Chapter 7

Kade

Four months from the wedding, and Kade had started losing time in ways that frightened him more than he let anyone see.

Not moments, exactly — nothing so clean or so mercifully brief as blacking out. It was subtler than that, and worse for being subtler: he'd find himself somewhere without a clear memory of the walk that had gotten him there. The training yard, more than once, standing in the same spot he'd stood in that morning with no sense of how many hours had passed in between. The border fence, once, at an hour he had no business being awake for. And once, unnervingly, he came back to himself halfway down the old northern road — the one that led, eventually, if you walked it long enough, toward the territory line he hadn't consciously approached since the night of the ceremony.

He stood there a long moment, heart going hard in his chest, trying to reconstruct how he'd ended up on that particular stretch of road out of every road in Blackthorn's territory, and found he couldn't. He turned around before he let himself think too hard about where his feet had apparently decided to take him without asking permission first.

Seraphine found him later that same week, in his study, going over guard rotations he'd already checked twice — a habit that had less to do with diligence these days and more to do with needing something, anything, to occupy his hands so they'd stop shaking long enough to hold a pen steady.

"Four months," she said, dropping into the chair across from him without waiting to be asked, the way she did most things. "The invitations go out next week. You should probably know who's on the guest list before Ashborne finalizes it without bothering to ask you."

"I trust you to handle it."

"That's either a compliment, or you've stopped caring what happens at your own wedding." She studied him for a moment in that sharp, assessing way she had, the one that made him feel less like a fiancé and more like a ledger she was still working out how to balance. Whatever she found in his face made something in her expression shift, soften just slightly, just for a second, before it smoothed back into its usual composure. "You look terrible, Kade. I mean that plainly, not unkindly."

"I've heard."

"From who? You barely let anyone close enough these days to say it to your face." She hesitated after that, which wasn't like her at all — Seraphine hesitated for almost nothing, had built her entire manner around never appearing to hesitate — and when she spoke again her voice had dropped into something quieter, something that sounded, for once, less like strategy and more like an actual person. "Whatever this is costing you. I didn't ask for that part of the arrangement, and I don't particularly want it. I want you to know that, even if it doesn't change anything either of us has to do about the solstice."

He didn't have an answer ready for that. Before he could find one, she was already standing, already halfway to the door, already reassembling the composure she'd let slip for exactly as long as she'd meant to and not one second longer.

"For what it's worth," she added, hand on the doorframe, not quite looking back at him, "I hope whatever this is does pass. Truly. It would be easier for both of us if it did."

Then she was gone, and he was alone again with guard rotations he'd already checked twice and an ache behind his ribs that had no intention of taking her advice.

It was Torren who brought him the other piece of news, later that same week, carefully, in the unhurried way Torren had learned to deliver things he suspected Kade would rather hear directly than filtered through someone trying to protect him from them.

"There's a pack reforming on the old Nightshade grounds," Torren said, watching Kade's face for a reaction he clearly expected and didn't get, because the name meant almost nothing to Kade beyond a vague childhood memory of a territory that had gone quiet long before he'd taken the pack seal — a name attached to old maps more than to anything current. "Word out of the northern markets is they ran off a rogue pack that tried to test them last month. Ran them off clean, apparently. That's not something a dying pack does. Dying packs don't win fights like that."

"Who's leading them?"

"Nobody knows yet. Whoever it is, they're keeping the name out of the markets on purpose, which is its own kind of interesting." Torren shrugged, though there was something considering in the gesture, something that suggested he'd already turned this over more than once before bringing it to Kade. "Could be nothing. Could be somebody worth watching, if Nightshade's actually climbing back from what it was six years ago. Packs that come back from the dead tend to come back hungry."

Kade filed it away the way he filed away most border news these days — noted, catalogued, set aside for a version of himself with more attention to spare than he currently had. He had a wedding in four months, a chest that ached worse every week regardless of what his father promised him about time, and a resurging pack two territories north didn't rank especially high against either of those two facts, not tonight.

"Keep an ear on it," he said, because it seemed like the responsible thing to say, and because some old habit of leadership was apparently still functioning underneath everything else that wasn't.

"Already am."

Torren left. Kade sat alone with the guard rotations a while longer, and didn't think about Nightshade again for a long time after that — not that week, not that month, not for longer than he would, later, be able to justify to himself.

He would, eventually, think of almost nothing else.