Chapter 5

ROMAN 

I never usually bothered with the prisoners the traders brought to settle debts. I let Gideon handle the sorting, the counting, all of it. Faces and names always blurred together in my mind after a while, and most of them meant nothing to me beyond a number in a file somewhere.

But something made me walk the line myself that night. I concluded it was just because the last shipment had come in short, and I wanted to see for myself what these traders thought they could get away with. That was what I believed until the wind shifted and a scent hit me like a fist straight to the gut.

My wolf surged awake so violently that I nearly stumbled. I hadn’t felt him react like that in years.

Gideon noticed. "What is it?" he said, coming to stand beside me.

I didn't answer him. I couldn't have explained it even if I tried. It wasn't a scent I recognized exactly, but something about it pulled at me anyway, so sharp and insistent like my whole body had decided something my mind hadn't.

"Roman," Gideon said again, his voice slower this time. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing's wrong," I said, already moving down the line of prisoners, scanning faces I didn't care about until I found the one my body seemed to already know.

She was near the back, wrapped in a blanket that wasn't doing much of anything against the cold, barely conscious, her head tipped forward like she didn't have the strength to hold it up anymore. 

She had dark brown hair, and pale skin that looked even paler from whatever she'd been through. I didn't know her name yet. I didn't know a single thing about her. I didn’t know why I couldn’t look away from her.

I only knew one thing. I wasn't putting her in a cell with the rest of the prisoners.

"Roman," Gideon said, his tone making me know he thought I was about to do something he didn't fully understand. "What are you doing?"

"She won’t be going into the cells," I said, pointing at her.

"The traders logged her the same as everyone else—"

"I don't care what they logged." I crouched down in front of her, and up close I noticed something the traders had clearly missed, something that made my heart clench. She was pregnant.

She was barely showing, and it was so easy to miss if you didn’t look closely. But I'd seen enough of that particular kind of exhaustion on many faces to know what was right in front of me.

"She’s going straight to the palace," I said. "Get the head doctor now."

Gideon didn't argue. He just gave me a long look that said he'd be asking questions later, and went to get the doctor without another word. 

Because I’d never done anything like this before, a couple of my men exchanged shocked glances behind my back like they thought I couldn't see them. I ignored it. I never explained myself to my men and I wasn't about to start over some half-conscious woman I'd never even met before today.

She stirred a little when I lifted her, murmuring something I couldn't make out, her whole body shaking because of the cold even wrapped in that useless blanket. I carried her myself the whole way back, which was something I’d probably regret later.

By the time we got to the palace, the doctor was already waiting. I stood in the doorway of one of the guest rooms while she worked, watching from a distance, saying nothing because I didn't have the first idea what I would even say.

She woke up sometime after that, in clean sheets and a warm room, with a doctor gently checking on her instead of a guard standing over her with a weapon. I took in her expression when she realized where she was, watching the confusion, then disbelief, spread across her face.

Of course, none of it matched whatever stories she'd definitely grown up hearing about me. Good. Let her be confused. Being confused was better than being terrified.

I kept my distance over the following days, but more than once, I caught myself standing in the doorway of her room just watching her sleep, telling myself I was only checking on her condition, nothing more. 

Something about her blood nagged at me, but I couldn’t get to the bottom of it no matter how hard I tried. Her wolf wasn't ordinary either, and I could tell that much even with how weak she was. 

"You keep doing that," Gideon said one evening, catching me in the hallway outside her room again. "Standing there like a man who's lost."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." He leaned against the wall, arms crossed, smirking. "You do know the entire North thinks you don't have a heart left to lose. Might want to keep it that way, standing out here mooning over an injured girl you dragged home yourself."

"I didn't drag her anywhere. I saved her life."

"Uh-huh." He didn't look convinced, and honestly, neither was I.

When the doctor finally showed me the full extent of her injuries, one thought settled into me like ice water had been poured down my spine.

This hadn't been an accident.

Someone had wanted her gone.

I stood there a long time after the doctor left, looking at a woman I'd known for less than a week—someone whose name I'd only just learned—feeling something I hadn't felt in years. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t curiosity. It was something colder. 

Purpose.

I didn't believe in fate. I'd seen too much and done too much to believe the universe cared enough about any of us. But standing in that doorway, watching her chest rise and fall under the blankets, I felt something shift in me.

Whoever had done this to her, whoever had left her broken, bleeding, and shipped north like cargo, was going to have to answer to me eventually. That much I already knew even though she didn't know it yet.

I stepped closer to the bed.

Aurora shifted beneath the blankets, her face tightening slightly as though she were caught in a bad dream. Then her eyes opened.

For the first time, she looked directly at me, and my whole body went still.

Her eyes widened, and I watched the confusion in her face slowly turn into something else.

Recognition.

But that was impossible. She had never seen me before. At least, she shouldn’t have.

“What…” Her voice sounded rough and scratchy. “What’s your name?”

“Roman.”

Her eyes stayed on mine for another second before exhaustion finally pulled them shut again. I waited until I was sure she was asleep before turning toward the door.

“Roman?”

I stopped in my tracks. Gideon stood there, his expression unusually serious.

“What?”

“The doctor wants to speak with you.”

“About her?”

He nodded.

I followed him down the hallway, but we hadn’t even gone ten steps when my wolf suddenly slammed against my ribs. I stopped, his presence so strong it nearly knocked the air from my lungs.

I turned back toward Aurora’s room.

What the hell?

I’d spent years forcing my wolf into silence. Years without a reaction like this. Yet one wounded woman had somehow awakened something inside him that I didn’t understand.

Then Gideon spoke again. “There’s one more thing. We checked the records the traders gave us.”

“And?”

His expression hardened. “Her name wasn’t on their original list.”

My blood ran cold instantly. “What are you saying?”

Gideon looked toward Aurora’s room. “Someone added her name after the shipment was already arranged.”

I stared at the closed door, realizing that someone had deliberately sent Aurora to me.

And suddenly, I wasn’t sure whether she had been brought here to settle a debt…

Or because someone knew exactly what would happen when I found her.

But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Why would anyone go through the trouble of making sure one specific woman ended up in Ravenwood?

Why send her to me?

Just then, my wolf stirred again.

Suddenly, a thought I didn’t want to entertain entered my mind.

What if Aurora hadn’t been sent here because of a debt at all?

What if I was the reason she was here?