Chapter 7: The Room Beside His

Seraphine’s POV

The room they put me in had a narrow bed, a washbasin, and a window that looked out over the training yard I used to run laps around before dawn, back when my legs belonged to me and my lungs didn’t ache just from standing still.

One door down from his.

I knew that the second the guard shut me inside, because I knew this hallway. I knew the crooked floorboard by the linen closet, the water stain shaped like a leaf near the ceiling, and the exact number of steps between this door and the one that used to be ours.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands flat against my knees until they stopped shaking.

This was my house, my hallway, my floorboard, and yet I was locked in a spare room like a stranger because, to everyone who mattered, I was one.

Heavy footsteps passed outside, unhurried in a way that used to mean he was coming to find me and had nowhere else to be. I held my breath until they faded past my door without stopping.

I got up and walked the length of the room twice, touching the wall, the window frame, and the corner of the washbasin as though I could make sense of things by reminding myself they were real, but that didn’t help.

My reflection in the dark window looked back at me with someone else’s face, and I still hadn’t grown used to it, not after everything.

A soft knock came, three quiet raps. I opened the door to find a woman about my age, her golden hair pulled back, a healer’s satchel over one shoulder.

“I’m to check you’re unharmed,” she said. “Alpha’s orders.”

I stepped back to let her in, and she moved past me as though she knew the hallway well. She probably did. I didn’t recognize her, which meant she’d come after everything changed.

She checked my pulse and my eyes, then asked the usual questions. I answered in Elowen’s soft voice, the one I had practiced for so long that it came naturally now. When she finished, she packed her satchel without hurrying and paused at the door.

“You’ll want to keep your voice down at night,” she said, not quite looking at me. “These walls carry more than people think.”

Then she was gone, and I stood there thinking about her words, wondering whether they were a warning, a threat, or nothing at all.

I did not have long to wonder. The door opened again without a knock, and Lysandra walked in as though the room belonged to her. In truth, it did, and the thought made my stomach tighten.

She looked older than I remembered, with sharper lines around her eyes. She moved slowly around me, studying me as though she were trying to decide what I was.

“You have a strange way of arriving,” she said. “Uninvited, unannounced, straight into his good graces on your first night.”

“I didn’t ask for his graces.”

“No.” Her mouth curved. “You never had to ask for anything, did you? Things just seemed to fall into your lap.”

My skin prickled at that. There was something wrong with the way she said it, something too specific and too personal for a stranger speaking to a witch she supposedly had never met.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course you don’t.” She stopped in front of the window, her back to me, looking out at the yard the same way I had been looking at it minutes before. “Rhydian doesn’t make impulsive decisions. Not since…” She cut herself off, and even from behind I could see her shoulders tighten.

“Since what?”

She turned around, and for one unguarded second, something beneath the polish showed through. It looked almost like grief before she smoothed it away again.

“Since he lost the only thing that ever mattered to him,” she said. “So when he decides overnight that a strange witch deserves his personal protection, I find myself very curious about what she has that the rest of us don’t.”

She stepped closer, close enough that I could smell rosewater and, beneath it, something colder that did not belong on skin.

“Careful, little witch. Whatever hold you think you have on him will not last. Nothing here does.”

She turned to leave, and as she reached for the door, her sleeve rode up, just for a moment, long enough for me to see it. A thin, pale scar circled her wrist, half-healed, in the exact shape of the binding I remembered from the ceremony that killed me.

She caught me looking and pulled her sleeve down quickly.

“Sleep well,” she said, and shut the door behind her, leaving me standing in the middle of the room, staring at the space where her wrist had been.