024 ~ Jealous wolves ~

Victor was waiting in her chambers when she returned to Ashfang. He stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back like a man who had rehearsed his own patience.

Selene stopped in the doorway, placed her hand over the journal still tucked beneath her cloak, and felt the weight of everything she now knew settle into her spine like pins.

"You look tired," he said, not turning to face her.

"It's been a long night."

"I heard." He finally turned, and whatever warmth she had once read in his expression now felt like something painted over a different face entirely. "Attacked in the woods. Rescued by Kieran Thorncrest, of all people. You spent the night alone with him in an abandoned tower."

"We were being hunted, Victor. Shelter wasn't a courtship."

"Wasn't it?"

His words felt like a slap to her face, landing sharper than she expected. Almost immediately, she saw something flicker behind his eye. It was not concern, or the careful grief he'd worn like a second skin for five years, but something rawer underneath it.

"I came to find out who's trying to kill me," she said. "Not to explain myself to you."

"You never have to explain yourself to me." His voice had gone low, controlled in the particular way that told her the control was costing him something. "I've spent five years making sure of that."

"Then don't start now."

He crossed the room before she could step back, close enough that she felt the heat radiating off him, the barely-leashed tension in his shoulders.

She'd seen Victor angry before, experienced firsthand his cold, precise, and terrifyingly controlled anger. Yet she had never seen him like this; he looked like something feral was pulling at the seams of his composure.

"You spent the night with him," he said again, quieter this time, and worse for it. "After everything he did to you. After he stood in that hall and rejected you in front of the entire pack, in front of your family, in front of everyone who'd ever love you. Yet just like a wet, little princess who isn't loved at home, you let him put his hands on you again."

"Why would you put it like he had the time to gently stroke my hair and caress my cheeks? He saved my life."

"He destroyed it first."

"I know what he did to me." Her voice cracked despite herself, five years of grief rising too fast to swallow back down. "I don't need you to remind me."

"Don't you?" His face twisted into something ugly, as the jealousy stripped bare every polite mask he usually wore over it. "Because from where I'm standing, you've forgotten it rather quickly. One night in a tower and suddenly you're defending him."

"I'm not defending him."

"You are." He stepped closer still, and for one suspended second she thought— genuinely thought— that his hand might rise, that five years of carefully banked temper might finally break loose in a way she couldn't take back.

His fist clenched at his side instead, with his knuckles turned white, as though the restraint seemed to cost him more than violence would have.

Her heart drummed in her ears as she tried to control her rising breath when the world stopped as his words struck her eardrums hard! "You think he abandoned you because he wanted to?"

The room went silent in a way that had nothing to do with sound.

Selene felt her breath stop somewhere between her chest and her throat. She stared at him, waiting for the sentence to continue, for it to soften into something explainable, something that could be walked back into the shape of an insult and nothing more. It didn't come.

Instead, Victor's jaw tightened, and something crossed his face that she recognized instantly, because she'd spent five years learning to recognize it on everyone around her.

Guilt.

His eyes refused to stay still, darting anywhere but hers, while his jaw tightened around words that never came.

It was immediate and undisguised, the kind that arrived a half-second after words a man never meant to say out loud.

"What did you just say?" she asked, and her voice had dropped to something dangerously calm, the calm of a woman standing very still because moving might shatter whatever was about to come apart in front of her.

"Nothing." Victor stepped back, putting distance between them like distance could undo the last ten seconds. "It doesn't matter."

"It matters." She followed him, refusing to let the space between them widen. "You said because he wanted to. Not if. You said it like you already know the answer."

"You're reading too much into it; it's nothing"

"Then explain it to me because I believe it's something Victor, fucking talk!" Her hands had curled into fists at her sides, matching his. "Explain to me why the man who's spent five years insisting Kieran ruined my life suddenly sounds like he knows exactly why Kieran did it."

Victor said nothing, stretching the silence that thickened with every second he refused to fill it, and that refusal told her more than any answer could have.

"Victor." Her voice shook now, all the careful calm burning away. "What do you know?"

He wouldn't look at her. His gaze had dropped to the floor, to his own clenched hands, to anything that wasn't her face demanding the truth he'd almost given away for free.

"You should get some rest," he said finally, and turned back toward the window like the conversation had never happened, like he hadn't just handed her the first real thread in five years of unraveling lies.

Selene stood frozen in the middle of her own chambers, the journal still hidden beneath her cloak, and felt the ground shift beneath everything she thought she understood about her own rejection. Kieran didn't remember the hall. Kieran didn't remember rejecting her at all.

And somehow, impossibly, Victor did.