Chapter 15 — Don't Protect Me

He walked me the whole way back to Vale, his hand never quite leaving my arm, and by the time the house came into view he had already begun issuing orders — a rider sent ahead to warn my father's guard, another dispatched to comb the woods at first light, a third, quietly, to watch the house itself until he was satisfied the danger had passed.

I let him get as far as the front step before I stopped walking.

"No," I said.

Kael turned. "No, what?"

"No guards on my house. No watchers in my woods. No riders combing the trail at dawn without my father's leave, which you have not asked for." I kept my voice level, though my hands, tucked into my skirts, were shaking again, this time from something other than fear. "You don't get to decide how House Vale defends itself."

"Someone tried to kill you an hour ago."

"I'm aware. I was there."

"Then you understand why—"

"I understand that you want to fix this the way you fix everything," I said. "By deciding, and then acting, and then informing everyone else afterward that it's already done. I understand that better than you know."

Something flickered across his face — surprise, and beneath it, something sharper, as though I had struck closer to a truth about himself than he was accustomed to allowing anyone to come.

"I'm trying to keep you alive," he said, quieter now, some of the Alpha's certainty draining out of his voice.

"I know." My voice softened despite myself, and I hated it a little, the way it always softened for him no matter what life I was living, no matter how carefully I'd planned not to let it. "And I'm grateful. If you hadn't been there—" I stopped, made myself finish it. "If you hadn't been there, I don't think I would have survived it. I know that. But being grateful doesn't mean I hand you my house's safety without being asked."

"You could have died."

"I know exactly how that feels, Alpha Draven." The words came out before I could weigh them, low and sharp and far too honest, and I saw them land on him like a blow he had not braced for, his whole body going still in a way that told me he had heard more in the sentence than I had intended to give him.

"What does that mean?"

I closed my eyes for one long breath. When I opened them, I had recovered enough of myself to lie, though it cost me more than it should have, more than any lie had cost me yet in this strange doubled life.

"It means I've thought about it before," I said. "Everyone thinks about dying, sooner or later. Tonight simply made it less abstract."

He studied me for a long, silent moment, and I had the uncomfortable sense that he had not entirely believed the correction, but had decided, for reasons of his own, not to push it tonight, filing it away instead alongside whatever else he was already quietly collecting about me.

"I won't send guards without your leave," he said finally. "But I am not walking away from this, Liora. Someone tried to put an arrow through you an hour from your own front door, and I intend to know who."

"Then know it," I said. "Investigate. Ask questions. I won't stop you from that. I'm only telling you that you don't own this house, and you don't own me, and the fact that you saved my life tonight doesn't change either of those things."

I expected anger. I had built myself, over a whole first life, on the assumption that powerful men did not care to be told no by women they had decided to protect, that refusal of any kind would be met with the same cold withdrawal I had learned to expect from every room I had ever stood in uninvited. Instead something in his face eased, very slightly, into an expression I did not have a name for.

"No," he agreed slowly. "It doesn't."

"You're not going to argue?"

"Should I?"

"Most men in your position would."

"I'm not most men." A pause, and the faintest, wry edge crept into his voice, cutting through the night's lingering tension. "Though I understand you may need convincing of that, given the position I apparently occupied in whatever life you keep almost mentioning and then refusing to explain."

I went very still.

He held my gaze, steady, patient, entirely too observant, and I understood that he had been turning it over for days — the strange half-admissions, the flinch that did not belong to an unbruised girl, the way I spoke sometimes as though quoting a memory rather than making a guess at what the future might hold.

"I'm not asking you to tell me tonight," Kael said, before I could find an answer. "You've been shot at. You're exhausted, and frightened, whether you'll admit it or not, and this isn't the moment." He stepped back, putting proper distance between us, and something about the deliberate courtesy of it felt, absurdly, like its own kind of gift, a restraint I had not expected from a man who had just killed to keep me breathing. "But I am asking. Eventually. When you're ready."

"And if I'm never ready?"

"Then I'll ask again," he said simply, "until you are."

He left before I could find any answer to that at all, and I stood alone on my own front step for a long time, watching his shape recede into the dark toward wherever he had left his horse, and thought, with a helplessness I resented and could not entirely suppress, that this was precisely how it had begun to happen the first time too — not with a declaration, not with a single dramatic moment, but with a man who kept, quietly and without being asked, choosing to stay.

I went inside once his shape had finally vanished past the gate, my legs unsteady beneath me now that the adrenaline of the evening had nowhere left to go. The house was dark and silent, my father and Seraphine long since retired, and I climbed the stairs alone with my heart still racing from everything the night had handed me — the arrow, the wolf, the blood on his hands that was not his own, and beneath all of it, quieter but no less insistent, the unsettling warmth of a man who had looked at me as though I were a puzzle worth solving rather than a burden to be managed.

I did not know, lying awake long after, whether that warmth frightened me more than the arrow had.