Chapter Two — The Morning After the Mark - 2

She followed him out, past a narrow service courtyard that smelled like wet slate and a shadow of smoke. Something in that scent tripped a memory she didn’t have yet. She paused and then kept moving, telling herself it was nothing but the weather.

Across the city, in a part of the Valehart estate the public never saw, Lucien stood in a training room lined with mirrored panels and steel. He’d sent his guards away and stripped down to a black shirt, sleeves shoved to his elbows. The air here was colder. It didn’t help.

He wrapped his hands in white tape with the focus of someone practicing a religion. Every pull and twist of the cloth tightened his breathing to something manageable. He hit the bag. The bag swung and hissed on its chain and came back. He hit it again until the impact shook up his arms and through his shoulders and into the place under his ribs that wouldn’t stop humming.

He’d lived with the wolf long enough to give it names. Hunger, heat, the clean need to run, the low mean itch that came with the moon. This was none of those. This was a line thrown from his body to hers without his permission, and it made rational thought feel like a trick he was trying to perform underwater.

He could smell her in memory. Soft skin. Clean soap. Something warm and human that had cut straight through the drug like a match to alcohol. He told himself it was biology and timing and nothing else. The animal under his skin disagreed.

He hit the bag until sweat slicked his spine and his breath sawed. He missed a strike and took the recoil in his shoulder, swore under his breath, and stood there while the bag spun slowly, chain squealing. His phone hummed on the bench. He ignored it. A second later it hummed again. He let it.

On the third buzz he crossed the room and picked it up without looking. “Yes.”

“Lucien.” Helena’s voice. “The girl set terms.”

“I agreed.”

A pause. “You did.”

“You invited her to be a piece,” he said. “I’m not surprised she arrived as a player.”

Another pause, a shade of curiosity. “And how do you intend to keep a player from turning the board?”

“I don’t,” he said. He could hear his own heartbeat through the line. “I intend to make sure the board doesn’t break.”

“Charming,” Helena said dryly. “We announce at five. Don’t look like a ghost on camera.”

The line clicked off.

He stared at his reflection in the dark paneling until it looked like someone else’s face. Then he wiped his hands on a towel and stood still until the tremor in his pulse receded from scream to hum.

He could have called the physician. He didn’t. He could have called his cousin. He didn’t do that either.

Adrian wasn’t answering him lately anyway.

Adrian was at the Cross mansion gate again by midafternoon, as if the day belonged to him and not to any schedule that had ever pinned him down. He stood with his ID between two polite guards until the second one recognized his name from the last hour’s memo and waved him in.

In the front hall, a row of bouquets had arrived from people who pretended to love the Crosses when they were useful and pretended not to know them when they weren’t. Adrian tilted his head at the nearest card and snorted under his breath.

“Don’t,” Evelyn said from the stairs.

He looked up and smiled, genuine this time. “You always find me just when I think I’m being clever.”

“That’s because you’re never as invisible as you think,” she said.

He’s not Lucien, the part of her body that had learned new tricks whispered. He didn’t crowd the air. He didn’t change the temperature of the room.

He held up his hands like he was harmless, which he wasn’t, but liked to pretend to be—another old trick. “I come bearing information and the world’s worst coffee. Which one do you want first?”

“Information,” she said, taking the coffee anyway.

“Press conference at five,” he said. “Statement drafted. You’ll have a copy in an hour. They’re putting the word temporary in the second paragraph and mutual in the third so your mother can pretend she was invited to choose.”

“Helena already told me.”

He nodded, reassessing, eyes running carefully over her face like he was reading a text for meaning rather than words. “How are you?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Try again.”

She took a breath and let it out. “Standing.”

“That’s not nothing,” he said. His mouth twitched. “You look like someone who just took apart a bomb and hasn’t decided whether to leave the pieces on the floor.”

“I’m considering throwing them back.”

“That’s my girl,” he said before he could stop himself. He felt the word after it left—my—and flinched, but he didn’t take it back. “You know I’ll be at the conference if you want me visible.”

“What I want,” she said, “is to go through a door without a camera behind the handle.”

“We can do that.” He offered his arm like they were at a debutante ball and not in a hallway full of knives. “Come on. I’ll show you a side exit your mother never learned.”

He led her through a narrow back corridor that smelled faintly of cedar oil and dust, past a storage room where the house kept its old trophies—the tennis cup she never won, the debate plaque she never got to accept because she was asked to leave before the ceremony started—and out into a service lane where the only cameras belonged to the city and were too bored to care.

They walked without speaking for a block, letting the sound of a bus brake fill the space. He kept his pace half a step slower than hers like he had in school, so if she tripped he’d be there first.

“You don’t have to be nice,” she said when the silence got heavy.

“I’m not being nice,” he said. “I’m being strategic.”

“Feels similar on this side.”

“Different motives,” he said lightly. “One’s a PR campaign. The other’s something I can’t categorize without sounding like a sixteen-year-old.”

She looked at him. “Say it anyway.”

He met her eyes and for once didn’t soften it. “I’m in love with you and I have been since you threw a textbook at a boy who wouldn’t stop talking about your shoes, and I’m trying very hard to keep that fact from ruining your life.”

She stopped walking. The city considered them, traffic shouldering around their moment like a river around a stone.

“I can’t give you anything,” she said.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“What do you want then?”

“To stand between you and whatever comes next,” he said. “Even if it’s my own blood.”

Heat climbed her throat that had nothing to do with the mark. “That isn’t fair to you.”

“Fair is a board game for people who never had to break their own pieces,” he said, and smiled like that softened it. “I’ll see you at five.”

He left her at the corner and slid back into the city. She went the other way, toward the river walk where tour boats would drift when the weather warmed. She stood under a plane tree and let the wind shift through her sweater and thought: This is not a choice anyone asked me to make, and I’m going to make it anyway.

At four, she went home to be polished. At four-thirty, she told her mother she’d speak for herself. At four-forty-five, she stood in the Valehart press room and watched the techs test the mics.

The space was built to look neutral and expensive—gray walls, chrome lectern, a Valehart crest in silver relief. A bank of cameras hummed softly at the back like a hive. Staff moved while pretending not to move. The air-conditioning kept the room at a temperature designed for men in suits.

Lucien came in at four-fifty-one. The bond inside her woke like a wire catching on something metal. He wore black, the fit precise enough to look like a decision, and a face that told the room nothing. He took his place at the lectern and read the top of the notes they’d put there for him. He didn’t need them.

She stood a step off to his left, where the frame would catch her but not center her. Adrian slid into the back row like a shadow, tilt of his shoulders saying he was bored, his eyes saying he wasn’t.

Helena watched from the side, a general with a battle plan.

“Two minutes,” a producer said to no one and everyone.

Evelyn lifted her chin. The wire under her ribs held steady. She didn’t look at Lucien. She didn’t have to, to feel the way the air pressed in the space between them.

At five, the red lights on the cameras blinked alive.

“Good evening,” Lucien said. His voice filled the room and then the feeds and then the homes of people who loved wolves and people who hated them and people who pretended not to care. “We’re here to address a private incident that has unfortunately become public.”

Incident, Evelyn thought. She might have smiled if the word hadn’t landed so neatly.

“The Valehart family and the Cross family will announce a temporary engagement,” Lucien continued. “We ask for privacy while we review the events of last night and determine the appropriate next steps. There will be no further comment on the details.”

He looked up then, not at her, but past the cameras to the swell of the city itself. It was a careful look, practiced, meant to read as strength.

A reporter raised her hand anyway and didn’t wait to be called on. “Mr. Valehart, are you confirming a mark?”

Helena’s eyes sliced toward the woman. The producer’s headset crackled. Somewhere, PR flinched.

Lucien didn’t blink. “I’m confirming an engagement.”

“Miss Cross,” another voice called, quicker, sharper, smelling of clicks and bonuses. “Were you sent to Mr. Valehart’s room, or did you go on your own?”

Evelyn had promised herself she wouldn’t speak. She spoke anyway.

“I went,” she said. The air in the room changed, as if the vents had reversed. “And I’m not answering anything else about it.”

“Miss Cross—”

“That’s my only comment,” she said, and kept her voice steady. “The rest belongs to me.”

The wire inside her stopped pulling and settled into something that felt almost like a line she could hold. She let the silence sit in the cameras’ mouths until it got awkward enough to move on.

The questions shifted to stocks and markets and if the moon still mattered when everyone pretended it didn’t. Lucien gave the answers his team had carved into him. Helena watched the room break its teeth on her smile. Adrian watched everything and nothing and breathed through a jaw he hadn’t unclenched.

It ended at five-twenty. The lights dimmed from red to dead. Staff exhaled. Cameras clicked off. Someone said “good job” to the air. PR handed them phones with posts already drafted.

Helena gathered them with a small lift of her hand. “We’ll review next steps in the war room.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Evelyn said.

“Everyone is,” Helena said pleasantly, “when the moon is this bright.”

Adrian stepped up before Helena could move them. “I’m taking Evelyn out the east,” he said to no one in particular.

Helena let her gaze slip over him and then away, the way people look at paintings they’ve decided not to buy. “As you wish.”

The east corridor again. The same cold marble. The same hum in the walls.

Halfway down, without planning to, Evelyn stopped. The window to the terrace stood open to a city rinsed clean by late light. The air smelled like rain and something metallic that didn’t come from pipes. She put a hand to the stone ledge, fingers spread, and the bond inside her tugged once, twice, as if testing the distance between bodies the way you test a bridge.

“Does it hurt?” Adrian asked.

“No,” she said, surprised by the truth of it. “Not like that.”

“How, then?”

“Like remembering a word I didn’t mean to learn.” She let her hand fall. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” he said softly. “But it will be.”

He took her down a narrow stair and out a door that fed into a service drive. A car waited, idling. The sky was darker now, the city already reaching for its night lights. He opened the door and she paused, hand on the frame.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.” She got in. The leather was cold. “Everything.”

He shut the door carefully and went around to the other side. “We’ll take the long way,” he said to the driver, and settled into the seat like he hadn’t been standing at attention for an hour.

They moved through Elaris with the radio off. On a cross street, a news billboard replayed her face. On another, a florist put MOONBOUND on a chalkboard and added a heart, because the city loved a story more than it loved the people inside it.

At a red light, Adrian watched her hands, the way her fingers had curled into each other like they’d forgotten how to relax. He covered the mark of his own worry with a grin. “You were good in there.”

“I told the truth once and refused to do it again.”

“That’s better than most leaders manage in a lifetime.”

She didn’t look at him. “What happens now?”

“The city eats, sleeps, posts, forgets,” he said. “We plan. Lucien pretends this is controllable. Helena decides which part of the world to cut off first and calls it strategy. Your mother practices a smile in the mirror that makes me want to break the mirror.”

“And you?”

He tipped his head back against the seat and shut his eyes for a beat. “I stand between you and the next sharp thing.”

The light turned green. The car rolled forward.

When they reached the Cross mansion, the gate recognized their plates with a chirp. The fountain threw its little ribbons of water like it had in the morning, pretending it had been doing that for a hundred years. Adrian walked her to the door.

“Text me if anything feels wrong,” he said.

“Everything feels wrong,” she said.

“Then text me if anything feels worse than wrong.”

She almost smiled. “Good night, Adrian.”

“Good night,” he said, but waited until she was inside before he left.

Upstairs, she sat at her desk and read the document Helena’s team had sent. The words temporary and mutual were right where Adrian said they’d be, neat as lies always were. There was a signature line for her and one for Lucien. There was a clause about privacy and another about photographs. There was nothing about the thing under her skin.

She put the tablet down and opened her window again. The moon wasn’t full tonight, but it was bright enough to find the edges of the buildings. She stood there with her hands on the sill and breathed until her shoulders lowered.

She thought of the way Lucien’s voice had sounded when he said good evening to the world like it meant nothing to him. She thought of the way it had sounded when he said you shouldn’t be here, which had sounded like it meant everything.

On her dresser, her phone buzzed where she’d left it. She picked it up expecting her mother or Helena or a brand requesting to send her a dress. An unknown number.

She should have ignored it. She didn’t.

You don’t know what the mark can do, the message read. But I do. Be careful where you stand when the moon gets higher.

No name. No signature. Just a second text, shorter:

You weren’t the first.

The room tilted, subtle and slow. She sat, the mattress dipping under her weight, the phone heavy in her hand.

Outside, a siren cut through the city and then faded. Somewhere else, a group of kids shouted and then laughed and then were gone.

She typed Who is this? and deleted it. She typed What do you want? and deleted that too. She put the phone face down and tried to listen only to her own breathing.

Across the river, Lucien stood at his window again. The training room hadn’t emptied him out like it usually did. His shirt stuck to his shoulder blades. His hands were steady for the first time that day. The city at night looked like a map of possibilities and threats, the way it always had. He looked down at his phone and then not at it, and told himself to sleep.

He didn’t. He watched the moon come up instead. It wasn’t full. It didn’t need to be to make the new line under his skin draw tight like a bowstring being tested.

When he finally shut his eyes, he dreamed of a silver hallway and a woman standing at the end of it with her hand on the wall, and the sound of his own name like a warning and a request at once.

Evelyn lay awake with the unknown message in her head and the word first circling like a hawk. She breathed in and out until the question lost its shape. It didn’t matter who had come before. It mattered who would stand when this was done.

She closed her eyes and pictured a different room—no cameras, no marble, no crest on the wall—just a door that opened when she pushed and closed when she asked it to. She held that picture until her heartbeat slowed and the line under it stopped pulling.

It was sometime between midnight and two when she finally slept. She didn’t dream about him. She dreamed about water and the sound it made against stone, and about a wolf whose shadow stopped at her feet and didn’t cross.

Outside, Elaris turned over and over on its lit axis, full of mouths and stories, while the moon climbed higher and made everything look cleaner than it was.

Morning would come gray again. The messages would stack. The signatures would be requested. The cameras would blink. The unknown number would stay unknown.

And a line none of them could see would tighten another quiet, patient notch toward whatever it was meant to pull them to.