Chapter 3: The Dinner

Elena

The dining hall was smaller than the Great Hall, which apparently meant it could only comfortably seat forty people instead of two hundred. I counted the chairs while a servant girl fussed with the laces on the back of a dress I hadn't chosen and wouldn't have picked in a hundred years — deep red, cut close, clearly selected by someone who wanted me to look like I belonged to something.

"His Majesty picked the color," the girl said, like she could feel me hating it.

"Of course he did."

"He said human brides usually wear white. He didn't want you confused about which one you were."

I almost laughed. Almost. "Tell him I appreciate the clarity."

She didn't tell him anything, obviously, because servants who valued their jobs didn't relay sarcasm up a chain of command that ended in a man who'd burned down a compound rather than sit through a negotiation. But she smiled for half a second before catching herself, and I decided I liked her.

By the time I made it to the hall, most of the seats were already filled — court members in expensive, muted colors, all of them watching the door like they'd been told a show was starting. Dorian caught my eye from a seat near the head of the table and gave me the smallest possible nod, which I chose to interpret as *don't do anything I can't talk you out of.*

Kade sat at the head, of course, in a chair that managed to look like a throne even at a dinner table. He didn't stand when I entered. Didn't stop his conversation with the woman beside him — dark hair, sharp jaw, the kind of beauty that had clearly been cultivated for exactly this room. She looked at me the way you'd look at something that had wandered in from outside and tracked mud on the carpet.

"Elena." Kade said my name without looking up from his glass. "You're late."

"I was informed dinner was at eight. It's eight."

"Punctual for a human." The woman beside him laughed — not a real laugh, the kind designed to be heard. "How refreshing."

"And you are?" I asked her directly, because two could perform for an audience.

"Marisol." She said it like the name should mean something to me. "I've known Kade since we were children. I practically grew up in this court."

"That explains the manners," I said, and sat down in the only open seat — which happened to be directly across from Kade, close enough that I could see the exact moment something flickered behind his eyes. Not anger. Something closer to interest, the same look from the Great Hall, like I'd moved a piece on a board he thought he'd already solved.

Marisol's smile thinned. "I'm sorry — did you say something clever? It's hard to tell, with the accent."

"I didn't say anything clever. I said something true. There's usually a difference, but I understand the confusion."

A few people down the table made a sound that might have been a laugh, quickly smothered. Kade's expression didn't change, but I caught the corner of his mouth twitch — there and gone, fast enough that I might have imagined it.

Dinner went on that way for the better part of an hour — Marisol testing me with small cuts, me handing them back sharper than she expected, the rest of the table watching like it was the only entertainment they'd had in months. It probably was.

The real trouble started with the wine.

A servant filled my glass without asking, the same dark red as everyone else's, and I watched Kade watch me pick it up and set it back down without drinking.

"You don't drink," he said. Not a question. Everything out of his mouth seemed to arrive that way — already decided, waiting for me to confirm what he'd concluded before I'd even opened my mouth.

"I don't drink wine I didn't pour myself. Not at this table. Not yet."

Silence. Actual silence, not the polite kind — the whole table seemed to inhale at once, like I'd said something closer to treason than table manners.

"That's an interesting accusation to make," Kade said slowly, "at my table, in front of my court."

"It's not an accusation. It's a policy." I held his gaze, because Dorian's advice was ringing in my ears — *don't perform for him* — and the only thing I had that wasn't a performance was the truth. "You had me delivered here on a contract I didn't sign, into a house full of people who'd benefit if I disappeared quietly. Forgive me for not trusting the drink I didn't watch get poured."

Marisol looked delighted, the way people look when they think they're about to watch someone else get destroyed. Dorian's jaw had gone tight. Somewhere down the table, a man I didn't recognize had stopped eating entirely.

Kade set down his own glass.

Then he reached across the table — slow, deliberate, giving me every opportunity to pull back that I didn't take — and picked up my glass instead. He drank from it. Not a sip. A real swallow, unhurried, eyes on mine the entire time, like he was making a point to the whole room and to me separately, two different messages in the same gesture.

He set the glass back down in front of me.

"Now it's safe," he said. "Drink, or don't. But don't ever imply, in front of my court, that I would let someone poison what's mine."

The word landed strangely. *Mine.* Not *my wife,* not *my bride,* not even *my human.* Just *mine,* like the possession itself was the only category that mattered, and everything else was details.

I picked up the glass and drank, mostly because I understood — the way you understand a shift in weather before the first drop of rain — that not drinking now would have been its own kind of surrender, a different one than the one he'd just prevented.

"Better," he said, and went back to his food like nothing had happened at all, like he hadn't just rearranged the entire table's understanding of what I was to him in the space of ten seconds.

Marisol didn't look delighted anymore.

I spent the rest of the dinner in a strange, humming quiet, aware of exactly how close his hand had been to mine over that glass, aware that I'd expected him to let the room turn on me and instead he'd stood in front of it — not for my sake, I told myself. For his. For the version of control that meant nobody got to threaten what belonged to him, even sideways, even as a joke.

That was all it was.

I almost believed it, walking back to the east wing alone that night, if I hadn't caught Dorian watching me the entire way down the corridor with an expression that looked a lot like a man revising his expectations.

"That wasn't what I meant by *don't do anything I can't talk you out of,*" he said.

"You said don't perform. I didn't perform."

"No," Dorian agreed, something almost like admiration in his voice. "You really didn't." He shook his head slightly, like he was already tired of whatever came next. "I don't think he's had someone refuse to perform for him in about six years."

"What happened six years ago?"

Dorian's face closed like a door. "Ask him yourself. If you're brave enough to survive the answer."

He left me there with that, and I stood in the corridor a long moment, thinking about the taste of wine I hadn't chosen, and the word *mine,* and the six years Dorian clearly wasn't going to explain tonight.