Chapter 15: Pride Is a Terrible Pillow

Ryker's POV

Daren came to me at noon.

He knocked twice, which was his signal for information that couldn't wait, and I called him in without looking up from the border report I was reviewing. He closed the door behind him. Stood in front of my desk. Waited until I set the paper down and gave him my full attention.

"Talk," I said.

"The new maid." He kept his voice level and professional, the way he always did when he was delivering something he knew I wouldn't like. "Her suppression mark is showing."

I looked at him.

"Faint," he continued. "Violet lines across her upper back and spine. One of my people spotted it this morning during the linen collection. She didn't know she was seen."

"Who else saw it?"

"Just my person. I've already spoken to them."

"Keep it that way." I leaned back in my chair. "How visible?"

"Currently, faint enough that you'd need to know what you were looking for. But faint now doesn't mean faint in a week." He paused. "Or in three days."

"You think it's accelerating."

"I think the bond pressure is significant and getting worse. A suppression mark isn't designed to hold against three simultaneous Alpha bonds. Whoever made it built it well, but they didn't build it for this."

I nodded once. "That's all."

He left.

I sat at my desk and finished reading the border report. Then I read it again because I had absorbed none of it the first time. Then I set it down and dismissed the two advisors waiting outside my door and walked to the window.

The palace grounds stretched out below me. Guards on rotation. Staff crossing between buildings. Everything moving in its usual patterns, ordered and predictable and under control.

I was not calm.

I was very good at looking calm, which was not the same thing. I had been looking calm since I was twelve years old and had learned that showing what you felt gave other people something to aim at. So I stood at the window with my hands behind my back and my face arranged correctly and I was absolutely not calm.

If the mark broke completely, everything changed.

Violet blood had a signature. Any supernatural entity trained to sense it would feel it within range the moment the suppression failed. And we had enemies. Specific, motivated, well-resourced enemies who had been watching this palace for years looking for leverage.

A violet-blooded mate in our palace was not leverage. It was a siege waiting to happen.

I needed to move her somewhere more secure. A room in the inner wing, closer to us, with better walls and fewer staff access points. And I needed to tell her what was happening, because she deserved to know that her mark was visible, and because she was going to figure it out herself soon if she hadn't already.

She was smarter than she wanted people to notice.

The problem was she would fight me. She fought everything I said on principle, which was its own kind of impressive, and telling her I needed to move her for security reasons was going to sound exactly like what she feared most. More control. More Alpha authority closing around her.

I needed to say it correctly.

I spent the afternoon working out how to say it correctly.

By evening I had a version I was satisfied with. Calm, clear, practical. The security situation has changed. Your mark is showing. We need to move you to a safer room. It is not a negotiation, but I am informing you because you have a right to know. That was it. Simple. Professional. Hard to argue with.

I went to her room at nine.

I knocked.

Properly. Two knocks, hand flat, not a command. I was somewhat proud of this. Cax would probably make a face if he knew I was proud of knocking on a door correctly, but Cax could find his own methods.

Footsteps inside. A pause at the door that told me she was checking who it was before opening it, which was smart and also told me she was already nervous about something.

The door opened.

She had been crying.

Not currently. The crying had stopped some time ago, long enough for the redness to fade to something she could almost hide. But her eyes were slightly swollen at the corners and there was a tension in her jaw that came from holding her face carefully, the way people did when they were trying to look like nothing had happened.

She looked at me. Said nothing.

I opened my mouth.

I had the words ready. The security situation has changed. Your mark is showing. I had constructed the sentence carefully and it was a good sentence and it was exactly what I had come here to say.

"I know Ryder rejected you," I said. "Tell me his full name."

Silence.

She stared at me. Her hand tightened on the door frame, just slightly.

I stared back.

Neither of us spoke for a long moment. I was standing in her doorway having said something I had not planned to say, something that had apparently bypassed every careful construction I had spent the afternoon building and come out on its own, and I did not entirely understand why.

She stared at me. I stared back. Neither of us understood why I had said it.