Chapter 4

He comes to her room himself. No summons through a guard, no note carried by Mira with the morning tray. Just three knocks, evenly spaced, and when Selena opens the door there he is, filling the frame of it in a way that makes the hallway behind him look smaller than it did this morning.

"You wanted to see me," she says, because it's easier than admitting she's surprised.

"I didn't send for you." Kael's eyes move past her, briefly, to the window she keeps open even in the cold. "I came to you."

"Should I be flattered."

"You should be careful." He says it without heat, more observation than warning, and steps past her into the room without being invited, which should make her furious and instead just makes her tired, like she's too worn down from three days of grief to fight a battle this small. "Oliver."

"What about him."

"Stay away from him."

Selena crosses her arms, deliberately unimpressed. "He's your cousin. Family. I thought that made him trustworthy, by your logic."

Something flickers across Kael's face, there and gone too fast to name. "I didn't say trust him. I said stay away from him."

"Those aren't the same instruction."

"No," Kael agrees. "They're not."

The silence that follows stretches longer than it should. Selena studies him in it, the way she's been studying everything in this castle since the night the horns sounded, hunting for the crack that proves the stories were right about him after all, that underneath the strange mercy and the unlocked window and the guards who won't meet her eyes, there's still just a monster wearing a careful face.

She can't find it. That's the part that scares her.

"Why," she asks finally, "did you spare my people?"

Kael's jaw tightens, just slightly, the first honest thing she's seen from him since the courtyard. "Would you rather I hadn't?"

"I'd rather understand you." The words come out sharper than she means them, an admission she didn't plan to make. "You killed my father in front of me and gave everyone he commanded a warm bed the same night. That's not mercy. That's a puzzle. And I don't like puzzles I can't solve."

"Maybe it's not meant to be solved."

"Everything's meant to be solved. People just run out of patience before they finish."

Something almost like respect moves across his face, gone as fast as it came, replaced by the same guarded stillness he's worn since she first saw him standing over her father's body. "Your father," he says slowly, "wasn't the man you think he was."

Selena's whole body goes rigid. "You don't get to talk about my father."

"I have more right to than you know."

"Then tell me." She steps closer, close enough to see the exact moment something shutters behind his eyes, close enough that neither of them backs away even though every instinct in her says she should. "Tell me why. Give me one real answer instead of another riddle, and I swear I'll stop asking."

For one long second, Kael looks like he might actually do it. His mouth opens. Something raw moves across his face, old and tired in a way that doesn't match a man his age at all, like grief that's had years instead of days to settle into his bones.

Then it's gone, folded back behind the same calm mask he wears for everyone else.

"Not yet," he says.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting tonight." He turns toward the door, and Selena hates how much she wants to grab his arm and demand the rest of it, hates that some traitor part of her is already cataloguing this as another crack in the story that doesn't fit. He stops at the threshold, hand on the frame, back to her. "Selena."

"What."

"Stay away from Oliver." A pause, his voice dropping lower, quieter, almost like it costs him something to say it. "I mean it. More than you understand right now."

He's gone before she can ask him to explain that either, footsteps fading down the hallway, and Selena stands alone in the room that isn't a cell, staring at the door, furious at herself for the one thing she can't quite deny anymore.

She wanted him to stay.

Down in the east wing, three doors from Selena's room, one of the Veyne survivors presses an ear to her own door and listens to the Alpha's footsteps fade into silence, then waits a full count of sixty before she slips out into the hall herself.

She's not supposed to be awake. She's definitely not supposed to be carrying the folded scrap of parchment tucked into her sleeve, the one pressed into her palm by a stranger at the market three nights before the attack, back when Veyne still stood. A stranger who never gave a name. Who promised, in careful, unhurried handwriting, help finding her family in exchange for whatever small things she could learn about the Blackthorn Alpha.

She told herself it was harmless. Watching. Listening. Writing down what she overheard in hallways that weren't hers to walk.

She doesn't know who reads what she leaves behind. She's never once seen a face at the drop point, never been given one to imagine. Just instructions, and the promise of her family waiting somewhere on the other end of them, and enough fear to make her stop asking questions she probably shouldn't.

The corridor is empty. She moves fast, careful, memorizing which floorboards creak the way Selena's been memorizing gates, and slips the folded note beneath a loose stone near the kitchen entrance, exactly where the instructions told her to leave it three nights running now.

She doesn't see the shadow watching from the stairwell above.

Oliver waits until she's gone before he descends, unhurried, and lifts the stone himself. He reads the note once by moonlight, refolds it, tucks it into his coat with a small, satisfied smile.

She has no idea he's the one collecting them. As far as she knows, whoever's reading her words has never set foot in this castle at all.

That particular blindness, Oliver thinks, is the most useful thing about her.