Already knows

Kael's POV

"Show me the Ashvale file."

The night-steward did not ask why. He had been at his small desk at the end of the library corridor for twelve hours. He had not slept. He had been pretending not to listen to the silence under my study door for the last forty minutes, and now I was standing in front of him at two in the morning asking him for a file I had not asked for in nine years.

He climbed the wooden ladder. He brought the file down with both hands. He set it on the long oak table in front of me.

"Will there be anything else, sir."

"No. Leave me. Lock the door behind you."

"Yes, sir."

He left. The lock turned. The library went quiet around me in the way a building goes quiet at two in the morning when the only thing breathing in it is a man who has not slept in twenty hours and the wolf at the base of his ribs who has not spoken in three years and is now refusing to.

I sat down at the table.

Opened the file.

The Ashvale bloodline records went back three hundred years. I had read them before. I had read them at twenty-two, in the year I had claimed the throne and had been required by Council law to acquaint myself with every founder line still recognized on the continent. I had read them again at twenty-six, when Lyra had been pregnant for the first and only time, because I had been a man who wanted to know the names of every line my child would be standing beside.

I had not opened the file since.

I had not needed to.

I needed to now.

The daguerreotypes were in the back, in an inner envelope, sealed with the founder-line wax that no archivist on the continent had cracked in sixty years. I broke the seal with my thumbnail. Tipped its contents onto the oak.

Twelve photographs.

I turned them over one by one. Matched names to bloodline tree at the front of the file. I worked through them with the deliberate slowness of a man who had decided not to let himself reach the photograph he was actually looking for until he had earned the right.

The eighth photograph was the photograph.

Sixty-one years ago. A woman holding a child of perhaps two. She was looking down at the child, not at the camera. The light was on the side of her face. Her hair pulled back severely from the temples. Cheekbones that did not know what to do with themselves on film because the woman had not been photographed often enough.

I had seen those cheekbones twice in the last six hours.

Once in my throne room, on a girl who had refused to bow lower than her rank deserved.

Once in the silver hall, three feet from me across a bowl of mingled blood, while my wolf had taken his first breath in three years.

I set the photograph down.

I did not move for a long time.

The wolf at the base of my ribs moved instead.

She is the one. She is the one. Mine. The one.

"Quiet," I said aloud, in my own library, at two in the morning, to a wolf who had not spoken to me in three years and who I was now telling to be quiet.

He did not go quiet.

He was a wolf. He had been silent for three years. He had been silent through the worst of my grief. Through the cold. Through the year I had not been able to eat and through the year after that when I had stopped trying. He had been silent through every night I had stood at the window of my own study and tried to feel the air on my face and had not been able to.

He had not been silent in the silver hall.

He was not going to be silent now.

She is the one, he said again. Mine.

I crossed the room.

The cabinet in the far corner. The lower drawer. The key I had carried on a chain at my throat for nine years and had not put my hand on since I was twenty-six. I unlocked it. Took out a second file. Carried it back to the table. Set it down beside the bloodline file.

I did not open it for a long time.

The label on the front of it read, in my father's handwriting: ASHVALE. SEALED. DO NOT REOPEN.

He had written it the night he had ordered the massacre.

I had read this file once, the year I had claimed the throne. I had read it once and I had locked it back into the drawer and I had not opened it again. The Ashvales had been dead twenty-one years. The signature at the bottom of the order had been my own father's, and there had not been a thing in the world I could do with that piece of paper.

Now there was.

I opened the file.

The order was on the top page. Twenty-one years old. My father's signature at the bottom. The names of the dead in a neat clerk's hand. The Ashvale alpha. His wife. His beta. The household guard. The line, the writer had noted at the bottom of the kill list, was extinct.

The line had not been extinct.

The line had been buttoned into a blood-red dress in my Keep three hours ago. She had pressed her palm to mine over a silver bowl. The bell that had struck in her chest had been the same bell that had struck in mine.

The wolf signature I had felt the moment we had touched in the throne room had been wrong for an omega in a way that did not happen by accident.

The signature I had felt was the signature of a True Alpha.

She did not know it.

She had grown up an omega. She had been told she was an omega. She had walked into my throne room in a sweater her friend had packed for her, expecting to be received as an omega.

She did not know what she was.

If the Council knew what she was, the Council would take her from me inside a week.

There were four alphas on the continent who would invoke prior claim on a True Alpha heir of a recognized founder line. Two of them had been waiting for an Ashvale daughter to surface for forty years. The Council would not protect her. They would adjudicate. They would split her across the four claimants in some politically tolerable arrangement and they would call it law.

There would be nothing my throne could do about it.

My throne would have been one of the four claimants.

I would not be allowed to claim her twice.

I sat very still.

Mine, the wolf said again.

"Quiet."

Don't tell them.

"I am not going to tell them."

Good.

I stood up. Closed the bloodline file. Closed the massacre file. Locked the massacre file back into the lower drawer. Put the key back on the chain at my throat. Crossed the library to the door. Unlocked it. Stepped into the corridor.

The night-steward was at his desk, pretending he had not been listening.

"Sir."

"Get me Riven. I don't care what hour it is."

Riven came in fully dressed. He had not been asleep. He had pulled a coat on over the same clothes he had been wearing four hours ago. His face was composed. His face was always composed.

"Sir."

"Sit down."

He sat across from me. Did not speak. He had not learned how to speak first to me at three in the morning, and I expected he would not.

"How long do we tell the Council she's an omega."

He did not answer at once.

He had not been expecting that question. I watched him absorb the question, and what it meant, and the further thing it meant. Which was that I had read a file tonight I had not opened in nine years, and I had matched the daguerreotype, and I knew.

He was a clever man. He absorbed it in less than three seconds.

"Days, sir. Maybe a week. After that the Council will hear what the Voss pack is whispering about the girl who walked out of her own rejection on her own feet. The questions will start. After that, if she shifts, we have hours. If she shifts in front of a witness who is not a Draeven, we have minutes."

"How many alphas will move on the prior-claim provision."

"Four, sir."

"You have been thinking about this."

"Since the moment your pupils blew wide in the silver hall."

I looked at him.

He did not look away.

"For the next week she is an omega. For the next month if I can manage it. For longer if I can manage it. You will tell her staff she is an omega. You will tell her healer she is an omega. You will tell the Council, if they ask, that no True Alpha signature was identified at the binding."

"That would be a lie to the Council, sir."

"Yes."

"You have never lied to the Council."

"I have never had a reason to."

He held my eyes for a beat longer. Then he nodded.

"Yes, sir."

"And Riven."

"Sir."

"Move her out of the corner room at first light. East wing. Window. Books. A door that locks from the inside."

"Yes, sir."

"And tell her healer to take her hands gently. The cut on the right one is shallow but it is still open."

"Yes, sir."

He stood. He went to the door. He paused with his hand on the handle.

"Sir."

"Riven."

"She does not know any of this."

"No. She does not."

"When will you tell her."

"When she is strong enough to want to know it. Not before."

"...That may take her time."

"It may."

"And in the meantime."

"In the meantime she is the omega the Council thinks she is. And we keep her alive."

He nodded once. He left.

The door closed behind him.

I did not go to bed.

I went to the corridor outside her room.

I had told myself, on the way down the stairs, that I was going to check the guard. I had told myself, on the way across the lower wing, that I was going to make sure the corridor was lit. I had told myself, on the way past the bath house and the kitchens, that I was a king who walked his own halls at three in the morning when there was a stranger in them and that no one would question it.

I was telling myself a great many things tonight that I did not believe.

I stopped outside her door.

The guard at the end of the corridor saw me. Lowered his eyes. Did not move.

I stood there for a long time.

I could hear her breathing on the other side of the door. Not asleep. Awake. The kind of awake a person is when she has been sitting in the same position for two hours and has not allowed herself to lie down.

The wolf at the base of my ribs pressed forward against the inside of his own wall.

Go to her.

"No."

Go to her.

"Not tonight. Not at three in the morning. Not in a corner room I put her in to test her. Not before I have given her the window I owe her."

She is awake.

"I know she is awake."

She knows you are out here.

I held very still.

On the other side of the door, I heard her breath catch. Hold. Wait.

She knew.

She had heard me stop. She had heard the boards of the corridor settle when I had not gone past. She was on the other side of the door listening to me listen to her, and the wolf at the base of my ribs was saying go to her and I was saying no and she was holding her breath.

I lifted my hand to the door.

I lowered it.

I turned. I walked back down the corridor. The guard at the end did not look up.

I did not look back.

In my study, the candle on the desk had nearly burned out. I sat down in the chair. I picked up the brandy glass I had not drunk in three years.

I held it.

The cut on my palm was beside the glass. The dried blood on the inside of my fingers was beside the dried blood on the rim where my thumb had pressed against it earlier.

"Sleep well, Luna."

It was the only honest thing I had said in three months.

I drank.

For the first time in three years, I drank, and the brandy burned all the way down a throat that had not allowed itself to feel anything in a very long time, and the wolf at the base of my ribs settled, slowly, the way a wolf settles when he has finally found the place in the den he intended to lie down in.

Mine, he said again.

He did not say anything else for the rest of the night.

I sat in the chair with the empty glass in my hand and a Cole household ledger entry in front of me, and I did not move until the candle on the desk went out.

A wife in servant quarters who didn't know she was a queen.

A king who already did.

And a wolf in a chest silent for three years pressing forward like something had finally come home.