Chapter Six: Waking in a Stranger's Kingdom

Annabel's POV

The first thing I noticed was that nothing hurt the way it should have.

No fist pounding a door.

No voice barking Omega through the wood.

Just soft light coming through a window I didn't recognize, and sheets against my skin so clean they felt almost wrong, like my body had forgotten what that was supposed to feel like and needed a second to catch up.

Then my body remembered the rest of it for me.

The drop.

The dark.

Fangs and claws circling in the trees, a voice saying nothing personal like that made it kinder. I sat up too fast and the

room tilted sideways and something sharp lit up along my ribs, and I understood, distantly, that I was alive in a way I hadn't been sure I'd stay.

I made myself breathe through it. Small breaths. The kind that don't ask your ribs for permission.

When the room stopped spinning I actually looked at it, and that was almost worse than the pain.

This wasn't a servant's room.

I knew servant's rooms — the cot, the cracked mirror, the window facing the garbage heap.

This room had a fireplace.

Actual expensive furniture, the kind with clean joints and no history of being someone's third choice.

A rug soft enough that I could feel it was soft just from where my foot had slipped free of the blanket.

Wherever I was, I did not belong here.

I knew that the way I knew my own name.

"You're awake."

I flinched so hard the pain in my ribs flared bright, and a young woman stepped into view from a chair near the window I hadn't even registered was occupied.

Warm-faced, dark curls pulled back loosely, sleeves rolled to the elbow like she'd been in the middle of something practical when I stirred.

She didn't react to the flinch at all.

Didn't soften her voice into something performative, didn't look at me like I'd done something strange.

Just smiled, easy, like flinching was a completely reasonable thing a person might do and she wasn't going to make it a moment.

"I'm Briony," she said. "Healer. Well — healer in training, if we're being precise, but nobody's died on my watch yet, so I'm counting it."

She crossed to the bed and reached for my wrist without asking, two fingers finding my pulse with the kind of practiced

ease that told me this wasn't her first patient who'd woken up somewhere unfamiliar.

"How's the breathing? Sharp, dull, or somewhere unpleasant in between?"

"Sharp," I said. My voice came out rough. "When I move."

"Two cracked ribs. They'll be dull sharp for another week, then just annoying."

She let go of my wrist and reached for the cloth at my temple instead, checking something there with light fingers. "You've got a healthy collection of bruising and a head wound that wanted eleven stitches and settled for eight because I'm efficient. All things considered — you got lucky."

"Lucky," I repeated. The word sat strange in my mouth. It wasn't a word I associated with myself anymore.

"Relative term," Briony said, unbothered, moving to check something at my side next. "You fell down a ravine and got chased by rogues. Lucky's doing a lot of work in that sentence.

But you're alive, your ribs will knit clean, and nothing's bleeding that shouldn't be.

I'll take it."

She kept talking while she worked — nothing important, just the easy scaffolding of small talk, the weather, a complaint about a healer's apprentice who kept mislabeling salves, the kind of nothing that fills a room without demanding anything back.

I lay there and let it wash over me and slowly became aware of something moving through my chest that I didn't have an immediate name for.

It took me embarrassingly long to place it.

She wasn't performing kindness for an audience. There was no Amelia in the doorway to impress, no pack watching to see how gracious the healer was being to the fallen Beta's daughter.

She was just being kind, plainly, because I was a person in a bed who'd been hurt, and that seemed to be reason enough for her.

I didn't know what to do with that. I genuinely didn't.

"Where am I?" I asked, when she paused long enough for the question to fit.

"Duskthorne." She said it like it should mean something to me, then caught herself. "Sorry — the Duskthorne Empire. You're in the citadel, in the guest wing."

Duskthorne.

The word landed somewhere behind my ribs, heavy and unfamiliar. I'd grown up hearing it the way you hear the name of a country you'll never visit — real, distant, irrelevant to your actual life.

"Whose territory," I said carefully, though some sinking part of me already suspected the answer, "exactly."

"Kyrian Ashford's." Briony said it easily, checking the stitches at my temple one more time.

"You were found at the border two nights ago.

Rough shape.

The King brought you in himself."

The King himself. "No this can't be right... he'll kill me himself when he gets back. I'm sorry to trespass but I have to leave this instant," I said, trying to get up from the bed but I was too weak to stand on my wounded legs. And besides,my body ached when I forced myself a little to be stubborn.

I turned that sentence over and it didn't fit anywhere in my current

understanding of my own life.

Nothing about the last three months had involved kings.

My life had shrunk down to kitchens and bucket water and the specific geography of hallways where I was least likely to be noticed.

Kings were not a category of person who noticed me.

"He brought me in," I repeated.

"Personally."

"Mm." Briony's eyes flicked to my face, something curious in them she didn't push on.

"Hasn't left much, either, if I'm honest. Sat in that chair most of last night." She nodded toward the seat she'd just vacated.

"Which is unusual for him, from what I hear.

I'm fairly new to the citadel myself, so don't take my gossip as gospel."

I didn't ask why.

I wasn't sure I wanted the answer yet — some instinct telling me it was standing directly behind the question, close enough to touch, and I wasn't ready to touch it.

"What happens now?" I asked instead. "To someone they find on the border.

Someone with no name, no pack, nothing to explain who they are."

Something crossed Briony's face — not evasion exactly, more like she genuinely hadn't considered the question mattered yet, too busy with ribs and stitches to think past the immediate work of keeping me alive.

"Honestly? I don't know," she admitted. "That's not really my department.

I fix people. What happens to them after I fix them is somebody else's job." She smiled, easy again, patting the blanket near my knee like that settled it. "Though I'd guess the King has opinions, given the sitting-in-a-chair-all-night thing."

I didn't answer that.

"What's your name?" she asked, gentle, like it was an afterthought and not the first real question either of us had asked.

"Nobody's had a chance to properly ask yet."

I opened my mouth.

I genuinely didn't know what was going to come out — the truth, or some smaller, safer version of it, some name that didn't carry three months of scrubbed floors and a bond that had torn itself out of my chest in front of three hundred witnesses.

I was still deciding, still turning the words over, weighing exactly how much of myself I was willing to hand a stranger in a kingdom I didn't understand yet—

The door opened.

I felt it before I saw it.

The air in the room changed, pressure building low in my chest, heat gathering under my ribs like something enormous had just leaned its full weight against the inside of my skin.

My breath caught somewhere between my throat and my lungs refused to go any further.

I looked up.

He filled the doorway the way certain things simply do — not by trying to, just by existing at that scale.

Dark hair, sharper jaw than any face had a right to, eyes that found mine and locked there with an intensity that had nothing polite left in it.

The bond slammed taut between us so hard I gasped out loud.

Not the golden warmth I remembered from the ceremony hall, not that fragile, hopeful pull that had made me smile like an idiot before it was torn out of my chest in front of three hundred witnesses.

This was something else entirely.

Something that didn't ask permission.

For one unbearable second, neither of us said a single word.