Chapter Four

Irabella~

The car stopped a quarter mile short of the gate.

I didn't understand why until the guard in the passenger seat turned around and told me to get out. No explanation. Just the door popping open and cold air rushing in around my ankles.

"Walk," he said.

I looked past him at the road ahead, black asphalt stretching toward a gate I could barely make out in the dark, and understood. They didn't want the King's men to see me arrive sitting down like a guest. They wanted me walking in like what I actually was.

Isabella's shoes were already wrong on my feet, half a size too small, and by the time I'd gone a hundred yards I could feel the blister forming on my left heel, hot and raw against the leather. I didn't slow down. Slowing down felt like giving something away.

That's when I saw them.

Two men in dark uniforms, walking the opposite direction, carrying something long between them, wrapped in white cloth. I had to step off the road to let them pass. Nobody told me to. It was just obvious, the way you know to get out of the way of a moving car.

The cloth had slipped at one end.

A shoe. A woman's shoe, the kind with a small heel, expensive once, the sole still dark and wet. The heel itself had snapped clean off and was hanging by a thread of fabric, swinging slightly with each step the men took.

Neither of them looked at me. Neither of them adjusted the cloth. They just kept walking, like carrying a body down this exact road was something they did often enough that it didn't require comment anymore.

Nobody explained it.

Nobody had to.

I kept walking too. What else was there to do.

The road didn't feel like a normal road. It was too quiet, no wind, no sound of insects, nothing but my own footsteps and the blister screaming with every step. Even the cold felt wrong, sharper than the season should have allowed, like the air itself had been set to punish anyone who walked it.

The gate itself was worse up close. Black iron, no crest, no decoration, just bars thick enough that I understood immediately they weren't there to keep people out. They were there to keep something in, or to make sure whatever went through them didn't come back out the same way it went in.

They didn't take me through the front doors. A side entrance instead, unmarked, leading down a short hallway with no windows, into a room that looked like it had been stripped of anything that could be considered comfortable. Stone floor. One desk. No fire. No rugs. A single lamp throwing a small circle of light across a stack of papers.

He was already there.

He didn't look up when the door opened. Didn't look up when the guard announced me and left, didn't look up when the door shut behind me and I was alone in the room with him for the first time.

He kept writing something, unhurried, like I was the least important thing scheduled into his day.

I stood there. My blister throbbed. The perfume scent, days old now, still clung faintly to my skin, and I hated it more standing in that room than I had at any point during the ride.

The silence stretched long enough that I started counting my own heartbeats just to have something to do with my mind.

Finally, he set the pen down.

Looked up.

His eyes were the kind of pale that shouldn't have felt as heavy as they did. He studied me the way you'd study a document you were about to sign, checking for anything that didn't match what you expected to find.

"Your mother's favorite thing to say to you at dinner," he said. "The one line she repeats every year on your birthday. What is it."

Nothing dramatic in his voice. He asked it the way someone asks for a phone number.

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out for one full second, then two, and I felt each one land against him like a dropped stone in still water.

"'You were worth waiting for,'" I said finally, pulling the words out of nowhere, out of every dinner table speech I'd heard aimed at Isabella over the years. "She says it every year."

He didn't react. Didn't nod, didn't correct me. Just watched.

"What was your childhood nickname," he said next. "The one only your parents used. Not the pack. Not your sister. Just them."

This one was smaller. Sharper. The kind of detail that lived in a house, not in front of a crowd.

My mind went blank white for half a breath and then filled in fast, too fast, the way it does when your body decides survival matters more than truth.

"Bella-bee," I said. "My father started it. Nobody else was allowed to use it."

My voice didn't shake. I made sure of that. I watched his face for any sign I'd gotten it right, and found nothing there to read either way, which was somehow worse than if he'd looked satisfied.

He rose from the desk. Slow. Unbothered. Walked around it until he was standing close enough that I had to tilt my head back to keep looking at him.

His hand came up.

I thought, for one absurd second, that he was going to touch my face the way you'd check a piece of jewelry for authenticity.

Instead his fingers closed around my throat.

Not fast. Not violent, not at first, just steady pressure that built until my next breath didn't come all the way in, and the one after that didn't come at all.

"Your bond-signature doesn't match," he said, quiet, almost bored, like he was reading a result off a screen instead of choking the air out of a person. "You're not her."

I clawed at his wrist with one hand. Useless. He didn't move.

My vision started narrowing at the edges, dark creeping in from both sides, and somewhere underneath the panic a colder part of me was already moving, already remembering the knife in the hidden seam of my sleeve, the one I'd sewn there myself the night before I left.

I got it free. Flicked it open with my thumb, the way I'd practiced a hundred times against a pillow in my room, and dragged it across his face before I let myself think about what I was doing.

He let go.

Air hit my lungs like it had teeth.

I stumbled back against the desk, coughing, my whole body shaking, watching him touch his own cheek where a thin line of blood was already welling up, dark against pale skin.

"I'm Isabella," I said, and my voice came out wrong, thin and trembling despite everything I'd told it to do. "Why would I be here if I wasn't."

He looked at his fingers. At the blood on them.

Then he smiled.

Not the reaction I expected. Nothing close to it.

"Feisty," he said, almost pleased, like I'd passed some test I hadn't known I was taking. "This is going to be fun."

He stepped closer again, close enough that I could smell copper and something colder underneath it, and dropped his voice down to something that felt worse than the shouting I'd braced for.

"Let me make one thing clear," he said. "If I find out you're lying to me, God help you."

He turned back toward his desk like the conversation was already finished.

"Leave," he said, without looking at me again.

I left. I didn't remember walking through the door, or down the hallway, or past whichever guard fell into step beside me. My hands wouldn't stop shaking and my throat still ached where his fingers had been, four distinct points of pressure I could still feel long after he'd let go.

Outside, the cold air hit my face and I kept moving anyway, putting distance between myself and that room before whatever was left of my composure gave out completely. I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and made myself breathe through my nose until the shaking slowed.

Underneath all of it, one thought kept repeating, cold and clear.

I had to keep being Isabella. Every hour, every conversation, every question he decided to test me with next.

Until I found a way out of this place, being her was the only thing keeping me alive.