KAPITEL VIER: DAS PROBLEM DES KÖNIGS

The problem, in its simplest form, was this: She didn't conform.

Darius had spent three days analyzing this situation with the same analytical framework he applied to military and political problems—a framework that was thorough and systematic but yielded no useful results. The bond of mate was real—he had felt its connection with the absolute certainty of something that had no interest in being talked away—and the presence of that bond meant that Seraphina Cole was not a prisoner to be managed or a subject to be disciplined. She was his mate. The supernatural, biological, cosmo-cosmically connected other half of a bond older and more powerful than any piece of political authority he possessed.

From an operational standpoint, it was a disaster.

He sat in the war council chamber, Hadeon opposite him at the table with three maps between them, and he was having a very hard time following the Bloodfang briefing. Hadeon, who noticed everything and voiced most of it, had already raised an eyebrow in his direction twice.

"The eastern flank," said Hadeon, "is unprotected without reinforcements from the Greywood garrison."

"Relocate the garrison."

"This leaves the northern pass undefended."

"Then relocate half the garrison."

"Darius." Hadeon's voice shifted to the tone he used when he actually wanted to be heard and not just dismissed. "You're not listening."

"I'm listening."

“You’re present. That’s not the same.” Hadeon leaned back in his chair and scrutinized him with that open, unashamed assessment only a blood relative could afford without losing his position or his teeth. “She’s in the east wing.”

"I know where she is."

"How exactly do you know that? Because you check Oren's watch report dispatches every twenty minutes. That's not, just so you know, a frequency that suggests anyone is primarily concerned about Bloodfang's troop positions."

“Oren’s watch report contains information relevant to—”

„Darius.“

"She tried to kill you."

“Yes.”

"And you put her up in a guest room."

"I have placed them in a secure room."

"With a window, a desk, and apparently access to Cain. He asked me this morning, with such feigned nonchalance, where the tea set was, that he's definitely doing something he'd rather not explain." Hadeon paused. "What will you do about her?"

Darius looked at the map. The situation in the borderlands did indeed demand his attention, and the fact that he was finding it difficult to muster that attention was information in itself. He didn't like it. "I'll talk to her," he said.

"You've been saying that for three days."

"I will speak with her today."

Hadeon studied him. He had a way of looking at him that contained a very specific combination of affection and despair, one that hadn't changed much since their childhood. Darius had spent the better part of thirty years immunizing himself against it, and yet it still occasionally seeped through when he wasn't at his most armored. "She's your mate," Hadeon said, not as an announcement, but as an acknowledgment. As if offering Darius the space to say yes without having to explain all that followed.

“Yes,” said Darius.

Hadeon was silent for a moment. "Is that the band—"

"Real. Yes."

Another pause. “And she—”

"He tried to kill me," said Darius. "Yes. We've been through this before."

“I wanted to ask if she felt it too,” Hadeon said. “The bond.”

“She sensed something,” said Darius in the flattest voice he could muster. “She expressed it with a blade.”

Hadeon opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "I will not laugh," he said with the energy of a man waging a serious battle with himself.

"I advise you to do the same."

“I absolutely will not—” He pressed his lips together. His shoulders shook. “I’m sorry,” he said, without actually being sorry. “I’m sorry, I’m just—your face, just now—”

"I will transfer you to the northern garrison," Darius said.

Hadeon recovered with visible effort. "The point is," he said with the careful articulation of someone maintaining a professional tone despite considerable inner resistance, "that whatever she felt, she felt it too. That means you have a companion who was aware of the bond and responded to it with lethal force. And that is—and I say this as someone who has studied every recorded companion bond case in Ironmoor history—not the standard."

“It’s not the standard,” Darius agreed.

"Which suggests that something is disrupting the natural function of the ligament."

Darius said nothing.

"Something like—" Hadeon's expression changed, the humor giving way to something more serious. "Darius. The witch."

“I said her words mean nothing.”

“You said her words meant nothing,” said Hadeon, “and then your companion tried to slit your throat on the road to Ashenford. And I suggest to you—as your brother, your general, and the person who has observed your decision-making for the past twenty-nine years—that the word ‘nothing’ needs revising.”

The silence in the war room enveloped her with the weight of something that had been waiting for this conversation for seven months.

“I will speak with her today,” Darius said again. And this time it wasn’t a diversionary tactic. It was a decision.

He went to the east wing in the early evening, once the dispatch work was finished, the council had been dismissed, and the palace had settled into the quieter rhythm of its nighttime operations. He dismissed the guard outside its door and paused for a moment in the corridor, a moment he would never have admitted to anyone.

He was not used to not knowing how to enter a room.

He knocked – a concession to something he couldn't immediately name – and opened the door.

She sat by the window with a book she seemed to have acquired somewhere—he'd have to ask Cain about that—and looked up at him. Her amber eyes instantly turned golden, and her jaw tensed with the distinct air of someone who had been expecting and preparing for this.

“Your Majesty,” she said in a tone that signaled no respect whatsoever.

He stepped into the room, closed the door behind him, and looked at her. She looked back. The bond of comradeship buzzed in his chest at a frequency he hadn't yet learned to control. The anger in her eyes was absolute, and yet—and this was the thing that had haunted him ever since she'd fallen to the ground on the road to Ashenford—there was something else beneath it. Something that scrutinized him with an attention that wasn't entirely hostile. An analysis, perhaps. The very particular quality of a sharp mind investigating something it hadn't quite solved.

“I will offer you an official position,” he said. He had opted for directness. He was better at that than at anything else, and any other tactic would only waste time. “The title of Luna, the rights and—”

“No,” she said.

He paused. "You haven't even heard the terms and conditions yet."

“I don’t have to,” she said. “A title of yours carries the weight of everything that title has already meant under your rule. That is to say, it is a control mechanism, packaged in words that sound respectful. I have no interest.”

He looked at her for a moment. "What would you like instead?"

"Go home."

"I cannot offer you that at the moment."

“Then we have no basis for negotiation,” she said, turning her attention back to the book.

He stood in the room for four more seconds – two seconds longer than he had ever stood in a room after being dumped – and then he left.

He stood in the corridor outside her door and realized – with the grim precision of a man who had always preferred precise information to convenient information – that every approach he had in his repertoire would fail with this woman.

He needed to understand why.

And somewhere between this thought and the way back to his own chambers, a possibility surfaced in the back of his mind that had been trying to get there for seven months, and he finally, finally allowed it.

The words of the witch.

He stopped mid-walk. He stood in the middle of the palace corridor, the nighttime sounds of the servants around him and the bond of comrades humming in his chest, thinking of Mira's voice in the glade and the words of the ancient language he had only partially understood. And he thought of how Seraphina's eyes had turned golden even before she had reached his horse. And he thought of how his Alpha command had shattered against her like a wave against a rock—something that had never happened before, something that should have been impossible—

*What you hate will confront you in the form of the person's face,which was created for your heart.*

He went to find Cain.