping, stirring, wiping down a counter that didn't need it, anything that gave them an excuse not to meet my eyes. One of them, a woman I didn't recognize, scraped together a plate from whatever scraps were sitting out and shoved it across the counter without looking at me.

"That's all that's left. Take it or leave it."

I took it. It was still better than anything I'd eaten in three years, and I'd long since stopped being too proud to notice that.

Once the King came and went, I decided, I'd ask them to let me leave this place for good. They'd only pulled me out of that cell because a King's decree left them no choice, every unmated female accounted for, no exceptions, and the second that obligation was met, there'd be no reason left for them to keep pretending I existed. There was nothing left here worth staying for.

I carried the plate to the dining hall and sat alone to eat it.

Dorian found me there anyway.

He sat down beside me with a smile that might have fooled someone who hadn't spent three years learning exactly what it meant.

"Is this all you're eating?"

His tone flipped cold before I could even answer. "You really learned a lot in prison, didn't you? Eating leftovers, making yourself look pitiful."

"If you actually wanted to atone for something," he said, "you'd apologize to the families of the people who died. Instead of putting on this act."

I lowered my eyes, picked up my plate, and tried to leave. His hand closed around my arm before I made it two steps.

"My one-day deadline is almost up," he said. "If you still won't apologize, I won't go easy on you again."

"You didn't go easy on me three years ago either." The words were out before I could stop them, harder than anything I'd let myself say to him since the car. "If you hadn't given false testimony, I never would have gone to prison in the first place."

I didn't have it in me to raise my voice back at him. I just wanted him to let go of my arm.

He went silent for a second. When he spoke again, whatever had cracked in his face had hardened back over.

"Because you were the traitor. I wasn't going to let you walk away from that."

I laughed, short and cold, with nothing behind it. I didn't have the energy left to argue my own innocence to a man who'd already decided the verdict three years ago and just wanted me to agree with him.

That seemed to make it worse.

He hauled me up by the arm before I could stop him, dragging me out of the dining hall and down the short flight of steps that led to the cellar door. I fought him the whole way, uselessly, my bad legs giving me nothing to fight back with. He shoved me inside before I saw it coming, and the door slammed shut behind me before I'd even found my footing.

"When you're ready to apologize," his voice came through the mind link, flat and final, "contact me."

Then nothing. He was gone.

I pounded on the door until my hands ached, calling his name into a room built to keep food fresh, which meant it was built to keep air out too. My voice went nowhere. It just came back at me, smaller each time.

Prison had left me with a fear of small, sealed spaces that no one down here had ever cared enough to notice, let alone treat. Without my wolf, I couldn't even mind-link out. I was just a voice, in a box, going quiet.

My legs gave out first. Then the room started sliding sideways, or maybe I was the one sliding, and somewhere in the dark I decided, almost peacefully, that this was probably where it ended.

The door burst open.

Someone caught me before I hit the ground, arms closing around me solid and sure, a stranger's voice cutting through the fog thick enough that I almost mistook it for something I'd invented to make dying easier.

"Wake up."

I didn't get more than an impression of him in that first second, the outline of a jaw, the warmth radiating off him like he'd been running, amber catching low light where his eyes should be.

Somewhere underneath all of it, deeper than thought, something in me that had been silent for three years lifted its head and howled a single word.

Mate. My mate.