Chapter 5

It is a small sound, dry, almost wondering.

“You finally figured it out.”

Iris goes very still.

“Skin and bones. Dressed like a beggar. Wandering the kitchens at midmorning so anyone can pity you the long walk back to the family table.” He shakes his head, the corner of his mouth lifting in something that is not a smile. “I’ll give you this much, Iris - three years ago you wouldn’t have had the nerve. Black Rock taught you something after all.”

The trays in her hands feel weightless, and the air weighs everything. Heat blooms behind her eyes. She clenches her jaw against it, hard.

Her face stays blank. She asked for too much yesterday. She is not asking again.

“Move out of my way, Adrian.”

“Move out of your way.” He pushes off the wall, slow, and his bootheels thud on the corridor stone - once, twice - closing the distance between them by half. “That’s funny. That’s actually funny. Because the last time I saw you, Iris, you were standing in the dock at your sentencing, and you didn’t have a single word for me. Not one. Three years, and now you want me to step aside? After everything I -”

“Adrian.” Her voice is quiet, but something in it surprises her. A warning. “I’m carrying breakfast trays. Move.”

He stops a foot from her.

This close, she can see the silver pin at his collar. His beta’s mark - the same one her father had given his father. She had held it against the sun once when she was nine, and Adrian had laughed when she pinned it to her own collar and pretended to be Cedric. He’d told her she would be a hell of an Alpha when she grew up, and he would be her beta until she was old.

She drops her gaze to it for a heartbeat. Lifts it. Shows him nothing.

“Three years, Iris,” he says, low. “You haven’t even said you’re sorry.”

“For what?”

The word is out before she can stop it.

His expression goes dark and tight.

“For what.” He tastes it like he can’t believe she’s said it. “For what. Goddess, you’ve lost the plot.”

“I didn’t burn anything, Adrian.”

She hadn't meant to say it. She'd promised Cedric to keep silent. But the words come out flat, almost involuntary, and once they are out she cannot put them back.

“And your sister was -”

She stops. She hasn't let herself think about Elena since the trial. Could not. Some doors you do not open.

But Adrian’s eyes have changed.

“Don’t.” The single word, soft and dangerous. “Don’t you dare put my sister’s name in your mouth. Not after everything you have already done.”

She holds his gaze.

She'd never thought of him as someone who could frighten her. But the man in front of her is a stranger, vindicated, almost relieved to have her here at last so he could get what he was owed.

“Apologize, Iris.”

“I didn't do anything wrong.”

For a heartbeat she thinks he is going to hit her.

He doesn’t. He grabs her wrist.

The trays hit the stone with a clatter, silver bouncing, plates smashing, someone shouting somewhere about the noise. He shoulders her sideways through a doorway she hadn't noticed, and she stumbles into the deep, dark space of a windowless storeroom -

“Adrian — ”

“Stay there until you can find a kinder mouth.”

“Adrian — ”

“Stay there, Iris.”

The door slams.

The lock clicks.

The corridor light, the last visible inch of it, vanishes in the seam of the door, and the dark goes absolute, and -

She is back at Black Rock.

The dark of the reformation room. The cold of the silver cuffs. You couldn’t see your own hands. The guards waited in the dark with you sometimes, just to see if you would cry first.

Her throat closes.

She is on her hands and knees on the stone before her body has decided what to do. Her fingers find the seam of the door and claw at it. Her voice comes back a few seconds after that, and then she is screaming, all her air ripped out of her at once - Adrian, Adrian, please, the door, please, please, the door -

He is still standing on the other side. She can hear his shoes on the stone.

“You can stop the act,” he says, after a moment. Cold. Distant. “It used to work. It doesn’t anymore.”

“Adrian, please — I can’t — ”

“You can. You just don’t want to.”

His footsteps recede.

The corridor goes silent.

She has no idea how long she has been screaming when she registers there is no one to hear it.

She tries to breathe. The breath catches in her chest and shreds. The walls push toward her, closing in the same way they always did at Black Rock. She presses her cheek to the door, lies down with her mouth at the gap. Air. There has to be air.

The breathing won’t slow. She has been here a minute. She has been here an hour. She can’t tell.

Then -

A voice. Above her. Not Adrian.

“Stop. All of you, stop. What is that?”

The Queen.

“Open it.” Queen Elara says. Steel under satin. “Now.”

A scuffle of feet. Somebody trying to explain. The Queen, again, sharper:

“I said now.”

A bolt slides.

Light cracks the seam.

The door opens, and the corridor light spills in, and Iris’s body, which had been screaming, goes still. And the Queen extended her hand to her.

“Easy,” she says, very soft. “Look at me. Easy. You are out.”

Iris looks at her.

For one immeasurable second, something passes between them that Iris does not have language for. The Queen’s eyes widen for a fraction of a second.

Then it is gone.

Iris’s wolf stays silent. No answering thrum from inside her.

“Easy,” the Queen says again. “Up. Slowly. Come here.”

Iris reaches.

The Queen’s hand is dry and steady and warm. It closes around Iris’s wrist, careful where Adrian’s had been bruising, and Iris lets herself be lifted out of the dark. She is shaking too hard to stand straight. The Queen doesn’t seem to mind.

In the corridor, the Queen says nothing for a long moment. She studies Iris's face, head tilted, gaze travelling the line of cheek and brow and jaw, as if trying to place something she almost recognizes.

Then she lifts a hand without looking and says, low, to the nearer of her Betas:

"Take her to a guest suite. Healer. Tea, food. No one in or out without my say-so."

She watches Iris disappear up the staircase. Then turns to her second Beta.

"Find me Cedric Fenrir. Now."