Chapter Five: Eleven Days

Sera's POV

I stared at him and didn't move.

He stood one step inside the room, relaxed as always, watching me with those amber eyes that gave away exactly nothing. The firelight caught the angles of his face and made him look like something carved rather than born.

I hated that he was attractive. It felt like a personal insult.

"You said we would discuss what this marriage looks like," I said "So discuss."

He moved further into the room, toward the sitting area, where two chairs faced each other in front of the fireplace. He sat in one of them and looked at me with an expression that said well?

I crossed the room and sat in the other one.

If he was surprised I did sit with just a gesture, he didn’t show it.

"The bond has to be real," he said. "Not performed. Real. Wolf noble houses will be watching… If they believe this marriage is hollow they will use it against both of us."

"Real means different things to different people, and–"

"In wolf culture it means witnessed," he cut me off. "It means a bond that’s been fully established. There are nobles in this palace right now who will test its legitimacy within the first month."

I looked at the fire for a moment. Thinking. He wasn’t entirely wrong and that irritated me deeply.

"And you need it established quickly," I said.

"I need it established before the first council meeting, which is in eleven days," he said. "After that you have a standing. Before that you are just a human woman in a palace full of wolves who have not decided yet whether to respect you."

I turned that over carefully. He was giving me a reason that was about my protection, my position, my power within these walls. Which was either genuine or the most sophisticated manipulation I’d encountered so far. With this man I genuinely couldn’t tell yet.

"You are asking me to trust you?"

"I am asking you to be strategic," he corrected. "Which is something you already know how to do."

He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, and for just a moment he looked less like a king and more like a man having a conversation he’d been rehearsing. Which meant it mattered to him, and I had more leverage here than the room currently suggested.

"Eleven days," I said.

"Eleven days," he confirmed.

I stood up abruptly, and he watched me closely. Something shifted in the room—the firelight, the particular closeness of two people who’d been talking around something and had just stopped talking.

Then, he slowly stood too. We were close. Closer than we’d been in the yard and the ceremony, close enough that I could see the exact color of those amber eyes and the fact that they were not entirely one color—gold at the center, darker at the edges, like something burning from the inside out.

He reached up and touched my face.

Just his fingertips. Jaw to cheekbone, the lightest possible contact, and his eyes stayed on mine the entire time like he was asking a question he didn’t want to say out loud.

And the honest terrible truth was that it was not unpleasant. That was the most dangerous thing that had happened to me since I walked through the gates of the Duskborne palace.

I let it go on for three seconds, then I stepped back. "N-not tonight."

His hand dropped with no sign of frustration on his face. He just looked at me steadily.

"Why," he genuinely asked, although it didn't seem like a question.

"Because I just arrived in a palace full of wolves who have not decided whether to respect me yet," I said, using his own words back at him.

"And I will not start my time here by doing anything that makes me feel less like myself."

Something moved behind his eyes. Too fast for me to read.

“You really think this would make you feel less of yourself?”

I held his gaze without saying anything.

"Okay… okay, that’s fair," he said.

I almost asked him to stop saying that. That is fair, agreed, you have every right. He kept giving me ground in small amounts like a man who understood that generosity was its own kind of control. Or maybe he just meant it. I couldn’t tell yet and that was exactly the problem.

"Goodnight," I said.

He held my gaze for one more moment, then he nodded once and walked to the door.

He paused with his hand on the frame.

"Sera…” 

The first time he’d used just my name. Not Commander. Not my Luna. Just Sera, quiet and deliberate, like he’d been saving it. I hated how it sounded in his voice.

"The eleven days stand," he said. "But I meant what I said. The bond needs to be real. For your sake as much as mine."

Then he walked out and pulled the door closed behind him. I stood in the middle of the room for a long moment before sitting down on the edge of the bed, pressed my hands flat on my knees and breathed.

My heart was doing something I refused to give it permission to do. I shut it down the way I shut things down on a battlefield… acknowledge it, set it aside, deal with it later when the immediate situation was no longer trying to kill you.

I thought about what he’d said. About the council meeting. About legitimacy and the eleven days that stood between me and a seat at the table I had negotiated for.

He had not pushed nor demanded. He’d simply made his case, heard mine, and left. Which meant one of two things.

Either he was a man capable of genuine restraint and respect, which would make him the most surprising person I’d ever met. Or he was patient. And patient men were the most dangerous kind because they wouldn't show you the trap until you’d already walked into it.

I got up and checked the door. It had no lock on the inside. I stood there looking at that for a moment—at the handle with no bolt, the frame with no latch, and I understood that this small architectural detail was not an accident. Nothing in this palace was an accident.

I pulled a chair from the writing desk and wedged it under the handle. It wouldn’t stop a wolf, we both knew that. But it would make a sound. And right now, sound was the only alarm system I had.

I got into bed, stared at the ceiling and listened to the palace settle around me… the distant footsteps of guards, the low sound of wind against the stone.

Eleven days. Could I work with eleven days?. Maybe. I closed my eyes and started building a plan.

I was almost asleep when I heard a sound outside my window. Not wind,and obviously not the building settling. Footsteps.

I was already out of bed and across the room before I was fully awake, pressing flat against the wall beside the window, heart slamming, hand on the small blade I kept under my pillow—old habit, the kind that’d kept me alive.

I waited silently, then, slowly, I turned and looked out the window.