chapter 4

Bryce had said exactly one thing when Lillo came down from the balcony: "Eat. Rest. We'll talk tomorrow."

Then he'd vanished into a war room with his council, leaving her alone in a palace full of silent staff and a very long list of things she didn't trust.

The food was at the top of the list.

Lillo had grown up learning that a stranger's kindness always came with a leash, and a meal cooked by a stranger's people in a stranger's kitchen was a leash with gravy on it. But by mid-afternoon her stomach was winning the argument. So she slipped down the back stairs, found the kitchen empty between meal services, and made a decision.

If she was going to eat in the Alpha King's house, she would eat something she had made herself.

"Noodles," she told the empty kitchen, hauling a copper pot onto the stove. "How hard can noodles be?"

"Almost-mommy!"

A small whirlwind in a tutu skidded around the corner, one sock missing, a doll tucked under her arm like a football. Somewhere down the hall, a nanny's voice rose in a long, hopeless wail of Lilly, come back here!

Lillo sighed. "Does anyone ever actually catch you?"

"No." Lilly climbed onto a stool with great dignity. "What you doing?"

"Making noodles."

"Can I help?"

"You can sit there and not touch anything."

"Okay." Lilly considered this, then held up the doll. Its yellow yarn hair looked like a bird had tried to nest in it. "Rosie's hair is all tangly. You fix it?"

"I don't do dolls."

Lilly's lower lip began to wobble. It was a slow, expert wobble, the kind that had probably brought entire armies to their knees.

"Fine," Lillo muttered. "Give me the comb."

Somehow, between pouring the water and dropping in the noodles, she ended up cross-legged on the kitchen floor with a plastic comb and a doll named Rosie. Lilly lay on her stomach beside her, chattering about a cat called Biscuit, a bug she had once befriended, and why socks were a tragedy.

"Hold still, Rosie," Lillo said, working a knot out of the yarn. "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you."

"She says thank you."

"Tell her she's welcome."

It was, Lillo realized distantly, the first time in days that her shoulders had come down from around her ears.

She didn't notice the water boiling away. She didn't notice the hiss, or the crackle, or the thin gray ribbon curling up from the pot.

The smell reached her first.

It hit the back of her throat, bitter and black, and for one frozen second it wasn't noodles at all. Lillo's head snapped up. The ribbon had thickened into a billowing, greasy cloud, rolling across the ceiling.

She didn't think. She didn't reach for the pot. She didn't turn off the burner.

She scooped Lilly under one arm, grabbed Rosie by the leg, and ran.

The smoke alarm shrieked to life behind her, a wail so loud the copper pans rattled on their hooks. Somewhere in the walls, something clanked and hissed. Then the ceiling opened up, and it began to rain.

The sprinklers in the corridor went off a heartbeat later, because the palace had apparently been built by someone with a healthy fear of fire. Lillo skidded to a halt in the hallway, soaked to the skin, a toddler under her arm and a drenched doll dangling from her fist.

"It's raining inside!" Lilly screamed, thrilled beyond words. "Almost-mommy, it's raining inside!"

Then the whole palace came running.

Guards poured around the corner with swords drawn, skidded in the puddles, and stopped dead at the sight of a dripping girl and a giggling child. Maids shrieked. The nanny sobbed. A wizened old cook shoved through the crowd, took one look at the kitchen door, and let out a howl of pure despair before plunging inside to rescue his stove.

And through the chaos, soaked to the bone, his charcoal shirt plastered to his chest and water streaming from his hair, came the Alpha King.

Bryce stopped in front of her. He looked at Lilly, who was wriggling and delighted. He looked at the doll. He looked at the ceiling, which was still weeping merrily on all of them.

Then he looked at Lillo.

"What," he said very quietly, "have you done?"

Lillo pushed a wet strand of hair from her eyes. "I was only trying to make noodles."

"Noodles."

"And then I was playing with Lilly, and then... I don't know what happened." She shrugged, dripping. "The noodles burned up. And now I'm hungry."

Bryce closed his eyes briefly, like a man counting to ten in three languages. "There are maids in this house for a reason, Lillo. They make food. When you want food, you tell them."

"I wanted my own food." Her chin came up. "I don't even trust you or your people."

"I see." Water dripped off his nose. "So you really do love causing trouble."

"If you think that was trouble," Lillo said sweetly, "you'd better be prepared for more."

His jaw tightened. For a second, she thought he might actually growl. Instead his gaze dropped, almost against his will, to the soaked sweater clinging to her shoulders, and he looked away so fast it might have been a flinch.

"Smoke seems to follow you," he said, too lightly.

Something in Lillo's face shuttered like a window. "Noodles aren't a fire."

"No," Bryce agreed. "They aren't."

He let it hang there, one patient beat, then another. When she didn't fill the silence, he changed direction with the ease of a man who had all the time in the world.

"I hear you ran away from marrying a very wealthy man."

"Oh." Lillo blinked. "Damien. Is he alive?"

Bryce went still. "Alive? What do you mean, alive?"

"Well." She tucked the drenched doll under her arm, entirely unbothered. "I kicked him in the nuts. Pretty hard. I thought he wouldn't survive."

A strangled sound escaped Bryce. He turned it into a cough, then into a very serious study of the ceiling, but his shoulders were shaking and the corner of his mouth was losing a battle it had been fighting since breakfast the day before.

On the wall, a guard made a noise like a punctured tire and developed a sudden, intense interest in his boots.

Lilly looked up from Lillo's arm, eyes huge. "What's the nuts?"

"Well," Lillo said, "the nuts is the thing that hangs between—"

"It's," Bryce cut in, a little too fast, "something you will know when you grow up."

Lilly's face crumpled with fury. She wriggled free, landed in a puddle with a splash, and planted her feet in front of her father with both fists clenched, soaking and tiny and magnificent.

"Stop yelling at my mommy!" she shouted. "We was just playing!"

The corridor went silent, except for the patient patter of the sprinklers.

Bryce opened his mouth. Closed it. Across from him, Lillo looked like she had swallowed a lit match.

Neither of them corrected her.