Chapter 6 — Why Do You Look at Me Like That?

"Who told you my name?"

My voice came out level. I was proud of that, distantly, the way you are proud of a candle that stays lit in a wind. Inside, everything had gone loud and white.

Kael did not answer immediately. He was frowning, very slightly, and it took me a moment to understand why the expression looked so wrong on him. It was not suspicion. It was confusion, the small, unsettled crease of a man reaching for something familiar and finding empty air.

"Someone must have mentioned it," he said at last.

"Who?"

"I don't—" He stopped. His jaw tightened. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. "I'm not certain."

He doesn't know where he got it.

I stared at him, and the tiniest, most dangerous seed of possibility pushed up through the frozen ground of everything I believed. I had died. I had woken three years earlier, alone in all the world with knowledge no one else could hold. That was the whole shape of my second life, the single fixed fact I had built my rules around.

But a man who said my name like that, without knowing why, was not a man who had lost nothing.

"Perhaps my father's steward said it at the gate," I offered, watching his face.

"Perhaps."

"He didn't."

Kael's eyes sharpened. "You seem very sure."

"I know my father's steward."

"And yet you weren't at the gate."

"I wasn't in the hall, either." I let the faintest edge slide into it. "It seems to have become a habit."

Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile, but the ghost of where one might once have lived. It vanished so quickly I wondered if I had imagined it.

"You're not what I expected," he said.

"What did you expect?"

He considered me. It was a long, unhurried look, without insolence, and it was infinitely worse than any insolent stare I had ever endured. It was the look of a man who took things apart to see how they worked.

"Someone quieter," he said.

"I am quiet."

"No." He shook his head, very slightly. "You're careful. That's different."

I had not expected to be seen. In the whole of my first life he had never once looked at me long enough to see anything, and I had built my armor for a man who would glance and forget. I had no armor for this.

"Why do you look at me like that?" Kael asked.

The question landed like a hand against my chest.

"Like what?"

"As though—" He stopped, and I watched him search for the word, watched a man who never chose his words carelessly discard three of them before settling. "As though you're already saying goodbye."

The moon-lilies breathed their scent into the cold air. Somewhere far behind us, faint through the glass, a burst of laughter rose and fell from the hall.

I could have lied. I could have told him he was mistaken, that I looked at everyone this way, that the light was strange. I was good at lies by now. I had spent an entire life learning how to smile while something inside me was bleeding.

But I was tired of lying to him. Even in this life, even standing here with three years of untouched history between us, I found I could not make the words come.

"You're a stranger, Alpha Draven," I said instead. "I'm sure I look at you the way anyone looks at a stranger."

"Then why are your hands shaking?"

I had not known they were. I looked down. They were pressed flat against my skirt, and beneath the fabric, the fingers trembled, small and traitorous. I curled them into fists.

"It's cold," I said.

"It's a glasshouse."

"Then it's a very cold glasshouse."

He did not smile. But there was a stillness in him now, an attention, and I understood that I had made a mistake. In my first life he had ignored me because I was easy to ignore. I was giving him every reason to do the opposite.

"If I have offended House Vale in some way," Kael said carefully, "I would prefer to know."

"You haven't."

"Not yet, you mean."

My breath caught.

I had not meant to say it. Or perhaps I had, in the quiet unlocked place where truth waits behind every carefully constructed sentence. Either way, it was out, and he had heard it, and the silence that followed felt as thin and dangerous as ice.

"Alpha."

The voice came from the glasshouse door. A broad, weathered man in Draven black stood there, half in shadow, one hand resting on the hilt of a plain sword. I recognized him immediately: Corvin Hale, Kael's Beta, who had once carried my rejection notice across the length of the northern territories with a face like a closed book.

His gaze flicked to me, took in my presence, and returned to Kael. "Your pardon. The hall is asking for you. And Lord Vane's carriage was sighted on the river road. He'll be half a day behind us, no more."

"Vane," Kael repeated. "Of course he is."

Lord Edric Vane.

The name struck a small, warm chord in my chest before I could stop it. He had been the one elder, in my first life, who had never turned from me. When the whole pack had made me a ghost, he had brought me tea in my mother's old glasshouse and told me gently that cruelty was not the same as strength. Order protects everyone, child, he had said. Even those who cannot see it yet. He had been the only voice of reason in the wreckage.

The only one who was kind.

I put that thought down carefully, where I could find it again.

"Give me a moment, Corvin," Kael said.

The Beta withdrew. Kael turned back to me. In the pale light of the moon-lilies, his face was unreadable again, the mask settling back into place like a door closing.

"Miss Vale," he said. "Thank you for your time."

"I didn't give you any."

"No." The corner of his mouth moved. "You didn't."

He turned toward the door. I let out a breath I had been holding for much too long, and my knees threatened to give.

Then he stopped, one hand on the doorframe, and looked back at me over his shoulder.

"Miss Vale," he said, in a voice I did not know. It was low and puzzled and very, very quiet. "Have we met before?"