Chapter 4

KAEL

She turned back. Her hands were shaking. I could see it through the grip on the decanter, through every careful movement she made. But she found the glass without asking, tipped the bottle, and poured.

Not a single drop spilled.

Four servants had been assigned to this room in three days. The first one knocked the glass off the table. The second dropped the decanter. The third made it as far as lifting the bottle before the shaking got so bad the whiskey ran down the side like rain. This maid's hands were trembling just as hard, but the stream hit the center of the glass and held.

She set the decanter down. Both hands. Careful. She was already turning toward the door.

"Have a drink with me."

She stopped. Her shoulders went rigid — a small, involuntary motion, the kind the body makes before the mind catches up.

She turned. Her eyes stayed on the floor. "I can't."

I set my glass down. The sound was very quiet in that room, but she flinched like a gunshot.

Nobody said no to me. Not Gary, not the elders, not the Alphas who sat across treaty tables and chose their words like men handling something that might detonate.

"You know what happens," I said, "to people who refuse me."

I stood. She didn't step back.

My knuckles grazed her cheek. She flinched, but she held.

I turned my hand and let my fingers trail down — along the line of her jaw, over the fading bruise there, to the side of her neck.

Her pulse kicked hard against my fingertips. I could feel it hammering, fast and desperate, the heartbeat of something small caught in a trap.

We were inches apart.

Then I smelled it.

She exuded an intoxicating scent.

My wolf was howling inside my skull, clawing at the cage of my chest, and the word that came with it—

Mate. She smelled like our mate.

But the Moon Goddess had cursed me to never have one. What was this woman?

"My child nearly died three days ago." Her voice shook, but she held it together the way she'd held the bottle — through sheer, stubborn will. "He needs my milk. If I drink, it poisons the supply." She swallowed. "Kill me if you have to. But I won't be the reason he stops breathing again."

I looked at her. Young. Mid-twenties at the most. The gray servant's tunic too large across the shoulders, a fading bruise along her jaw she hadn't tried to cover. She had kept her eyes down the entire time.

I felt an urge to touch her more. Something I had never experienced before.

My gaze dropped — not by choice, something pulled it — and I saw the two dark circles spreading through the gray fabric at her chest. Milk, leaking through.

She wasn't lying. She was a woman standing in front of a man who could kill her with one hand, and she had chosen her child over her own life without hesitating.

In the end, I held back the urge.

"Go," I said.

She didn't wait. She turned and walked out, and the door closed behind her, and I sat there with a glass of whiskey I suddenly had no interest in drinking.

This woman was different.

---

LYRA

My legs gave out the moment I turned the corner.

I caught the wall and stayed there, just breathing. The stone was cold and solid and the best thing I had felt in three days. My heart was somewhere behind my teeth. I pressed my forehead to the plaster and counted until the shaking eased.

I had just spent forty minutes in the Reaper's room.

And I was alive.

I had surprised myself. Every time my hands started to lose it, every time I thought about the bloodied courtyard yesterday, I had thought about the nursery. About my son's weight in my arms two nights ago. About the fact that if I died in that room, there was no one coming for him.

But what confused me more was that he should have terrified me to the bone. And he did. Yet woven into that fear was something that had no right to be there. A pull.

When he drew near, my body wanted to step back and lean in at the same time. Like standing at the edge of a cliff, knowing I shouldn't look down, but unable to tear my gaze away from the abyss.

Then I remembered something even more shameful.

The moment his rough fingertips brushed against me, my body reacted. Not with fear—with something else. Something warm and uncontrollable.

I could feel the dampness seeping through the fabric, the familiar scent of milk rising from my collar. I think he might have noticed too…

Absurd and shameful as it was, at least I had survived.

—

The ceremony was about to begin.

After today, I could take my child and slip away while they were busy seeing off the guests. To make sure he slept quietly during the ceremony without fussing, I needed to nurse him first.

The nursery was quiet when I arrived. My son was awake, tracking the ceiling with the vague, serious attention of a newborn. He turned toward me before I reached the crib — that instinct already working, recognizing what he needed before he could name it.

I lifted him and settled into the low chair in the corner and let myself have this one thing: the weight of him, the smell of his head, the way his whole body relaxed the moment he was in my arms.

The door opened behind me.

I turned.

Bram stood in the frame. Darius's beta. I had known him for three years.

But now, he was looking at me the way I did not want to be looked at.

"Checking in," he said. He stepped inside and let the door swing shut. His eyes moved over me with a slowness that made my skin contract. "Things change fast, don't they. Omega now."

I held my son closer. "Leave."

"I used to think about it," he said, crossing the room. "When you had the rank. Figured I'd never get the chance." He stopped an arm's length away. "Omega's got different rules."

"Bram." My voice came out flat. "I argued for your promotion. I fed you at my table. I treated you with more respect than you deserved."

"You did." He smiled. "Made me curious what the rest of you tasted like." His eyes dropped to where my tunic had slipped during feeding. "Omega's got no rank, no one coming to check. And I've been waiting three years to find out if the former Luna fucks as good as she looks."

He reached out.

Anger gave me strength. And with my son beside me, it gave me nerve.

I set my son back in the crib, straightened, and drove my foot into Bram's groin.

It didn't drop him. It bought me one step. I put my back to the crib, my son crying behind me now.

The door opened.

Serena stood in the frame. Her attendant beside her. Her eyes moved from Bram to my stance to my son's red face.

Something settled in her expression. Something very deliberate.

"She came to me. Begged me to help her turn against Darius. Told me she'd give me anything—anything—if I'd just take her side."Bram said quickly.

"Seize her." Serena turned to the guards. They moved before I could react.

"You lying coward," I said, my voice shaking with rage. "You put your hands on me."

"She's lying," Bram said. "She's been looking for trouble since she got here."

Serena reached around me, lifted my son from the crib and handed him to her attendant without looking back at me. My son's cry pitched higher.

"Take her to Darius. She's committed a grave crime. He can decide what to do with her."

"You're nothing but cowards and hypocrites, every last one of you." I saw red.

She didn't look at me once more. She didn't need to. She had what she came for.

From behind the door, my son's cry rose — thin, bewildered, reaching for someone who wasn't coming back.