Chapter 5

The east wing kitchen smells like burnt bread when Selena walks past it, and that's what stops her. Not the smell itself, but the voice underneath it, low and even, asking a question instead of giving an order.

She backs against the wall outside the doorway and listens before she can stop herself.

"You're doing it wrong." Kael's voice. She'd know it anywhere by now, memorized despite herself. "Fold the dough over, don't press it flat."

"I've never made bread in my life." A woman's voice answers, shaky, one of the Veyne cooks Selena recognizes from the caravan, an older woman named Hesper who used to run her father's kitchens with an iron grip and a wooden spoon she wasn't afraid to use on anyone who stole a taste too early. "Forgive me, my lord, I don't know your kitchens' ways."

"You don't have to call me that." A pause, the sound of dough being handled, patient. "And you're not doing anything wrong. Nobody expects perfect bread on your first week in a strange kitchen."

Selena presses closer to the doorframe, careful not to be seen, and watches through the gap in the hinges. Kael stands at the worktable in his shirtsleeves, no crown, no guards trailing behind him, showing an old woman how to fold dough like it's the most natural thing in the world for an Alpha to be doing at dusk.

It doesn't match anything. Not the stories, not the boy who killed her father without blinking, not the calm predator who cornered her in her own room two nights ago demanding she stay away from his cousin.

She doesn't understand him. That's becoming the most dangerous thing about him.

Hesper says something too quiet to catch, and whatever it is makes Kael go still for a second, something shifting behind his expression before he answers.

"My mother taught me," he says. "A long time ago."

Selena frowns at that. She's heard nothing about Kael's family beyond Oliver, nothing about parents, no stories at all about where the terrifying young Alpha of Blackthorn actually came from before he arrived to burn her home down. She files the detail away, another loose thread in a story that refuses to add up cleanly, and doesn't notice Rhen approaching from the other end of the hall until he's already beside her.

"Spying," he says, not a question.

Selena straightens fast, caught. "I was walking."

"Through walls, apparently." Rhen's mouth twitches, not quite a smile, watching her with the same careful assessment she's used to seeing on Kael's face, like the whole castle learned it from the same teacher. "He does this most evenings. Doesn't like people knowing."

"Why not?"

"Ask him." Rhen's gaze flicks toward the kitchen doorway, then back to her, something more serious settling into it. "The elders are here. They've been asking for you."

Selena's stomach tightens. "Why would elders want anything from me?"

"You'll find out." He nods down the hall, toward the main chamber, and doesn't offer anything else.

The elders sit in a half circle when Selena enters, three of them, gray-haired and unhurried, the kind of stillness that comes from decades of being obeyed without needing to raise their voices. Kael stands near the window, arms crossed, something rigid in the line of his shoulders that tells her this conversation started before she arrived and isn't going well.

"Ah." The eldest of the three, a woman with silver hair pinned in an elaborate braid, turns to study Selena with open, unhidden interest. "The Veyne girl. Come in, child. Sit."

Selena doesn't sit. "I was told you wanted to see me."

"We wanted to see the pack's newest guest." The woman's eyes are sharp despite her age, missing nothing. "The Moon Goddess ceremony approaches. Ten days. Every unmated wolf in Blackthorn territory attends, by tradition older than this castle's stones."

"I'm not Blackthorn."

"You live within Blackthorn walls now." Another elder speaks, older still, his voice creaking like old wood. "The Goddess doesn't concern herself with which banner you were born under. Only which roof shelters you when she calls."

Kael's jaw sets, and Selena catches the exact moment he decides to speak. "She's a guest. Not pack."

"She sleeps behind your walls, eats your bread, breathes your air." The silver-haired elder's tone doesn't change, doesn't sharpen, and somehow that makes it worse, more final. "The tradition doesn't care for your objections, Alpha. It never has."

Selena watches something pass between Kael and the elders, an old argument neither side expects to win outright, the kind of tension that comes from a young ruler pushing against rules that predate him by centuries.

"Cancel it," Kael says. "This year. We just took in forty-three refugees, there's still unrest at the border—"

"The ceremony has never once been cancelled in four hundred years of Blackthorn history." The elder's voice finally sharpens, just slightly, enough to make the temperature in the room drop. "Not for war. Not for plague. Not for grief. You will not be the Alpha who breaks that record over a matter of convenience."

Kael says nothing. A muscle in his jaw works, once, like he's chewing on whatever he isn't allowed to say, and Selena watches him choose a battle and lose it anyway.

"Fine," he says finally. "Inside the castle only. No open grounds, no outside guests. My people, watched, controlled."

The elders exchange a glance, some silent negotiation passing between them, before the eldest nods, slow and satisfied. "Acceptable."

Her gaze slides back to Selena, and something in it makes Selena's skin prickle. "You'll attend, child. As will every unmated wolf sheltered here."

"And if the Goddess doesn't choose anyone for me at all?" Selena keeps her voice even, though the question feels bigger leaving her mouth than it did in her head. "What happens to the ones she skips over?"

"Nothing happens to them." The elder's smile is thin, unreadable. "They simply wait for the next ceremony, and the one after that, until she decides otherwise." A pause, her gaze flicking once, deliberately, toward Kael. "Though I wouldn't spend too much time preparing for that outcome, child. The Goddess has strange interests these days."

Selena doesn't understand what that means. She isn't sure she wants to, not with the way Kael has gone suddenly, carefully still by the window, not looking at either of them.

Kael finds her in the hallway afterward, catching up in three long strides, something urgent in the set of his shoulders that wasn't there in the chamber.

"You don't have to go," he says, low, like he doesn't want the words carrying.

"Your elders seemed pretty clear that I do."

"I'll handle the elders."

"Why does it matter to you?" Selena stops, turns, studies him the way she's been studying everything since the courtyard, hunting for the answer underneath the answer. "You've barely explained anything to me. Why fight this battle for me specifically?"

Kael's mouth opens. Closes. Something moves behind his eyes, old and complicated, the same thing she glimpsed in her room two nights ago right before he shut the door on the conversation entirely.

"Because the ceremony reveals fated mates," he says finally, quiet, like it costs him to say it out loud. "And I don't know what the Goddess intends to do with you."

The hallway goes very still around them.

"What does that mean," Selena asks, though some traitor part of her chest has already started pounding before she's finished the question.

Kael doesn't answer. He just looks at her the way he did that first night in the courtyard, ash and smoke and ruin between them, like he's already decided something he hasn't found the courage to say out loud yet.

Then he turns and walks away, leaving her alone in the hallway with ten days, an unanswered question, and a fear she can't quite name pressing cold against her ribs.