Cassia | Cold Ground

Ashwood at night is a different creature to Blackridge, softer air, the smell of pine and river water, the distant sound of the copper-dark current moving through the valley below. Beautiful, if you're in the right frame of mind for it.

I'm not.

I walk three steps down the path from the door and stop and turn, because I can feel him behind me and I'm not interested in being followed into the dark without at least facing in his direction. Kade stops two feet away.

He looks… terrible, actually. Not in the way Theron meant this morning. Kade looks like a man who has been running on adrenaline and control and very little else, and has just reached the point where the adrenaline is still there but the control is fraying at the edges. His hair is wrong. His jacket isn't his riding one, it's the heavier one, the one he grabs when he leaves fast without thinking, which means he left fast without thinking.

He found out I was gone and he came, the thought does something I don't have a name for, which I immediately put away.

"How did you know where I was?" I ask.

"Marcus." A pause. "He wasn't going to tell me. I asked once and then I," he stops. Jaw working. "I didn't ask twice."

He didn't have to. I can imagine exactly how that conversation went. 

"I left a note."

"Back by nightfall." His voice is flat. "It's past nine."

"I got held up."

"In Theron's private dining room."

The words land with a particular weight. He's holding back all that he really wants to say, I can feel him holding it, but something underneath it that he hasn't reined in quite as successfully.

"We were going over legal precedent," I say evenly. "For the hearing."

Something moves across his face. "That's why you went."

"That's why I went."

He's quiet for a moment. I watch him process it, the specific recalibration of a man who came here expecting to be angry about one thing and has found out it's another thing and hasn't fully rerouted yet.

"You could have told me," he says.

"I needed someone who wasn't you." I hold his gaze. "I told you that. In your office. I go alone, I stand alone, they don't get to call it Blackridge politics." I pause. "Theron's council seat is independent. His testimony carries weight mine doesn't, weight yours can't. If he comes to the hearing and speaks to my wellness and my legal standing, that's something the council can't easily dismiss."

Kade is quiet as the night air moves between us, cold and unhurried.

"He agreed?" he says finally.

"He agreed."

Something in him is warring, this is the look of a man who has just had to acknowledge that something he didn't want to happen was also the right thing.

"Good," he says. The word comes out letting it be known that it cost him something.

"Yes," I agree. "It is."

A pause, the river sounds in the valley below fills the gap, somewhere in the Ashwood tree line a bird calls once and goes silent.

"He wanted you," Kade says.

I don't pretend not to understand. "Once."

"And now?"

I meet his eyes. "I handled it."

"Did he,"

"I handled it, Kade." My voice is firm. "Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen. I know how to take care of myself."

He holds my gaze for a long moment. I watch him believe me, it's visible, the decision to trust what I've said, and the fact that it's a decision and not a reflex tells me something about how much the last week has cost him that I haven't let myself fully see.

"I know," he says finally. "I know you do."

The path between us is narrow and the night is cold and he is standing close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him in the dark.

"Why did you really come?" I ask.

"Because," he says, slowly, like he's choosing each word individually, "you're in my territory one minute and then you're not, and you're in Theron's territory and he's," a pause, "He's not nothing, Cassia. He's not some pack soldier. He's an Alpha who has wanted you for years and he has warmth and space and a stable pack that doesn't have a council summons hanging over it, and I,"

He stops, something is happening in his face that he isn't managing to prevent.

"And I couldn't sit in my office and wait," he says. "And I know I didn't have the right to come. I know this isn't," he stops again. His jaw tightens. "I know what I gave up. I know what I don't get to claim anymore. I'm not…I came because I couldn't not."

The words sit between us in the cold air.

I look at him. This man who made the worst decision of both our lives and apparently spent three hours arguing against it first. Who burned prophecy records in the council chambers before the ink on my exile papers was dry. Who stepped aside at his own gate and hated himself for it. Who put his fist through a sparring ring and stood in the wreckage and let me see it.

Who drove through the dark to someone else's territory because he couldn't sit still and wait.

I am not ready to forgive him.

I'm not close to ready.

But I am standing here in the Ashwood night, looking at a man who came when he probably shouldn't have and is telling me something true at a significant cost to his dignity, finding it harder than I'd expected to stay as far away as I'd planned.

"You should have stayed," I say. Quietly. "You have a pack. You have a hearing to prepare for. You have,"

"I know what I have."

"Kade."

"I know." He takes a breath. "I know. I'll go." He doesn't move. "Are you, are the twins alright?"

The question, out of nowhere, in that voice, does something it shouldn't.

"They're fine," I say. "Rhett has them."

Something crosses his face at Rhett's name, not the flare from the training yard, something quieter than that, almost resigned. 

"Good."

"They're fine," I say again. Softer this time.

He nods.

And then, because the night is cold and we've been standing still long enough and he did say he'd go, he takes a step back. Then another. Giving me the space back, the way he denied me the space in corridors and archives and hallways, the way the wolf in him refused it. Now he gives it deliberately.

"Cassia," he says, from the extra distance.

"Mm."

"The archives." He hesitates. "Did you find everything you needed?"

"Almost. I have two more sections to get through."

He nods. "Marcus will keep them open as long as you need."

"Thank you."

Another pause. The river below. The bird, silent in the trees.

"Don't do this again," he says. "Without telling me."

I look at him. "I can't promise that."

"I know." A breath. "I know you can't. I'm asking anyway."

I hold his gaze for a moment.

"I'll think about it," I say. Which is not a yes, and we both know it, but it's more than I was willing to give an hour ago and the look on his face tells me he knows that too.

He turns and walks back up the path toward where he's left his horse.

I watch him go.

The cold presses in where he was standing.

And I stand on Theron's path in the Ashwood night and breathe it in, and think about ten days and hearings and legal precedent and the particular quality of his voice when he said I couldn't not, and I let myself feel, for exactly thirty seconds, the full weight of how complicated this has become.

Then I walk back to Theron's gate to collect my own horse.

There's work to do.