Chapter 14

Elara's POV

The room Kael led me to sat at the end of a long hallway on the castle's third floor, tall windows overlooking a courtyard garden below, and when he pushed the door open and stepped back to let me enter first,

I stopped just inside the threshold, momentarily overwhelmed by how much care had clearly gone into preparing it.

"This is too much," I said, taking in the soft blue and silver of the bedding, the shelves already lined with books that looked recently added, the small vase of wildflowers sitting on the windowsill that someone must have picked that very morning. "Kael, I don't need all this."

"You needed something that felt like yours," he said simply, standing in the doorway rather than following me fully inside, like he was giving me space to claim the room without him crowding it. "I asked the staff to prepare it a few days ago, before we decided to bring you here properly. I wanted you to have somewhere that felt like more than a place you were hiding."

Something in my chest ached at the thought of him arranging all this before he even knew for certain I'd agree to come, careful and quiet in a way that felt entirely different from anything Ryker had ever offered me, and I found myself crossing the room to look more closely at the books on the shelf, several of them familiar titles I'd mentioned in passing during our conversations at the cottage without ever expecting him to remember.

"You remembered," I said softly, running my fingers along the spines.

"I remember most things you say," he admitted, and when I turned to look at him, there was something almost bashful in his expression, an emotion that seemed strange sitting on the face of a man three centuries old and feared across every kingdom I'd ever heard of. "It's a bit embarrassing, honestly, how much attention I've been paying."

I laughed, and the sound eased some of the formal tension that had followed us up from the entrance hall, Elder Mathis's careful, assessing eyes still lingering somewhere in the back of my mind even as I tried to let the warmth of the room push them out.

"Elder Mathis doesn't like me very much," I said, sitting on the edge of the bed, testing the mattress with my palm.

"Elder Mathis doesn't like change," Kael corrected, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. "He's served this court for longer than most of the wolves in it have been alive, and he's spent every one of those years believing my curse was simply the price our bloodline pays for an old mistake. A price with no cure. Finding out that might not be true anymore is going to take him time to accept, and men like Mathis don't always handle change gracefully."

"Should I be worried about him?"

Kael considered the question seriously, which I appreciated more than if he'd simply brushed it off to make me feel better. "I don't think he means you harm. I think he's cautious, and cautious men sometimes say things that sound sharper than they intend. But I'll be watching, Elara. You don't need to carry that worry alone."

A knock sounded at the still-open door, and Soren leaned in, a grin already spreading across his face at whatever he'd overheard on his way up the hall. "Am I interrupting something, or is this a good time to properly introduce myself to the woman who's apparently turned our King into someone who remembers the titles of books?"

"You've already met her," Kael said dryly, though there was no real irritation in it.

"I've met her in passing, covered in forest and running from rogues. This is different. This is an introduction with proper manners." Soren stepped fully into the room and offered a small, exaggerated bow that made me smile despite myself. "Soren. Beta to His Broodiness here, and unfortunately the person who has to listen to him complain when things don't go according to plan, which, since you arrived, has been often."

"I don't complain," Kael said.

"You complained for two straight days after the border encounter with Alpha Cross," Soren said cheerfully. "Extensively. I nearly asked Nyra for something to help me sleep through it."

Kael shot him a look that had absolutely no real heat behind it, and I found myself relaxing further at the easy banter between them, the obvious years of friendship underneath it, so different from the careful, formal way most of Ashwood pack had always spoken around their Alpha's family.

"He's not wrong," Kael admitted eventually, glancing at me with something rueful in his expression. "I may have been somewhat difficult to be around for a few days after that encounter."

"Somewhat," Soren said, raising an eyebrow.

"You can leave now, Soren."

"I can, but I won't, because I actually came up here to tell you that a rider arrived twenty minutes ago from the western kingdoms." Soren's playful tone shifted, something more serious sliding into place underneath it. "Lady Vesna sends word that she'll be arriving within the week. Officially, she says it's a diplomatic visit to discuss trade agreements along the western border."

"And unofficially?" Kael asked, though from the flat look on his face, I suspected he already knew the answer.

"Unofficially, her rider mentioned that she's heard quite a lot of interesting rumors coming out of Nightfall Hollow lately, and she's very eager to see for herself whether they're true." Soren's eyes flicked to me, apologetic. "I'm sorry, Elara. I don't think word staying contained was ever a realistic hope, not with how fast Alpha Cross's warriors talk when they've had a few drinks in them."

The warmth of the room seemed to cool slightly at the mention of another visitor, another set of eyes that would look at me and see a bloodline instead of a person, and I wrapped my arms around myself without meaning to, an old, protective habit resurfacing.

"Who is Lady Vesna?" I asked.

"Daughter of Alpha King Draven of the western territories, no relation to my own family line despite the shared name, an old confusion of history I won't bore you with," Kael said, and something careful entered his tone, the kind of careful that told me this wasn't a simple answer. "She's ambitious. Clever. And she's made her interest in strengthening ties with Nightfall Hollow known for years, in ways that have very little to do with trade agreements."

"She wants you," I said plainly, and Kael didn't deny it.

"She wants my throne, more precisely, and marrying into it has always seemed the simplest path to her," he said. "I've turned down every overture she's made for the better part of a decade. I doubt hearing that I finally have a mate is going to make her give up quietly."

Soren cleared his throat. "For what it's worth, I don't think she'll try anything foolish on her first visit. She's smarter than that. But she'll be watching you closely, Elara, trying to figure out exactly what you are and exactly how much of a problem you might turn out to be for her plans."

I looked down at the mark on my wrist, steady and warm against my skin, and felt something harden quietly in my chest, a small, stubborn resolve that hadn't fully existed in me before the night of the rejection, before the forest, before any of this.

"Then I suppose," I said, "she'll just have to watch closely enough to figure out that I'm not going anywhere."