Chapter 10 — Dinner With the Alpha

Draven Hall was larger than I remembered it, or perhaps I had simply never allowed myself, in my first life, to look at it properly. I had spent my year there with my eyes lowered, my shoulders drawn in, making myself small in rooms built for people who took up space without apology. Tonight I walked through its wide stone entrance with my chin level and my mother's sapphire cool against my throat, and I let myself see everything: the high vaulted ceiling, the black iron chandeliers, the enormous tapestry of a running wolf pack that stretched the length of the great hall.

Dinner was smaller than I expected — perhaps twenty guests at a long table, Concord envoys and northern lords and their families, candlelight catching on silver and crystal. I was seated, to my quiet surprise, not at the distant foot of the table where a lesser house's second daughter belonged, but three seats from the head, nearly across from Kael himself.

He did not look surprised to see me there. He looked, if anything, as though he had arranged it.

"Miss Vale," he said, when the first course had been cleared and the conversation around us had splintered into a dozen private currents. "I hope your hands have recovered."

I froze, fork halfway to my mouth.

"My hands, Alpha?"

"You were favoring your right one, at the door." A faint, precise nod toward the faded pink marks still visible along my palm, half-hidden by my glove. "Training injury?"

"You're very observant."

"It's a survival trait, in my position."

"I imagine most things are, in your position."

Something in his mouth moved — not quite a smile, but its nearer cousin. Down the table, Seraphine was deep in animated conversation with Corvin Hale, laughing at something, the candlelight gilding her in a way I remembered too well from a hundred other rooms. I watched her for a moment, and Kael, I noticed, did not.

"You're training," he said. It was not quite a question.

"Is that so unusual?"

"For a Vale daughter? Yes." He studied me. "Your house doesn't raise warriors."

"My house raises what it needs. It's never needed one before."

"And now it does?"

I set my fork down. "Perhaps I've simply decided it should have one."

"Just like that."

"Just like that."

He considered this for a long moment, turning his wine glass slowly by the stem, and I had the distinct, uncomfortable sense of being weighed on a scale I could not see.

"Most people," Kael said, "decide such things after something happens to make the decision for them."

Something did. "Must there always be a reason?"

"There's always a reason. People simply prefer not to name it."

"Then perhaps I prefer not to name mine."

His eyes held mine a beat too long across the candlelight, and I felt, absurdly, the old traitorous warmth rise in my chest — the same warmth I had spent a whole first life chasing and never once being fed. I crushed it down before it could show on my face.

"Careful, Miss Vale," Kael said, very quietly, so that only I could hear it beneath the noise of the table. "You look at me as though you already know how this conversation ends."

"Do I?"

"You do it constantly. I noticed it in the glasshouse. I'm noticing it now."

"Perhaps I'm simply better at conversations than you're accustomed to."

That, finally, won something close to an actual smile — small, surprised, gone almost as quickly as it arrived, but real. It struck me harder than I wanted it to. In my first life I had seen him smile perhaps three times in an entire year, and never once at anything I had said.

"Lord Vale tells me," Kael said, changing course, "that you have a particular interest in the old histories. The founding treaties. The original boundary agreements between the packs."

I went still. This was not a subject my father would have raised idly. "Did he."

"He seemed to think it might interest me." A pause, deliberate. "Should it?"

I thought of the Veilheart. I thought of a woman scratched out of a family portrait, of a compartment holding nothing but dust, of a woman's voice I had not yet heard but somehow already dreaded: never let them open the gate. I thought of how much I did not yet understand, and how dangerous it would be to let this particular man see how much I wanted to.

"I find old things interesting," I said, carefully bland. "That's all."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have tonight."

Down the table, my father laughed loudly at something Lord Vane had said — I had not even noticed Edric Vane's arrival, seated near the head of the table in unassuming gray, his kind, weathered face turned attentively toward whoever spoke to him. He caught my eye across the candlelight and inclined his head, warm and courteous, and something in my chest eased slightly at the sight of him, an old, familiar comfort I did not examine too closely.

Kael followed the direction of my glance.

"You know Lord Vane," he said. It was not quite a question either.

"Not yet." The word slipped out before I could stop it, too honest, and I saw Kael's eyes narrow very slightly at the strangeness of it. I recovered as smoothly as I could. "I mean — we've not been introduced. I only meant that he has a kind face."

"He does," Kael agreed, watching me a moment longer than the correction required. "Most people trust him instantly. I've never entirely understood why."

"Don't you?"

"I trust very few things instantly, Miss Vale." His gaze returned to mine, steady, gray, unreadable. "You, for instance. I don't trust you at all."

"Good," I said. "That makes two of us."

This time the smile came fully, unguarded, startled out of him before he seemed to realize it was happening, and for one dangerous, unraveling second I forgot entirely that this was the same man who would one day stand three steps from me in the snow and let a knife do what he would not lift a hand to stop.

Then a servant leaned in to refill his glass, the moment broke, and across the table Seraphine's bright laughter rose again, and I remembered exactly why I had come here, and it was not to be charmed.