CHAPTER 5

Ivy's POV

I don't sleep again.

I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and listen to the lodge settle around me and think about twigs snapping on empty paths. About the fact that Rook has been trained by the same people who trained me and we both know that if he wanted to follow someone through dark territory without being heard, no one would hear him.

He would know that I know.

That's the thing about Rook and me; we have always operated in the space of things we don't say out loud.

***

Rook is already in the great hall when I come down.

This is notable because Rook doesn't do communal breakfasts. In eight years I have never once seen him voluntarily sit in a room full of people eating. He survives on coffee and whatever is available to be eaten while standing over a kitchen counter, preferably alone.

I get food and sit across from him.

He looks up and we lock gazes, the way we always do; the conversation that happens before the conversation, the one where we establish what we already know without saying it. His face gives me nothing. But his eyes are doing the thing where they move over me quickly and efficiently, cataloguing, checking for damage, and he only does that when something has worried him.

"You went out last night," he says.

"Good morning to you too."

"Ivy."

"I couldn't sleep," I break a piece of bread, "I went for a walk."

"To the rite grounds."

I look up. "You followed me."

"I was already awake."

"That's not an answer."

"Neither is I went for a walk," He picks up his mug. Something shifts in his jaw, "You were told not to go there."

"Yes. And yet." I eat the bread. "Are you going to tell Soren?"

The look he gives me is genuinely insulted.

Whatever Rook is, he has never once in eight years reported something about me that didn't need reporting. He filters. He decides what matters and what doesn't and he makes those decisions based on something I've never been able to fully map because it isn't protocol and it isn't orders.

I've always suspected it's something more personal than either of those things.

"Caelum Dusk was with you," he says. Not a question.

"He found me there. He didn't take me."

Rook says nothing. He drinks his coffee and looks out across the hall and I think about last night on the path, the twig, the empty trees.

"Rook," I say, quietly enough that the nearest Pack members can't hear. "What were you doing on that path?"

He looks at me.

And for just a second, something moves through his expression that isn't the wall. Something that looks almost like conflict. 

Like a man standing over a decision he's already made and not entirely at peace with it. Then it's gone.

"My job," he says.

I hold his gaze. "Your job ended at the border. You said plans changed. Whose plans, Rook?"

He sets his mug down. Looks at me steadily. "Eat your breakfast."

I want to push. I want to reach through that wall and pull out whatever is sitting behind it and put it on the table between us and make him look at it with me. But I know Rook well enough to know that pushing him in a room full of people he doesn't trust will get me exactly nothing.

So I eat my breakfast.

And I feel his eyes on me the whole time, careful and watchful and full of something he's decided I'm not getting yet.

***

He finds me alone for the first time at midday.

I'm in the small library off the eastern corridor going through the territorial history documents Soren's aide brought me this morning. Trying to understand what Ashveil is beneath the treaty language. 

Rook closes the door behind him.

He doesn't say anything at first. He leans against the shelves opposite me and crosses his arms and looks at me with the particular focus he has when he's decided to actually see something.

"Ask me," I say, without looking up from the document.

"How are you feeling?"

I look up then, because that's not what I expected. In eight years Rook has never opened with that. He speaks in logistics, in threat assessment and in practical observations. How are you feeling is not in his vocabulary.

"Fine," I say.

His expression doesn't change but something behind it does. "Ivy."

"I'm…" I stop. I look at him. At the way he's watching me like the answer actually matters to him and he's prepared to wait for the real one. "I don't know," I say.

He nods slowly. Like that was the answer he was afraid of.

"Last night," I say, "at the rite grounds. Before the twig…" I watch his face, "you were there for a while, weren't you?"

"You watched the whole thing, " I keep my voice level, "Me and Caelum at the tree line."

Something happens in his eyes. Brief and quickly managed, "I was making sure you were safe."

"From Caelum Dusk?"

"From a territory you don't know in the dark."

"Rook." I close the document and look at him the way he looks at me when he wants the real answer. "I know what your job description is. I know what my father pays you for and I know where your assignment technically ended," I pause, "None of that explains why you're still here."

The silence stretches.

He unfolds his arms. Looks at the shelves to his left, and his jaw works slightly the way it does when he's choosing between versions of the truth.

"Do you remember," he says, still looking at the shelves, "three years ago. The Cairn delegation."

I go still. "Yes."

"Your father sent you in without a briefing. There were four men in that room and two of them weren't there for the treaty."

I remember. I remember exactly. I was twenty-one and I walked into a room and felt the temperature of it wrong before I'd crossed the threshold and I had approximately three seconds to recalibrate everything I'd prepared.

"I handled it," I say.

"You did." He looks back at me. "I was outside the door for six hours because your father forgot to tell me the location had changed and by the time I found the right building you'd been alone in there for two hours," Something moves through his face. Raw and quickly buried, "You walked out fine. You always walk out fine." A pause. "I don't like relying on always."

The room is very quiet.

I look at him; this man who speaks in facts and logistics and has just, quietly, without ceremony, told me something that isn't either of those things.

"That was three years ago," I say softly.

"Yes."

"You've been doing this for three years?"

He doesn't answer, which is the answer. And I think about all the near-misses I attributed to luck, all the moments things could have gone sideways and didn't, all the times I walked out of rooms I wasn't sure I could walk out of and told myself I was just good at this.

But maybe I haven't always been as alone in it as I thought.

Something opens up in my chest that I have absolutely no idea what to do with.

"Rook…"

The door opens.

Maren leans in, stops when she sees Rook.

"Sorry," she says, "Ivy, Caelum is looking for you. Something about the boundary walk this afternoon."

I look at Rook.

He has put the wall back up. Every brick of it, perfectly arranged, and back to being a man who speaks in logistics and threat assessments and has absolutely not just told me something that has rearranged the way I understand the last three years of my life.

"Go," he says.

I gather my documents. I stand. I cross the room toward the door and when I pass him I'm close enough that I could touch him if I reached sideways and I don't but I feel him go very still in the way he goes still when he's making himself stay exactly where he is.

I stop in the doorway.

"Rook."

He looks at me.

"Thank you," I say. "For the Cairn delegation. And everything after it."

He says nothing.

But something in his eyes does something I have never seen them do before and I turn and follow Maren down the corridor before either of us has to figure out what to call it.

That night the moon rises full and enormous over Ashveil and the Pack howls and I sit on my bed with my knees pulled up and feel my blood answer it and think about two men who couldn't be less alike and how somehow both of them have gotten inside the walls I spent twenty four years building.

And somewhere outside my door, I know without looking, Rook is awake.

Listening to the same moon.

Not sleeping either.