Leave Him Out of This

LYRA'S POV 

I don't remember walking back into the room. I just find myself there, door shut again, pulse hammering so hard I can feel it behind my eyes.

Kael is dying. The words loop through my head on repeat, refusing to settle into anything I can actually use. I pace instead, three steps to the window and back, trying to force my mind into forming a plan and finding nothing but static where one should be.

There has to be a way to undo it. Curses get broken. Stories always say that, somewhere, if you find the right person, the right words, the right price. I don't know any of those things. I don't even know where to start looking for them in a house that isn't mine, surrounded by men who answer to someone who's spent years deciding exactly how much of my life belongs to him.

I think about running again. I get as far as glancing at the window before I remember what Ashford said, the easy certainty in his voice, YOU ALREADY HAVE.

Running didn't save me this morning. I don't know why I'd believe it could save Kael now.

The door opens without a knock.

Every muscle in my body locks at once. I don't need to turn around to know who it is. I'd recognize the particular quiet of his footsteps anywhere, unhurried, like he's never once had to rush toward anything in his life.

"You're awake," Ashford says, like he's commenting on the weather. "I thought you might try the window. Smart of you not to."

I don't answer. I'm too busy deciding, in the space of a single breath, exactly what I'm willing to do.

I drop to my knees before I let myself think better of it.

"Please." The word comes out rawer than I mean it to, scraped thin. "Whatever you're planning, whatever this is, do it to me. Not him. Please, just leave him out of this entirely."

Something shifts in Ashford's expression, interest where I expected irritation.

"Oh," he says slowly. "You already know."

I don't trust myself to say anything else. I just stare up at him, waiting, my whole body braced for whatever comes next.

He crouches slowly, bringing himself level with me, close enough that I can smell the same cologne I remember from a lifetime ago, expensive and cold.

"I'm curious," he says. "You didn't even say his name. Careful, right to the end, to keep him separate from whatever punishment you think you deserve." A small, humorless smile. "That's almost admirable."

"Just tell me what you want."

"I want what I've always wanted, Lyra. You. Whole, unshared, exactly the way your father promised me years before you were old enough to understand what that promise meant." He tilts his head, studying me the way he studied the mark on my arm earlier, his expression clinical and possessive. "The rest of this, the Alpha, the mark, all of it, that's simply the cost of you forgetting your place."

"Then let the cost be mine. Not his."

"It already is yours." He stands, looking down at me now instead of beside me, and something about the shift makes the room feel colder. "You misunderstand the shape of this, sweetheart. His dying isn't a separate punishment I can trade away for your good behavior. It's a consequence of something you already did. Breaking a bond doesn't un-happen it. The debt's already written."

"There has to be a way to stop it."

"Perhaps." He says it with the same careless ease he brings to everything, as though the question costs him nothing to consider and even less to dismiss. "I imagine there's always a way to stop these things, if you're willing to pay whatever that way demands. But that's not information I'm inclined to hand you for free."

"What do you want for it?"

His smile widens, slow and satisfied, like I've finally asked the question he's been waiting for.

"Now that," he says, "is a conversation worth having."