What He Won't Promise

The horn sounded before Ronan could say another word, low and urgent, cutting through the tension in the room like a blade dropped from the ceiling.

Every line of his body went rigid at once, gold eyes snapping toward the tall windows behind him, and Marlowe felt the temperature of the entire room shift with him, whatever conversation about Priya had been building between them instantly buried under something far more immediate.

"Stay here," he said. "Do not leave this room."

"What is that sound?"

He was already moving toward the doors, and the last thing she heard before they slammed shut behind him was one word, thrown back over his shoulder like a warning he hadn't meant to give her.

"Rogues."

The doors had barely shut before Marlowe was pulling on them. Locked. Of course they were locked, because apparently promises about consent and handled problems only extended so far as it was convenient for him. She pressed her palm flat against the carved wood and listened, straining to catch anything past the pounding of her own pulse. Shouting, somewhere distant. The clash of something metal. A sound that might have been a howl if she let herself believe that was possible, which she wasn't ready to do yet, not even after everything she'd already seen.

She turned from the doors and took a slow circle of the room instead, cataloging exits with the same instinct that had kept her safe backstage at the club for three years. Every room had a way out if you looked hard enough. This one had windows, tall and arched, and beneath them a narrow balcony that curled around the side of the building like it had been carved as an afterthought.

She crossed to it and shoved the glass open before she let herself think too hard about what she was doing.

Cold air hit her face, sharper out here than it had been from behind the glass, carrying a bite of pine and something underneath it that made the hair on her arms rise. From the balcony she could see down into a courtyard lit by torches, and what she saw there stole the breath out of her lungs.

They weren't men. Not entirely. Shapes moved through the firelight below, some upright and dressed as Ronan had been, others hunched low and covered in fur, teeth bared, moving faster than anything on four legs had a right to move. She'd told herself in the hallway that the horn, the word rogues, could still mean something ordinary. Standing here now, watching men trade blows with wolves the size of horses, she couldn't tell herself that anymore, and somewhere underneath the terror was a single clear thought: nothing about explaining this to Priya was ever going to sound sane.

One of the wolves went down hard, and the man who'd put it there turned enough that torchlight caught his face. Ronan. Even from this height she recognized the set of his shoulders, and the wolf that lunged for his back a heartbeat later sent her stomach into her throat before she could stop the reaction.

"Behind you," she said, too quiet for anyone below to hear, uselessly, her hands white-knuckled on the railing.

He turned in time. Barely. The wolf's jaws closed on empty air where his shoulder had been, and he drove something silver into its side that made it scream, a sound too close to human to be comfortable, before it collapsed and didn't move again.

Marlowe realized she was shaking. Not from the cold.

"You shouldn't be out here."

She spun so fast she nearly lost her footing on the narrow balcony. The man from the great hall stood in the doorway behind her, the one who'd left with Serah earlier, tall and unbothered in a way that suggested chaos in the courtyard was Tuesday to him. He didn't move toward her, just leaned against the frame with his arms crossed, watching her the way someone watches a spooked animal they don't want to startle further.

"Who are you?" she said, because it seemed safer than admitting what she'd just watched.

"Kellan. Ronan's second." He nodded toward the courtyard without looking at it. "You should come back inside. Rogue packs don't usually breach this deep into our territory, which means someone's getting desperate, and desperate is when things get sloppy. Better sloppy doesn't include a stray human on the wrong balcony."

"Stray human." She let out a breath that was almost a laugh, except nothing about it felt funny. "Is that what I am to you, people? Because back home, I have a name, a job, a roommate probably calling hospitals right now. None of you seem to care that this is a life, not a prize."

Something in Kellan's expression shifted, the first crack of genuine sympathy she'd seen from any of them. "For what it's worth, I don't think he sees it that way. I've known him three hundred years. I've never once seen him ask a healer to look after someone the way he asked this morning, about a woman in the human world he's never even met."

"What healer? What are you talking about?"

"He sent someone to find your roommate an hour ago," Kellan said. "Quietly. To make sure whatever she's told doesn't put her in danger, and doesn't leave her thinking the worst happened to you. I imagine that's part of what that horn just interrupted."

The information landed strangely in her chest, unwelcome relief tangled up with fresh anger at how little control she still had over any of it, even the parts meant to protect the people she loved. "That's not the same as asking me first."

"No," Kellan agreed. "It isn't. I didn't say he was doing this well. I said he was trying." He tipped his chin toward the courtyard, where the fighting had begun to thin, bodies of the fallen left where they'd dropped, the survivors dragging themselves back toward the tree line in retreat. "Come inside. Whatever this was tonight, it's not finished, and I'd rather explain that to you somewhere the wind isn't carrying your scent to anyone still out there."

She didn't have an answer for that. She hugged her arms tighter around herself and let him guide her back through the window into the warmth of the room, some of the fight draining out of her now that the immediate danger below had passed. It didn't mean she trusted him. It didn't mean she trusted any of them. But something in her chest, some traitorous, exhausted part of her, was grateful to be back behind glass, and terrified all over again by what Kellan's words meant about the man currently bleeding somewhere in that courtyard for a war she hadn't asked to be part of.

The doors burst open before she could ask anything else, and Ronan came through them like the fight was still in his blood, a shallow cut along his jaw the only visible mark of what she'd just watched from the balcony. His gaze found her instantly, sweeping over her like he was checking for damage she didn't have, and behind him, close enough that she could see the blood on his hands wasn't only his own, stood a face she didn't recognize at all, someone new, watching her with an intensity that made the hair on her arms rise all over again.