Chapter 6 — Too Close To The Fire

Sandra’s POV

I turned around slowly.

Not quickly — quickly would’ve looked guilty and I had nothing to be guilty about. I was standing in a corridor. People stood in corridors. I turned at a pace that said I heard my name and responded to it, nothing more.

Zadok was maybe six feet away. Close enough that I could see the slight tension around his eyes that meant he was working something out and hadn’t finished yet. He was still in his training clothes — dark, fitted, the kind of effortless that probably wasn’t effortless at all — and he was looking at me with that expression I still didn’t have a name for.

Behind me the door was still slightly open. I didn’t look back at it.

“You’re not training,” he said.

“I finished early.”

“I watched you leave mid-session.”

So he’d been at the grounds. I hadn’t seen him and I’d been watching the whole time, which meant he’d arrived after I’d left, or he’d been somewhere I hadn’t thought to look. Both options were annoying in different ways.

“I needed water,” I said.

He looked at me. I looked back. The corridor was quiet enough that I could hear the murmur of voices behind that door and I was almost certain he could too, and I waited to see if he’d acknowledge it.

He didn’t.

“Walk with me,” he said.

Not a question. Zadok didn’t really do questions — he made statements that assumed compliance and people complied because that’s what you did around an Alpha who’d never once had to raise his voice to get what he wanted.

I complied. Not because of any of that. Because the door was still cracked open behind me and standing here was more dangerous than moving.

We walked back toward the main grounds. He set the pace, unhurried, hands behind his back. I matched him and kept my eyes forward and waited for whatever this was.

“You’ve been quiet,” he said.

“I’m usually quiet.”

“Not like this.”

I glanced at him sideways. “I don’t know what that means.”

He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how direct to be. I knew that pause. I’d catalogued it years ago.

“You used to look for me at gatherings,” he said. “I noticed you doing it. I never said anything but I noticed.”

My stomach did something I didn’t appreciate. He’d known. All that careful hoping I’d thought was invisible and he’d seen it and filed it and said nothing for six years. I didn’t know what to do with that information so I put it aside for later when I could be properly angry about it without an audience.

“People change,” I said.

“In two days?”

“Sometimes it doesn’t take long.”

He stopped walking. I took two more steps before I stopped too and turned to face him. We were at the edge of the grounds now, the tree line close, the sounds of training carrying faintly from the other side of the estate.

“Sandra.” His voice was different. Not the Alpha voice, not the polite gathering voice. Something underneath both of those. “What happened yesterday morning. On the bench.”

“Nothing happened.”

“You looked at me like—” He stopped. Started again. “You looked at me like you knew something I didn’t.”

The accuracy of that nearly made me laugh. I kept my face easy.

“You’re reading into things,” I said.

“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Or maybe something shifted and you’re the only one who knows what it is.”

This was the problem with Zadok. In the first life I’d loved his perceptiveness — the way he noticed things, caught details other people missed. I’d thought it meant he’d eventually notice me properly. What I understood now was that his perceptiveness had nothing to do with caring. He observed everything with the same quality of attention. It wasn’t personal. It was just how he was built.

The fact that he was currently directing it at me meant nothing.

I told myself that clearly and firmly.

“I’m the same as I’ve always been,” I said. “Maybe you just weren’t paying attention before.”

Something moved through his expression. Not quite surprise — more like the moment before surprise, the intake before the reaction.

I turned to go.

“She talks about you, you know.”

I stopped.

“Vanessa,” he said. Behind me. Still in that same even tone. “She talks about you more than you probably realize. Keeps track of you. She’d say it’s because she cares.”

I stood there with my back to him and kept very still.

“And what would you say,” I said.

A pause. Long enough to mean something.

“I’d say Vanessa is careful about the things that matter to her,” he said. “And she’s been careful about you for a long time.”

I turned around slowly and looked at him and for once I didn’t try to read his expression or file it or figure out what it cost him to say. I just looked at him like a person who’d heard something and wasn’t sure yet what to do with it.

Because that was exactly what I was.

“Why are you telling me this,” I said.

He held my gaze. “Because I think you should know.”

“Know what exactly.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. That jaw shift — the one that meant he’d decided against saying the full thing.

“Just — be careful,” he said. “With what you walk toward in this house.”

He knew about the corridor.

Maybe he knew about the door.

The question was how much he knew and which side of it he was standing on. Because there was a version of this where Zadok was warning me because he wanted to protect me. And there was another version — one that sat colder and made more sense given everything I knew — where he was warning me away because he already knew what was behind that door and needed it to stay there.

I smiled at him. Small, easy, the kind that gave nothing away.

“I’m always careful,” I said.

I walked back to the estate and didn’t look back and counted my steps to keep my breathing even. Twenty two, twenty three, twenty four.

He knew something.

The question eating through everything else wasn’t what he knew.

It was whether the wolfbane dagger was the secret or just the consequence of one.

I pushed open the side door and nearly walked directly into Dara, who was standing just inside with a look on her face I hadn’t seen since the last year of her life — tight, frightened, controlled.

“Someone was in your room,” she said quietly. “While you were at training.”

“What?”

“They didn’t take anything.” Her voice dropped lower. “But they were looking for something. I could tell from how things were moved. Whoever it was knew how to put things back.”

She pressed something into my hand. Small, cold, metal.

A casing. Broken at one end, the kind used to carry concentrated liquid. Empty now but the smell still clinging to it faintly.

Wolfbane.