The Grey-eyed Stranger

Kai Thorn arrived four days later, and he didn't send a herald ahead of him to announce it.

I heard the commotion before I saw him, boots on the stone moving too fast, voices pitched too high, and when I stepped out to the courtyard he was already getting off his horse, his grey eyes cutting through the crowd like he was looking for someone to blame. He found me almost immediately. I suppose that wasn't hard. I was the only one standing still.

Behind him, his men were already fanning out along the courtyard wall, hands resting near the hilt of their swords, they weren't quite drawing, and I understood, watching them, that he hadn't come to negotiate. He'd ridden here because a public refusal was a wound to his pride no letter could fix, and men like Kai Thorn didn't send letters when they could deliver their fury in person instead.

"You," he said, crossing the courtyard in a handful of strides. "You're the one who refused me."

I had forgotten how tall he was up close. I had forgotten a lot about being nineteen and unmarried and looking at this man for the first time, because In my memory he already belonged to me, already knew the sounds of my laugh and the shape of my worst fears, and none of that had happened yet. Not in this life. Not to this version of him.

"I refused a marriage contract," I said. "Not you, personally. We've never met."

"No one refuses my father's proposal." His jaw was tight, the expression on his face was something between fury and confusion, like he'd expected tears and apologies and gotten neither. " Do you understand what you did ? What that makes people think?"

"That I have opinions on who I marry."

Something flickered across his face, there and gone so fast I missed it. In my first life, I had learned every version of that face, the polite mask he wore in public, the harder mask he wore for enemies, the rare unguarded look he only ever gave me in the dark. This wasn't any of those. This was a man meeting someone he genuinely couldn't predict, and it unsettled him more than my refusal did.

"You're not what they told me," he said, quieter now.

I went very still. "What did they tell you?"

"That Alpha Voss's daughter was gentle. Obedient. Grateful for the match." His eyes searched my face like he was looking for the seams of a mask I wasn't wearing. "You don't look grateful."

"Would you be? If your entire future was decided at a table you weren't invited to?"

He didn't answer that.

"I told myself I'd handle it myself," he said. "I didn't expect to be standing here arguing with a girl who thinks she knows everything. You know how things like this works. You know who my father is. I'm pretty sure you know a lot for a young lady your age since I heard you spend most of your times in the library. If you know all these, why still refuse me? Or did I do something bad to you in your past live?"

I hadn't meant for him to react like that. I felt my breath catch anyway, half a second too long, and his eyes narrowed like he'd caught it.

"Have we met before?," he asked. "You're looking at me like you already know how this ends."

I have buried you, I thought. I have hated you and forgiven you and hated you again, in a life you don't remember living. I have died In your arms while you told me you were sorry and I never got to ask you what for.

"No," I said. "We haven't."

"Then explain to me," he said. "Why a girl I've never met refuses my father's proposal without so much as a private conversation first. Most women In your position would have at least asked to meet me."

"Would it have change anything?"

"It might have." Something in his voice shifted, less accusation now, more genuine curiosity, like he was turning over a puzzle he hadn't expected to find interesting. "You might have discovered I'm not the monster my reputation makes me out to be."

"I don't think you're a monster," I said, which was true, though not for reasons I could explain to him. "I think you're a man who's never for once had never for once had to consider that someone might say no to him. That's different."

"You say that like you know me."

"I don't," I said, and hated how easily the lie came, how practiced I'd apparently already become at protecting a truth no one would believe anyway.

"Then explain the confidence." He tilted his head, studying me the way I imagined he studied a border dispute, looking for the seam where the real problem was hiding. "Most people when they meet me, are careful. You're not being careful at all."

"Would being careful have changed your mind about anything?."

"No," he admitted, and something about the honesty of it caught me off guard, because I remembered a version of him who guarded even small truths like this one behind diplomacy and half answers. This Kai, younger and less practiced at being alpha, hadn't learned that trick yet. "But it might have made this conversation shorter."

His eyes narrowed, but there was no real heat behind it this time. "You have a sharp tongue for someone who claims we are strangers."

"Is that a complaint?"

"I haven't decided yet." He paused for a moment. "My father wants an explanation he can bring back to the council. Territory disputes are already escalating on our western border, and a broken proposal to House Voss doesn't exactly project strength right now."

"That sounds like a political problem, not a personal one."

"Everything is a political problem when you're born who the way I was," he said, and there was something raw underneath it, quick and gone, the same wound I remembered pressing on years later when be finally let's himself talk about his father with me in the dark. " I was hoping you'd at least give me a reason I could use."

"The reason is that I want a say in my own life. Use that."

He stepped closer, close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his gaze, and something about being near to him made my pulse do something strange, some old and stubborn memory in my body that hadn't gotten the message my mind kept sending it. He reached out and closed his hand around my wrist, not hard, just enough to hold.

"You're not what they told me," he said again, and this time it sounded less than an accusation and more like something he was working out in real time. " I don't know who you are."

Neither do I, I almost said.

"Kai." One of his guards called from across the courtyard, tension in his voice. "We should move. Now."

Kai's hand tightened once around my wrist before he let go, his eyes were still on me like he wasn't finished. "Whatever you're hiding. I'll find it."

He turned and strode back toward his horse, calling orders to his men, and I stood in the courtyard rubbing the place his hand had been, my heart going faster than it had any right to for a man I'd just met twice in two different lifetime.

I told myself it was only my memory playing tricks on my body, old habits my heart hadn't unlearned yet. I almost believed it. I had spent five years learning exactly how dangerous it was to believe anything Kai Thorn made me feel, and one confusing conversation in a courtyard wasn't going to undo that in an afternoon.

I noticed Lira then, half hidden behind the shutter of an upper window. Her gaze was fixed on Kai, watching as he retreat with an attention she hadn't meant for anyone to catch.

The moment she realized I'd seen her, she stepped away from the glass quickly, though not quick enough to erase the look that had been on her face a second before. I took note of that, but it was a thought for another day.

That was when I saw the raven.

It sat on the courtyard wall above the gate, black and motionless, and ravens were common enough in Lunara that I shouldn't have looked twice. But this one wasn't moving the way birds moved. It wasn't preening or shifting it's weight or doing any of the small restless things living things do even when they're still. It was simply watching, it's head angled toward Kai, then toward me, then back again, with a patience that had nothing to do with hunger and instinct.

It was strange. I had never seen any an animal watch anyone like that.

I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know if it meant anything at all, if I was seeing conspiracies in the shadows because grief and fear and worn my judgement thin. But something in me, something old and sharpened on the worst night of my life, was telling me very clearly that whatever the bird was, it hadn't come here by accident.