Behind Closed Doors

Ava wasn't meant to hear this conversation either, but the study door had been left open a crack, and the hallway outside it was, unfortunately for everyone involved, exactly where she needed to be to reach the linen cupboard.

"He's staying at least a week," her father was saying, pacing the length of the room if the pattern of his footsteps was any indication. "Possibly longer, depending on how the talks progress. That's our window, Delia. A week to make this work in our favor, and not a day more."

"A week is nothing," Delia said, though there was calculation rather than complaint in her voice. "But it's enough time, if we're careful. Bree's already made an impression tonight. Did you see the way he watched her during the toast?"

"I saw him watching the room," her father said. "I'm not certain that's the same thing as watching Bree specifically."

"It's close enough to build on." A pause, the clink of glass against glass, someone pouring a drink. "We need him to see her as more than pleasant company at dinner. We need him to see a Luna. Someone capable of standing beside him, managing a household of his scale, handling whatever political weight comes with a territory that size."

"And you think Bree's ready for that."

"I think Bree's been training for that her entire life, whether she knew it or not. Diplomacy lessons since she was eight years old. Etiquette, history, the proper way to receive foreign delegations. I made certain of every bit of it myself." Delia's voice sharpened slightly, defensive. "You've never once questioned the expense of that training before now."

"I'm not questioning the training. I'm questioning whether one dinner and a week's acquaintance is enough for a man like that to commit to a marriage alliance with any daughter, trained or not."

Ava, frozen in the hallway with an armful of linens she no longer had any real reason to be carrying, found herself holding perfectly still, listening despite every instinct telling her to keep walking.

---

"Then we make it enough," Delia said. "We arrange time together. Meals, walks through the grounds, whatever opportunities we can manufacture that look unmanufactured. Let him see her competence up close. Let him see how well she'd fit into his world."

"And if he asks for time with the rest of the family? The other children?"

"Colt can join the warriors for drills, that's easy enough, gives Draven a look at our fighting strength through him. The twins are sweet enough at a distance for maybe one supervised visit, nothing more, children that age tend to say unfortunate things unsupervised." A pause, longer this time, like Delia was working through the rest of the list methodically. "Ava handles the household staff duties, same as always. There's no reason for her to be part of any of this."

The words landed exactly the way Ava expected them to, which didn't make them land any softer.

"She was seated near the kitchen tonight," her father said, not quite a question.

"Where she belongs, given the circumstances. We can't very well seat her at the head table after what happened at the ceremony. People are still talking about that, you know. The last thing this alliance needs is Draven Voss hearing the story of a public rejection attached to this family before we've even secured his interest properly."

"That's fair," her father said, and something in the easy way he agreed, no pause, no hesitation, settled cold and heavy in Ava's stomach.

"You're not troubled by any of it?" Delia asked, a note of genuine curiosity in her voice now, like the question had only just occurred to her. "Leaving her out of it entirely, I mean, so completely."

"Should I be?"

"I only ask because you've never been especially, well, warm toward her, not once in all these years. I've always wondered, quietly, whether that troubles you more than you let on."

There was a long pause before her father answered, long enough that Ava, still frozen in the hallway, found herself holding her breath without deciding to.

"She reminds me of things I've spent a long time trying very hard not to think about," he said finally, quiet, almost too quiet to carry through the crack in the door. "That's not something I'm proud of, saying it out loud like this. It's simply the truth of it, whether I like admitting to it or not."

"That's not her fault, Marcus, and you know it isn't," Delia said, and for a moment there was something almost like genuine gentleness in her voice, quickly buried again under practicality. "Regardless of any of that. It doesn't change what needs to happen this week."

"No," her father agreed. "It doesn't."

---

"What if he asks about her directly?" her father said, after a moment. "He's the sort of man who notices things. If he asks why there's a third daughter he hasn't been introduced to—"

"Then we tell him the truth, dressed appropriately. That she prefers to keep to household matters. That she's shy, perhaps, or simply not particularly social. Nothing that invites further questions." Delia's tone made it clear she considered the matter settled. "Men like Draven Voss aren't visiting to catalog every member of a household. He's here for an alliance, a strategic one, built on strength and competence. Ava isn't relevant to that equation, and there's no reason to make her relevant by drawing attention where none is needed."

Not relevant. Ava mouthed the words silently in the dark hallway, testing the shape of them on her own tongue, finding they fit uncomfortably well against every other version of the same sentence she'd heard from this family over the years, in one form or another, for as long as she could remember.

"I want this to work," her father said, his voice dropping to something more tired than calculating, weary in a way Ava rarely heard from him. "Whatever Draven Voss actually wants from this alliance, we need it. You heard him at dinner. Coordinated rogue attacks across three territories. If that reaches us next, and we don't have a powerful ally already bound to this pack, we won't survive it the way smaller territories haven't been surviving it."

"Then we secure the alliance," Delia said, firm now, businesslike. "Bree marries him if that's what he wants, and this pack gets the protection it needs. It's not romantic, Marcus, but it's sensible, and sensible is what this family requires right now more than anything else."

"And if he doesn't want Bree? If he came here wanting something else entirely, and we've built this whole plan around the wrong assumption?"

A pause, longer this time.

"Then we adjust," Delia said, though something in her voice suggested she found the possibility more irritating than genuinely worth preparing for. "But I doubt it comes to that. What else would he possibly want, coming to a house like ours? We have exactly one asset worth an alliance of this size, and she's currently on the guest list I'm drafting for tomorrow's ride."

"You're already planning tomorrow, then."

"I'm always already planning tomorrow, Marcus, and the day after, and the day after that. Someone in this house has to be, since it certainly isn't going to be you."

---

Ava didn't wait to hear the rest. She carried the linens the last stretch of hallway to the cupboard, her hands steadier than she expected given the tight, familiar ache settling in her chest, the particular ache of confirming something she'd already known rather than discovering something new.

She wasn't hurt, exactly, not the way Rowan's rejection had hurt, sharp and public and impossible to hide from. This was quieter. Older. The dull, worn-in pain of being reminded, once again, that whatever happened in this house, whatever alliances got built or broken, whatever futures got decided around the dinner table or behind a half-closed study door, she would remain precisely where she'd always been. Useful. Convenient. Entirely beside the point. It was the kind of pain she'd grown almost fluent in, familiar enough by now that she barely had to brace for it anymore, and yet somehow that familiarity never quite made it painless.

She finished putting the linens away and made her way back toward her room, passing the study door once more on her way, low voices still audible from within, already moving on to logistics, timing, which afternoon might work best for Bree to happen to be walking the grounds when Draven took his customary ride, which colors would flatter her best in the afternoon light, which stories about Bree's accomplishments would land naturally in conversation rather than sounding rehearsed.

She didn't stop to listen further. She'd heard, she thought, everything that actually mattered, and there was only so much of her own erasure a person could stomach listening to in a single evening.

---

Later, lying awake in the dark, Ava found herself turning the conversation over the way she'd turned over the stranger woman's kindness on the road days before, except this time there was no comfort hidden anywhere in it, nothing worth rationing out to make it last.

She thought about the dinner, about the brief weight of Draven Voss's eyes finding hers across the hall for a second that had meant nothing, that couldn't have meant anything, given everything she now understood about exactly how invisible she was meant to remain for the entirety of this visit. She thought about her father agreeing so easily, no hesitation at all, when Delia suggested keeping her out of sight. She thought about the word Delia had used, relevant, and how thoroughly it summarized her entire existence within these walls, a single word doing the work of a lifetime's worth of quiet dismissals.

She thought, too, though she tried not to dwell on it too long, about how strange it was that a household so determined to keep her hidden from a visiting alpha had still, somehow, managed to have his eyes find her anyway, if only for a second, if only by accident. It didn't mean anything. She reminded herself of that firmly, more than once. But the thought lingered regardless, small and stubborn, refusing to be reasoned all the way into silence.

It didn't matter, she told herself, staring up at the dark ceiling. She hadn't wanted any part in this alliance to begin with, hadn't asked for any of it, not the ceremony, not Rowan, not this. She had no interest in performing charm at a grieving stranger for the sake of securing her family's protection, no interest in competing with Bree for anyone's attention, no interest, after everything Rowan had already cost her, in placing herself anywhere near the possibility of being noticed and then discarded all over again.

Still, some small, stubborn part of her, the same part that had faltered slightly under Draven's brief attention at dinner, refused to fully believe her own reassurances. She kept circling back, uselessly, to her father's voice through the crack in the door, the particular weariness in it when he'd admitted what she reminded him of, and found she couldn't decide whether that admission made things better or worse. At least it was honest. At least, for once, she understood exactly why, rather than being left to invent reasons of her own in the silence he usually left her with.

She fell asleep eventually, restless, unsettled, without any clear sense of why a decision that changed absolutely nothing about her own circumstances had left her feeling quite so hollow.