007

MEIRA

The estate sat at the end of a long private road flanked by trees so tall they blocked out the sky on both sides, turning the drive into something that felt less like an arrival and more like a descent. I watched it through the car window with my hands folded in my lap and my overnight bag on the seat beside me — all I had managed to pack in the hour Sera had given me before the car arrived.

Everything else I owned was still at the packhouse. I left it. I wasn't sure I'd go back for it.

The main house came into view as the road curved, and my first thought was that it didn't look the way I'd expected. I had imagined something cold — all hard lines and dark stone, the kind of place that announced power by making you feel small the moment you looked at it. The scale of it was undeniable, vast, three stories, built from pale stone that caught the morning light and held it. But there were old climbing roses on the eastern wall, dormant and scraggly in the winter, and the grounds had the slightly overgrown quality of somewhere that had once been carefully tended and was only now finding its way back to that.

It looked, against all my expectations, like somewhere someone actually lived.

A woman was waiting at the front steps when the car pulled up. Mid-fifties, broad-shouldered, grey hair cut close, the kind of face that had probably never wasted a smile on anyone who hadn't earned it. She looked at me the way people look at a new piece of furniture they're not sure belongs in the room.

"Luna Meira," she said, the title delivered without ceremony. "I'm Hilda. I run the household."

"It's good to meet you, Hilda."

She gave a short nod, turned, and walked inside without waiting to see if I followed.

I followed.

The entrance hall was high-ceilinged and quiet, the kind of quiet that belonged to a house with thick walls and no children. Dark hardwood floors, old expensive rugs, light coming through tall narrow windows in long pale strips. It smelled faintly of woodsmoke and something herbal I couldn't name.

Hilda walked me through it briskly, naming rooms without elaborating — study, sitting room, dining room, library — and I turned my head at each doorway and tried to absorb what I could. The house had good bones and not much clutter. It felt like the home of someone who had accumulated the things they needed and nothing more, who had no interest in decorating for appearances.

Which told me something about him.

"Your rooms are on the second floor," Hilda said, already on the stairs. "East wing. The King's are in the west. You won't cross paths unless you want to."

"He told you to say that."

She glanced back at me. "He told me to make sure you knew it."

There was a difference, and she clearly understood that I understood it too, because she turned back around and kept walking without adding anything else.

My rooms were three — a bedroom, a small sitting room, and a bathroom that was larger than any room I'd had to myself in years. Someone had put fresh flowers on the dresser, white and yellow, nothing dramatic. The bed was made with the particular tightness of someone who took it seriously. The windows looked out over the back of the grounds where a stone path wound between bare winter hedges toward a greenhouse in the distance, its glass panels catching the flat grey light.

I stood in the middle of the bedroom and just breathed for a moment.

"There are basics in the wardrobe," Hilda said from the doorway. "Sera sent ahead measurements. Anything you need that isn't there, write it down and leave the list on the kitchen table by morning."

"Thank you," I said.

She looked at me again with that measuring expression. Then — "Dinner is at seven. The King eats in the dining room when he's in residence. You're not required to join him, but the kitchen closes at eight and I won't reopen it."

It was, I realized, the closest thing to an invitation I was likely to get from her.

"I'll be there," I said.

She left without another word and I was alone.

---

I slept in the afternoon, which I hadn't meant to do. My body simply decided without asking me, pulling me under the moment I lay down still dressed, shoes still on. I woke to dim light and the distant sound of a door closing somewhere below and lay there disoriented, reaching for the shape of my old bedroom before remembering.

Right. The King's house.

I changed, unpinned my hair, and made my way downstairs at five to seven.

The dining room was lit by candles and a low fire, the long table set at one end for two. Darius was already there, standing near the window with a glass of water, still dressed from the day — dark shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, jacket gone. He looked up when I came in.

"You slept," he said.

"How can you tell?"

"Your hair's different."

I touched it briefly, self-conscious before I caught myself and dropped my hand. "It's been a long two days."

"Sit," he said, and it came out less like a command than permission.

I sat. He sat across from me.

Hilda appeared with food — simple, well-made, nothing showy. Roasted vegetables, bread, meat in a dark sauce that smelled like it had been going for hours. She set it down and disappeared again without a word.

We ate in silence for a while. Not uncomfortable exactly, but careful. Two people are learning the particular shape of sharing a table.

"Did Sera go over the public arrangements?" he asked eventually.

"She mentioned the ceremony would be announced tomorrow. A statement from your office."

"Short and factual. I don't want speculation filling the gap." He reached for the bread. "There will be a reaction."

"I know."

"From your father especially."

"I know that too."

He looked at me across the table. In the candlelight he looked less like the Lycan King and more like a man who was tired and eating dinner, which was disarming in a way I hadn't prepared for. "How are you holding up. Honestly."

I thought about deflecting. I was good at it. Years of practice.

But there was something about the way he asked — no performance of concern, no softness put on for effect, just a direct question that wanted a direct answer — that made deflecting feel more exhausting than the truth.

"I'm managing," I said. "Which isn't the same as fine, but it's what I've got right now."

He nodded like that was a perfectly reasonable answer and didn't push further.

"The twins," I said, because I had been carrying the word around all day waiting to say it to someone who already knew. "I have a doctor's appointment Thursday. I wasn't sure how that works now. Whether I go alone or—"

"I'll come," he said.

The answer came so quickly and so plainly it stopped me mid-sentence.

"You don't have to," I said carefully.

"I know I don't have to." He set his fork down. "You're about to walk into a room full of people who know exactly who you are and who you're married to, and they're going to look at you a certain way. You shouldn't have to do that alone."

I stared at him. "That's unexpectedly thoughtful."

"You keep expecting me to be different than I am."

"You'll have to forgive me. The last man I trusted turned out to be in bed with my sister."

Something moved through his expression, quick and sharp. "Stepsister," he said, and the echo of Isabella's own correction turned it into something dry and dark.

Despite everything, I almost laughed.

It loosened something between us, that almost-laugh. The careful distance across the table felt less like strategy and a little more like two people who had both had a terrible year sitting in the same room and deciding, without saying it out loud, to be human with each other for a few minutes.

"I want to know the rules," I said.

"There aren't many."

"There are always rules."

He thought about it. "Don't lie to me. If something's wrong, say it. If you need something, say it. I'd rather deal with a problem I know about than one you've been carrying quietly for weeks."

I thought about Kaelan. About how many things I had carried quietly for four years because bringing them to him only ever made things harder.

"That's a rule I can manage," I said.

"Good. Same goes the other way."

I looked at him across the candlelight and the remnants of dinner — this man who was a stranger and somehow not, who had shaken my hand in a ceremony hall and offered me a contract and sent Sera instead of coming himself because he had understood without being told that I needed the space first.

"Darius," I said.

He looked up.

"Why did you come back here yourself? You're the most powerful man in this world. You could have destroyed my father from a distance. Money, influence, people who do things on your behalf." I held his gaze. "Why come back and look at him in person."

The fire cracked in the grate. The candle between us moved in a draft from somewhere.

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer.

Then — "Because some things you have to look a man in the eye to finish."

He said it quietly, worn down to its truest shape by however many times he had turned it over alone in the dark.

I didn't ask anything else.

We finished dinner without much more talking, but it was a different silence than the one we'd started with. Something had been laid down in it. Not trust — not yet. But the first layer of something that might, given enough honesty and enough time, become solid enough to stand on.

I said goodnight at the door to the dining room.

He said it back.

I walked upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed and put my hands over the small curve of my stomach and thought about the fact that for the first time in longer than I could properly remember, I had eaten a full meal without anyone at the table making me feel like I was taking up too much space.

It was such a small thing.

It shouldn't have meant as much as it did.

But it did.

And I let it.