Chapter Eight: The Stare

The distant thunder of hooves was what pulled me out of my thoughts.

The sound built gradually, rolling in from somewhere beyond the high stone walls like approaching weather. Rhythmic. Heavy. A lot of it.

Conny, who had been fussing with something in the wooden chest behind me, froze.

Then she scrambled to the window so fast that she nearly took out a candle stand.

"Rita," she hissed, plastering herself to the side of the window frame and peering out at an angle in a way that looked both urgent and completely unhinged. "Rita. Rita."

"I heard it," Rita said tightly, already crossing the room.

"Is it—"

"Aye."

Conny made a sound that I could only describe as a squeak getting into a fistfight with a gasp. Her hand flew to her chest. "Oh gods. Oh gods, they're here."

They're here.

Something cold ran a slow lap around my ribcage.

I was out of the chair before I'd made the conscious decision to stand.

"Let me see," I said, already moving toward the window.

"Yer highness—" Rita started.

"I just want to look." I nudged myself into the space between them. Neither of them moved away, exactly, but neither of them stopped me either, so the three of us ended up pressed together at the window frame like pigeons on a ledge — Conny vibrating almost audibly on my right, Rita rigid and watchful on my left, and me in the middle with my robe still on and my heart doing something strange and fast against my sternum.

I looked down into the courtyard. I counted fifteen people - ten men and five women.

Among the party, I spotted him immediately; it was in the way he carried himself, even seated on horseback.

Here is what I had expected, based on the combined testimony of Conny, every rumor I had absorbed in the last few hours, and frankly just the general energy of this world: a monster. Something large and wrong-shaped. Something that would justify the word feared being attached to a person's name like a title.

Here is what I got instead.

Tall. That was the first thing — genuinely, unreasonably tall, the kind that registered even from three stories up. Dark coat, dark riding gear, nothing ornamental about him. Long midnight-black hair that brushed his shoulders, slightly wind-disordered from the ride.

Even from up here, I could catch the glint of his knuckle rings as he passed a torch bracket. One deliberate vanity in an otherwise severe man. It made him somehow more unsettling, not less.

I found myself leaning closer to the glass.

"He's so much more terrifying in person," Conny breathily.

"Shh," Rita hissed.

"I'm just saying—"

"Conny."

I barely heard them.

He was not what Conny's stories had built. He was also not — I was forced to privately, reluctantly concede — what I had built in my own head either, in the anxious hours since this morning.

Just a man on a horse.

A very large, very composed, apparently very powerful man who, according to pack law, now owned my neck. But still.

That's fine, I thought. That's manageable. I can work with—

Suddenly, he stopped.

Not fully — the horse kept its slow pace. But something in him stilled, and his head turned with the unhurried certainty of someone who already knew what they were going to find.

He looked up.

Directly at my window.

Directly at me.

The air left my lungs.

Rita made a small noise and stepped back from the window immediately, pulling Conny with her by the sleeve. I heard Conny's squeak of alarm, heard Rita's urgent muttered warning — don't let him see ye, for gods' sake — but I didn't move.

The horse was still walking, slow and steady, carrying him across the courtyard. He could have looked away. He didn't. His eyes — dark, still, absolutely unreadable from three stories up and somehow not — held mine.

The horse reached the entrance.

He looked away first.

But not before I watched his jaw tighten.

Then he rode inside and was gone, and the courtyard below was just a courtyard again.

*

I stepped back from the window.

My heart was doing something genuinely erratic in my chest, which I found both irritating and inconvenient. I pressed two fingers to my sternum as though I could manually regulate it.

That's fine, I told myself again, with significantly less conviction than the first time. That was nothing. That was a man seeing movement at a window. He probably looks at everything like that. He probably looks at his breakfast like that. Ruthless alphas with reputations for parental homicide almost certainly have a very penetrating default gaze, it doesn't mean—

The wolf pendant was warm against my pulse.

I am going to need several minutes, I admitted to myself privately. And possibly also therapy. Which does not exist here. Perfect.

"Yer highness."

Rita's voice came from directly behind me, clipped and extremely professional, which told me she had also collected herself and decided we were not going to discuss what had just happened.

I turned around.

Her expression confirmed it. We were absolutely not discussing it.

"Aye," I managed.

The door opened before she could say anything further. One of the other maids stepped in with the efficient posture of someone delivering news on a schedule. She dipped a quick curtsy.

"Begging yer pardon, Yer Highness. The Queen sent me to inform ye—" she paused just briefly enough to suggest the next part was to be taken as non-negotiable, "—that the wedding will begin in a few hours. She says ye had better be dressed and ready."

She delivered this with the gentle, inexorable energy of a woman passing on a message that she wanted very much not to be associated with if things went badly.

"Right," I said. "Yes. Of course."

The maid curtseyed again and retreated.

The door had barely closed before Conny was already in motion, crossing the room with purposeful chaos and reaching for the wooden chest with both hands. Rita was right behind her, pulling pins from somewhere in the architecture of her own hair and holding them between her teeth as she moved toward the dressing stand where the wedding gown was presumably waiting to change my life against my will.

The room reorganized itself around me with sudden, total efficiency.

"Right," Rita said, around the pins, with the brisk energy of a woman who had been waiting for permission to be useful. "Let's get ye into that corset."

I looked at my reflection one last time.

The girl in the glass looked back at me — platinum hair, pale eyes, wolf pendant sitting warm and heavy at her throat — and looked, I thought, approximately as ready for this as someone could look while being absolutely not ready at all.

"Wonderful," I said to her. "Let's go get married."