Chapter 5 — The Frown

"Out," he said. "All of you."

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The glass corridor emptied in eleven seconds — aides, guards, the men murmuring into the air — gone like water down a drain. Then Rowan, with one unreadable look at his king, stepped out too and pulled the door soundless behind him.

The glass held the whole city beneath us and gave none of it back as sound. I had never been anywhere so high, or so quiet. And it struck me, absurdly, that this was the second room of his I'd ever stood in — and both had been at the top of towers, the world reduced to lights too far down to matter. As if the man couldn't bear to stand on the same level as the thing he ruled.

Neither of us said the names we'd refused each other five years ago. Though I had his now, folded small in a box at the bottom of a kitchen drawer. Kael. I'd been pressing it like a bruise since the lobby.

Strange, to finally hold a man's name and have nowhere to put it. For five years it had been the most dangerous word I owned. Now he stood three feet away, and the word was useless. You cannot wield a name against a man who already knows it's his.

"You disappeared," he said. Each word set down like a weight. "By dawn. No name. I had the city searched. Do you understand what it costs to have this city searched?" His jaw worked. "I told myself it was a kindness to stop looking."

"I didn't come here for you." My voice held. I made it hold. "I didn't even know it was your building until a week ago. I'd have walked past this place forever if I'd had any other door."

"Then why—"

That was when my bag slipped off my shoulder.

It wasn't grand. It wasn't a choice. The strap just gave, the way cheap things do at the worst possible moment, and the contents spilled across the white floor between us — keys, wallet, a crumpled appointment slip, and a photograph that landed face-up and slid to a stop against the toe of his handmade shoe.

He looked down.

A four-year-old boy looked back up at him. Black hair. Silver-gray eyes. And a low, serious frown — the exact frown the man standing over it had been wearing one second ago.

I watched it happen. I watched the most controlled creature alive lose all of his control at once, for the first and only time I would ever see it.

He went down on one knee — not to me, to the photo — and picked it up with a hand that wasn't steady. And I saw him do the arithmetic. Five years. The night with no names. The frown that was his frown. The eyes that were not his and not mine but ours. I watched the number assemble itself behind his eyes and become a child.

I'd braced for fury. For denial. For the cold arithmetic of a powerful man working out how fast he could make an inconvenience disappear.

I had not braced for this — the most controlled creature alive, down on one knee on his own glass floor, holding a photograph like the only warm thing in a cold building. I had not let myself imagine he might want it.

"How old," he said. It wasn't a question. His voice had gone somewhere I'd never heard a voice go.

"He's four. His blood begins to turn in nine days, and it will tear him apart — he won't live to be five unless it's stopped. That's why I'm here. Your doctors are the only ones on earth who can—"

"What is his name."

"Luca."

Kael closed his eyes. When he opened them, the gold was burning molten around the iris, and the glass walls hummed faintly with whatever was moving through him, and I understood that I had just handed an unimaginably powerful man the one thing in the world that could unmake him.

I had spent five years deciding I would never need anyone again. I'd built my whole self around the certainty that needing someone was the same as the moment a man stood up in a white coat and severed me in front of the world.

So when he rose and turned to me with our son's photograph held against his chest like a wound, it felt — for one bracing second — like the second time in a week I was being thrown away.

And then I understood I had the shape of it wrong.

Damian had thrown me out of a life I'd never been allowed to want. This man was trying, clumsily, with a king's whole brutal vocabulary of ownership, to pull me into one. They are not the same wound. It would take me a long time, and a great deal of damage, to learn how very much not the same they are.

This time, I wasn't being discarded.

This time, I was being kept.

"You will not take him anywhere," the Lycan King said, very quietly. "You will not run again. He is mine — which makes him the only royal heir alive — which means there are people in this very house who will kill him the moment they learn he breathes. Unless he is legitimate. Unless he is protected by the crown. Unless his mother is my wife."

The floor dropped out of the world. The way it had once before, in another tower, in another life, when a different man used a different sentence to decide what I was worth.

"There's a treatment," he went on — relentless, gentle, terrible. "It exists. The full resources of my house, the research, the ritual, the protection. All of it. But the crown does not spend itself on a bastard it cannot claim. So I'll say this once, and then I need your answer."

He looked at me with our child in his hand.

"Marry me. Or watch our son die."