Chapter 3: The Name He mentioned

POV: Evana

Arthur didn’t come back to the hall.

I gave it twenty minutes before I stopped pretending to enjoy the wine Corwin kept refilling and went looking for him myself, slipping through the same side door I’d watched him disappear through with the stranger, down a corridor that led toward his study rather than back to the party. 

The birthday continued behind me without either of us,  Delphine had already stepped in to smooth the gap, laughing too brightly at something Ashford had said, buying the room a story that didn’t involve her son vanishing mid-celebration.

The study door was shut. I heard voices behind it, low, Arthur’s clipped in a way I recognized and the stranger’s even, unbothered, like a man discussing weather rather than whatever this actually was.

I didn’t hear words. I heard tone, and tone told me enough,  Arthur wasn’t in control of this conversation, which was its own kind of information, because I had never once, in eleven months, seen my husband not in control of a room.

The voices stopped. I stepped back from the door fast enough that when it opened a moment later, I was three feet away instead of standing against it, close enough to look like I’d simply been passing, far enough that Arthur’s eyes narrowing at me felt more like habit than actual suspicion.

The stranger walked past me without a glance, like I wasn’t worth the half-second it would have cost him to acknowledge a Luna standing in her own husband’s hallway. I watched him go until he turned a corner toward the front of the house, and then I looked at Arthur, who hadn’t moved from the study doorway.

“Who was that?”

“No one that concerns you.”

“He interrupted your own birthday, in front of two hundred people, and you disappeared with him for twenty minutes. That concerns me.”

“It concerns the pack,” Arthur said. “Not you.”

“I am the pack, Arthur. Whether either of us wanted that or not, the council made it true the day I married you.” I kept my voice even, the way I’d learned to keep it in every conversation with him that mattered. “So either tell me who he is, or tell me you’re choosing not to, but don’t stand there and tell me it isn’t mine to ask about.”

Something shifted behind his eyes,  not the flicker I’d seen twice now and still couldn’t name, something harder, more decided. He stepped past me into the corridor, close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his gaze, and for a moment I thought he might actually answer.

“His name is Silas,” Arthur said finally. “That’s all you get tonight.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.” He started toward the hall, then stopped, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something I hadn’t heard from him before,  not gentler, exactly, but lower, like the words cost him something to say out loud. “Stay away from him if you see him again. Whatever he says to you, whatever he offers you. Stay away from him.”

“Offers me what?”

“Evana.” My name in his mouth, not Luna, not wife, and it landed strangely enough that I actually stopped. “I need you to trust me on this one thing tonight, even though I’ve given you very little reason to.”

It was the closest thing to honesty I’d heard from him since the wedding. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I did the only thing that felt true,  I nodded, once, and let him walk back toward the party ahead of me, and stood alone in the corridor turning the name Silas over in my mind like a stone I couldn’t quite place the weight of.

Later that night, after the guests had gone and the manor had settled into the particular quiet that came after two hundred people left a house too big for the two of us, I found Arthur in his study again, a glass of something amber in his hand, staring at nothing in particular.

“You’re still up,” I said, from the doorway.

“So are you.”

I stepped inside, further than I usually let myself in this room, and watched him not look at me. “Is the pack in danger, Arthur? From him?”

“The pack isn’t your concern tonight.”

“You keep saying that. It doesn’t make it true.”

He set the glass down harder than he needed to, and for a second the old cruelty rose back up in his face, the version of him that measured my plate and my dress size and found me lacking in both, but underneath it, for the first time, I saw something that looked almost like fear, quickly buried, quickly replaced.

“Go to bed, Evana.”

I went to bed. Not because he’d ordered it, but because I’d learned everything I was going to learn from him tonight, and the rest of it, whoever Silas was, whatever debt or history he represented, I was going to have to find on my own.