Chapter 19 — The Alpha's Suspicion

Kael found me three days later in the old glasshouse, exactly where he had found me the first time, though this time I had gone there on purpose, needing the quiet and the moon-lily scent to think in.

"Dressen's gone north," he said, without greeting, closing the door behind him against the cold. "Your father's men lost his trail two days ago."

"You've had him followed."

"I've had him watched since the night of the attack. I told you I'd find out who sent those men." He crossed the glasshouse to stand near the old tarnished mirror, angling his shoulder away from it out of the same old habit I had noticed the first time. "I didn't expect the trail to run through your own household guard."

"Neither did I."

"You knew, before your father told you." It was not a question. "You went to him already suspecting something was wrong with the attack. Not who did it. Something about the shape of it."

I said nothing, and my silence was, I realized too late, its own kind of answer.

"You've been doing this since the first night I met you," Kael said, quiet and level, though something taut ran beneath the calm of it, a tension that had clearly been building for weeks rather than days. "Small things. The way you flinch and then correct yourself. The way you speak, sometimes, as though quoting an event that hasn't happened yet and then catching yourself before you finish the sentence. The stable boy who never fell from a horse he was never allowed to ride again, after you warned him off it a full three weeks before any accident occurred to anyone else." His gray eyes held mine, sharp now, entirely focused. "I asked the head groom. He remembered you telling the boy to wait a month, precisely a month, as though you already knew how long the danger would last."

My mouth went dry. I had not thought anyone would trace that thread so carefully, over so many weeks, back to its root, patient enough to gather fragments I had assumed would scatter unnoticed.

"You've been watching me," I said.

"Since the glasshouse," Kael admitted, without apology. "I don't ordinarily concern myself so closely with the affairs of a minor house. I've made an exception in your case, and I no longer fully understand why, which unsettles me more than I care to admit." A pause, and something in his voice, when it came again, had gone rougher, more uncertain than I had ever heard from him. "I keep waking with half a memory I can't place. A room. Snow. Your voice, saying something I can't quite hear." His jaw worked, visibly fighting whatever instinct told him to dismiss the admission as nothing. "I told myself it was nothing. I'm no longer certain I believe that."

The glasshouse seemed suddenly very small, and very cold, despite the warmth of the moon-lilies. I thought of the knife, and the snow, and his voice in that other life saying she was never my mate, and the terrible, dislocating vertigo of hearing him describe fragments of the very death I had already survived once, filtering up through him like light through water, distorted and half-formed but undeniably, impossibly there, as though some part of him had carried the memory across the same broken thread I had.

"Kael," I said, and stopped, because I did not know, even now, how to finish that sentence honestly without handing him a weapon I could not take back, a truth that might change everything between us before either of us was ready for what that change would cost.

"Tell me," he said. "Whatever it is. I would rather know a terrible truth than keep circling a comfortable lie."

I opened my mouth. I do not know, even now, what I would have said, because at that exact moment the glasshouse door opened without a knock, and Corvin Hale stood in the frame, his weathered face grim in a way that stopped whatever words I had been gathering before they could reach the air.

"Alpha," Corvin said. "You need to come. Now."

"What is it?"

Corvin's eyes flicked, briefly, to me, and something in the look made my stomach turn cold before he even spoke, a dread that arrived before the words did, as though my body already understood what was coming.

"We found Dressen," he said. "Two miles past the northern border. He's dead. And Alpha—" his voice dropped, "—he's been dead for at least a week. Since before he ever left Vale territory."

The words landed in the small glasshouse like a stone dropped into still water, rippling outward through everything I had believed true only moments before. I felt the blood drain from my face, my mind racing backward through every detail of my father's account — the two hours behind a closed study door, the tears, the trembling hands, the quiet departure under cover of darkness that had seemed, at the time, like simple shame rather than something far more carefully staged.

"That's not possible," I heard myself say, though some cold, clear-eyed part of me already understood that it was entirely possible, that it was in fact the only explanation that fit every strange detail I had been too relieved to question.

Kael's hand found my shoulder, steadying rather than restraining, and I realized only then how badly I had begun to sway on my feet. "Breathe," he said, low enough that Corvin, still standing grim in the doorway, would not easily hear it. "Whatever this means, we'll untangle it together. But I need you breathing first."

I breathed. It took more effort than it should have, each inhale catching somewhere in my throat before I managed to force it loose, and when I finally steadied myself enough to speak again, my voice came out rougher than I intended.

"Take me to him," I said. "Corvin. Please. I need to see this for myself before I can believe any of it."