Chapter 5: Lockdown

Elena

The lockdown started with a bell.

I didn't know that was what it meant, not at first — just a deep, resonant sound rolling through the stone corridors at midday, followed by the unmistakable noise of running feet, doors slamming, voices raised in a register I hadn't heard from this court before. Controlled panic, if there was such a thing. Efficient fear.

Dorian found me before I'd made it two steps out of my room. "East wing, now. Don't argue."

"What's happening?"

"Rurik's scouts were spotted inside the outer boundary an hour ago. We're not taking chances." He was already moving, and I was already following, because whatever calm authority Dorian usually carried had sharpened into something that didn't invite questions. "You're with the King until this clears."

"With him where?"

"His quarters. It's the most defensible room in the compound, and frankly, it's the one place no one would dare try to reach you." He didn't wait for my reaction to that, just kept walking, fast enough that I had to work to keep pace.

Kade's quarters turned out to be less a room than a suite carved into the oldest part of the compound — thick stone walls, narrow windows built for defense rather than view, a fireplace already lit despite the hour. He was standing near it when Dorian brought me in, arms crossed, jaw tight in a way that told me the scouts weren't the only thing bothering him.

"How long," he asked Dorian, not me.

"Unclear. Could be hours. Could be until morning, if they're testing the perimeter properly." Dorian glanced between the two of us, something unreadable crossing his face. "I'll post guards at both ends of the corridor. Nothing gets past them."

"See that it doesn't."

Dorian left, and then it was just the two of us and the fire, and a silence that stretched long enough to become its own kind of conversation.

"You could sit," Kade said eventually, nodding toward a chair near the hearth. "Standing in the doorway all night seems like an unnecessary form of protest."

"I wasn't protesting. I was deciding how much of this room I trust."

"None of it, I'd imagine."

"None of it," I agreed, and sat anyway, because my legs had started aching from the run through the corridors and pride only carried a person so far.

He didn't sit across from me. He paced instead, close to the window, glancing out at grounds I couldn't see from where I was, like he could track the threat by sheer force of attention.

"This is my fault," he said, after a while, so quietly I almost missed it.

"Rurik cornering me in the garden?"

"All of it." He stopped pacing. "I bought a debt I could have forgiven. I made a point instead of making peace, because making a point was easier, and now there's a man testing my perimeter because he thinks the fastest way to hurt me is through the thing I claimed to prove I could."

"Is that what I am? A point you made?"

He turned to look at me properly for the first time since we'd entered the room. "You were, when this started."

"And now?"

He didn't answer right away, and something about the pause felt more honest than any answer he could have given quickly. "Now I don't entirely know what you are. Which is its own kind of problem."

The fire popped, sending a brief flare of light across the room, catching the sharp lines of his face in a way that made it harder than usual to remember I was supposed to be afraid of him.

"Tell me about six years ago," I said.

He went very still. "Dorian talks too much."

"Dorian said almost nothing. He said I should ask you, if I was brave enough to survive the answer. That's not the same as talking too much. That's just enough to make sure I'd never stop wondering."

Something shifted in his expression — not quite pain, but close enough to its neighborhood that I understood I'd found a door he kept locked for good reason.

"My father was King before me," he said finally, sitting across from me at last, elbows on his knees, eyes on the fire instead of on me. "He believed in mercy. Negotiation. He believed the Ashfords, when they said they wanted peace." A long pause. "They didn't want peace. They wanted him dead, and an opening to take the territory while his son was too young and too soft to hold it."

"They killed him."

"They killed him in this room." Kade's voice was flat, controlled, the way you talk about something you've had to practice saying without breaking. "I was twenty-two. I found him. And I decided, somewhere in the hours after that, that mercy was a luxury for kings who intended to keep breathing, and I didn't intend to make my father's mistake twice."

"So you burned their compound."

"I burned their compound," he agreed. "And I've spent six years making sure every pack within three territories understood exactly what happens to people who mistake my patience for weakness." He finally looked at me. "Rurik doesn't hate me because I'm cruel, Elena. He hates me because I stopped being anything else, the day I found my father on this floor, and he can't forgive me for surviving what killed him."

I didn't know what to say to that — didn't know how to hold the version of him sitting across from me, quiet and unguarded in the firelight, against the man who'd drunk from my glass like a threat, against the King who'd told an entire hall I'd get used to disappointment.

"I'm sorry," I said finally, because it was true, and because Dorian's advice was still ringing somewhere in the back of my head — *don't perform. He'll smell it before you finish the sentence.*

"Don't be." He looked back at the fire. "Sympathy is wasted on me. I made my choices with both eyes open."

"That doesn't mean you don't get to be sorry about what caused them."

He looked at me like I'd said something in a language he hadn't heard spoken in years — surprised, careful, like he wasn't sure whether to trust the sound of it.

We sat like that for a long time, the fire between us, the sound of guards shifting outside the door, the whole compound holding its breath around a threat neither of us could see. At some point, without either of us deciding it out loud, the distance between our chairs had narrowed to something that no longer felt entirely accidental.

"For what it's worth," he said, much later, when the fire had burned low and my eyes had started to ache with exhaustion, "I don't think you're a point I'm making anymore."

"What am I, then?"

"I haven't decided yet." A pause, and something almost like humor in it. "You should sleep. There's a couch. I'll take it — you can have the bed."

"That's oddly gentlemanly for a man who told a hall full of people he owns me."

"Owning something," he said, standing, offering me a hand up that I took before I'd fully decided to, "doesn't mean I intend to treat it carelessly."

I didn't correct the word *it.* I told myself that was strategy, not surrender.

I mostly believed that, lying in a bed that smelled like him, listening to a King's even breathing from a couch six feet away, while somewhere past the walls, a man who wanted to hurt him tested a perimeter neither of us could see the end of.