The Emperor's Castle

Ivara's POV

The fire in my chamber never seemed to go out. I noticed that on my third morning in Emberreach, watching the flames curl around a fresh log while a servant girl set a tray of bread and honey beside my bed. In Ashveil, fires burned low by dawn, and no one bothered to feed them again until dusk. Here, someone always came before I woke.

I sat up slowly, my hand pressed against the curve of my stomach. The healer said the baby was strong, stronger than she expected for how thin I had grown in the omega quarters. She said it with a frown, like something about that strength troubled her more than it comforted her.

"You are awake." The voice at my door was crisp and cold, and I looked up to find a woman standing there I had not met before. She wore silver at her throat and a gown the colour of frost, and her eyes moved over me the way a butcher looked at meat before deciding which cut to take first.

"I am Lady Serris," she said when I did not answer fast enough. "I sit on the Emperor's council. I came to see the wolf who has caused so much talk among my people."

"I did not ask to cause talk."

"No." Her smile did not reach her eyes. "I imagine you did not ask for any of this. And yet here you are, carrying an Alpha's child in the heart of our kingdom, healed in the Emperor's own wing, guarded by his own men." She stepped closer, and her gaze dropped briefly to my stomach before returning to my face.

"Tell me, does it not strike you as strange how quickly he has taken an interest in a stranger from a rival pack?"

"He saved my life. That is all I know."

"Is it." She said the words flatly, not as a question. "The Emperor has never once brought a wounded outsider into his own home before. Not a soldier. It's not a noble. Certainly not the discarded wife of an Alpha he has no alliance with." She let that sit in the air between us. "I only wonder what he sees in you that the rest of us cannot."

Before I could answer, the door opened again, and Kael filled the frame the way he always did, broad enough to block the light behind him. Serris straightened at once, her spine going rigid, her expression smoothing into something pleasant and false.

"Lady Serris." His voice was even, but there was an edge underneath it I had learned to recognize in the days since he found me. "I do not remember summoning you to my guest's chamber."

"I only came to welcome her, my lord. It seemed the courteous thing to do, given how much attention she has already received."

"Then you have welcomed her." He held the door open wider, a silent command, and Serris walked past him with her chin high, though I caught the tightness in her jaw as she left.

Kael watched the empty doorway a moment longer before he turned back to me. "She will not be the last to test you," he said. "My court does not trust easily, and they trust outsiders even less."

"I noticed."

A ghost of a smile crossed his mouth, gone as quickly as it came. He crossed the room and lowered himself into the chair beside my bed, the same chair I had woken to find him in more mornings than I could count since the rogues nearly killed me. "You do not have to earn their trust today," he said. "You only have to heal."

"And if I can not heal fast enough for them?"

"Then they will learn patience, or they will learn to fear me instead." He said it simply, without any heat, the way another man might comment on the weather, and something about the certainty in his voice settled a fear in my chest I had not realized was sitting there.

I studied him for a moment, this man who had pulled me half dead from rogue territory and never once asked what I could offer him in return. "Why does it matter to you," I asked, "what happens to me?"

His jaw tightened, and for the first time since I had known him, he looked almost unsure of his own answer. "I have asked myself the same question every night since I found you," he admitted. "I have not settled on one I am satisfied with yet."

The honesty in that surprised me more than any flattery could have. Draven had spent three years finding pretty ways to say nothing at all. Kael had just handed me the truth, unfinished and rough, and somehow that felt like more than anything my husband had ever given me.

"When you do settle on an answer," I said quietly, "I would like to hear it."

"You will." His eyes held mine, steady and warm in a way that made my chest ache in a manner I did not fully understand yet. "I promise you that."

A knock at the door broke whatever moment had been building between us, and a guard stepped in, his face grim in a way that made my stomach drop before he even spoke.

"My lord," the guard said, "there is a messenger at the gate. He claims to carry word from Ashveil."

Kael rose at once, his whole body shifting into something harder, more dangerous. "Bring him to the hall. I will hear what he has to say myself."

"He did not ask for you, my lord." The guard hesitated, glancing at me before he finished. "He asked for her."

Kael's eyes narrowed, and I felt the sudden tension gathering in the room like a storm building over still water. "Bring him to the hall regardless," he said. "She will decide for herself whether she wishes to be seen."

I rose slowly, my legs steadier than they had been in days, and followed him toward the great hall with my heart pounding against my ribs. Whatever waited on the other side of that door, I refused to face it as the trembling, broken woman Draven's people had thrown into rogue territory. I wanted to walk in standing tall, even if my knees threatened to buckle the moment I saw whatever news had been sent for me.

The messenger boy stood near the doors when we arrived, his eyes wide at the sight of Kael's full guard filling the hall behind him. He looked barely old enough to carry weapons, let alone the weight of whatever letter he clutched against his chest.

"Speak," Kael commanded, his voice carrying easily across the stone hall.

"I was sent only to deliver this, my lord," the boy said, his voice shaking. "I was told to place it directly into her hands, and no one else's."

Kael glanced at me, and I nodded, stepping forward to accept the folded parchment from the boy's outstretched fingers. My name was written across the front in handwriting I recognized instantly, the same careful, controlled script Draven had used to sign correspondence throughout our marriage.

I broke the seal with fingers that did not shake nearly as much as I expected them to.