CLOSE QUARTERS

Lyra's POV

I would rather die than see the alpha in his chambers . I tell myself over and over again as a kind of mantra so that maybe it will be real.

So I don't leave. I stay where the air smells of soap and pots, where work keeps my hands busy and my head muddled. The servants' wing is boisterous in the only way a space stays vibrant — clinking pots, a humming woman ironing, a boy swearing under his breath as he lifts sacks of rags. I scrub, sweep, pile. Anything to have something between my ribs to keep the rest of me from hurting.

My shoulders hurt by noon from lifting too many trays. My hands sweat with steam. I value the little exhaustion which conceals the larger one. Rumour runs faster than I do; someone in the kitchen has already seen the message and the rumour goes out. It is a little, fiery patch at the base of my neck: the knowledge that the Alpha asked for me. The knowledge that I declined ,and now probably look like an insolent fool.

A girl — Rue — rushes by me with an armload of newly washed napkins. She's all wide-eyed and quick, the kind of servant who moves as if the world beyond the castle never did anyone any harm. "Shouldn't you be in the Alpha's quarters?" she asks, half teasing.

"I have… chores," I tell her. "Extra things to do." My tone is dull. She raises her eyebrows like she doesn't really believe me. She heads off, and I make a conscious effort not to watch her leave.

I accidentally open the wrong door. The hall quiets into carved wood and thick rugs; the smell shifts from starch to cedar. I push and the door opens onto a room that is not a servant's — high ceiling, thick drapes, a bed big enough to swallow a man. It makes something in me constrict. I step back.

A hand grabs my cuff. "You don't go in there," says the man who had given me some slashes, his voice gruff and annoyed. "That's private. Servants don't pass this door." He sends me the other direction into the real servant quarters. His voice is practical, not polite.

"I thought —" I start.

"You thought wrong," he tells me. "Here. Come with me." He pushes me, the push is enough.

I play along for a little while, sweeping and folding without even thinking about how close my feet had been to the bed. I make the motions until my muscles remember nothing but gesture. The day drags itself out in a beat and I almost think that I can keep the hunger at bay.

Then someone says my name — quietly, slowly. My heart drops into my stomach. I turn, and he's there.

Aziel stands there in the corridor, as though he has been waiting, as though the passage bends. He doesn't look old, or crushed, or legendary. He looks like a man who takes up space as an option. He looks younger than the monster things I had imagined, and that riles me. It gives me a toothache with the desire to break something.

"When I told you you were to be relieved of duty — did you not hear?" His tone is steady. Not hard. Not gentle. Simply abrupt.

"I must have heard wrong." My apology is automatic. My lips have learned the curve of obedience. "Sorry, Alpha."

He steps closer. Guards melt into the shadows behind him — not to scare me, but to contain him. The hallway becomes a tunnel. I stand tiny in the center of it, a coin in a hand.

"What is wrong with you?" he thunders. "Why aren't you in my chambers where I instructed you to be?"

He gazes at me and something flickers in his face; it may be irritation, it may be curiosity. He tilts his head to one side. "Do you not feel?" he says brusquely. "Do you not feel the bond? The call?"

I can see where this is going. I have rehearsed the rejection in my mind a thousand times. I have a dozen things I can say: hatred, accusation, denial. I have things that require my hands not to be hindered by the shaking of some foreign, unwanted pull.

"I don't feel anything," I say to him. The falsehood springs bright and tasteless. I intend it exactly as I must intend it: no acknowledgment, no fissure.

He frowns. "You're lying." Not a question. "Do you hate me? Scared of what my name suggests? The stories? Tell me."

The hall inclines. The guards' eyes flick towards us like fireflies. If I attack now, in the open, the penalty is swift. Treason. Death. The vision I built for Blue Moon—protection of elders, orchard revival—crumbles. I can kill Aziel and be nothing more afterwards. That thought roots me like metal.

"I—" I clamp my mouth shut. Something within me wants to scream that I hate him, dig him up and slowly bury him with a right hand. But I keep my face empty. Silence is a weapon too.

Aziel's eyebrows. He steps closer, close enough that shadow and warmth cross mine. "You're likely to carry a blade in your chest," he says. "Not rumor. Something sharp. I don't want to prod, but tell me straight: is it hatred?"

"Hatred," I answer finally. The word is brief and clean. "Mostly."

He doesn't flinch. If anything, his eyes become mushy with an odd sympathy that trumpets like treachery through me. "Then tell me why," he says softly. "If it's deserved, speak. Don't keep it wrapped in lies.".

 If I told him all of it  the yard, the blood, my mother's blank face — the room would start to tip and I'd be bare. But he's insisting on it. He wants the truth, and to tell would make this real in a way that I'm not ready for.

If I kill him at this moment, Everything goes to waste. If I wait, the bond has a chance of repairing itself into something that will steal my soul and my revenge. Both choices are swords with two blades. I choose the blade that holds the future for my people.

"Just know you'll not find comfort with me," I say to him. It isn't a lie this time. It isn't a whole truth either. It'll have to do.

He looks at me, curiously as if he's studying a map and continues to fold it in half. After a ragged breath he nods once. "You will visit my chambers tomorrow," he states, brutal. "When I return. We will speak."

"Understood." I bow, because all the rest of my record is shaky. I start to step away and my wolf howls closer, to reach out, to take his arm, to tear him apart and devour whatever that tugging is. My hands are raised at my sides.

As I turn aside the corridor hums like something set free. Aziel rises and looks at me. I can feel his eyes on my back like an animal.

I go back to the sink and scrub harder than necessary. The water scorches my skin. My plan is a cold stone against my thigh. The knife is shoved into the crease of my jacket, threat and promise.

Tonight I'll sleep in the servant's quarters. Tomorrow I'll learn his schedule. I'll keep my hands clean enough to murder when the moment comes.