Chapter Nine: He Is Coming

Rowan brought me the message himself. He held it out without having opened it the seal was intact, the wax pressed with the Vael crest, unbroken. It’s addressed to you,’ he said simply.

I took it. I turned it over. My name was not on it just the description. The silver-eyed female of Ashcroft blood. As if he did not yet know my name, or had chosen not to use it, or was making a point about what he knew and what he was choosing to withhold.

I broke the seal and read it. The handwriting was precise and controlled, every letter formed with the exactness of someone for whom imprecision was not a category they operated in. It said:

I am aware of your location. I am aware of what you carry. I will arrive at Ashdale in three days. I ask that you remain.

It was signed: J. Vael.

I read it twice. Then I folded it along its original crease and held it in both hands and said: ‘He knows about the baby.’

The room was very quiet. Sera, standing near the window, had gone very still. Rowan’s expression did not change but something shifted in the quality of his attention.

How, Sera said. Not a question. A problem she was already working through.

Someone in Ashcroft. Or someone watching the border when they walked me out. I thought about it. Wolves with pack insignia at Rowan’s border the day after my arrival. They had not come to retrieve me.

They had come to confirm I was here and report back. Not to my uncle. Above my uncle. ‘He has people watching the Ashcroft borders. He’s been watching since the ceremony.’

I looked at Rowan. ‘I understand if you want me to leave before he arrives. Whatever political obligation his arrival creates for you.

I don’t want you to leave, Rowan said. He is the Lycan King. If he arrives here and finds you have been —’

Harboring you. Something in his voice was almost amused. Harboring is an interesting word for offering a guest a bed and breakfast.

I stopped arguing. Not because I had run out of arguments but because I could see that they were not going to work, and I had learned a long time ago not to spend energy on immovable things.

I examined what I felt about the message in the hours that followed. Carefully and honestly, the way I tried to examine most things. I was not afraid of Jasper Vael.

That surprised me enough that I sat with it for a while to make sure I was reading it correctly. I had been afraid of him at the ceremony not of him exactly but of what he represented, of the rejection, of the pack’s reaction, of what it meant for the life I had been trying to build from very limited materials. The bond snapping had felt like having something torn out of me.

But I had survived that. I had survived the weeks that followed, the grey weeks of shame and whispers and my aunt’s quiet satisfaction. I had survived the Elder Council and the border and the rogues in the dark and two days of running on nothing but the determination not to stop.

I had found Sera waiting. I had found a warm room in a pack that was not mine. I had found, underneath everything, a name for what the silver light meant.

He had rejected me and I had kept going. He had called me an insult and I had found out I was something older and rarer than anything in his throne room. He had stepped back from the bond and I had built something from the wreckage of it and I was still here.

What I felt reading his precise handwriting was not fear. It was anger. Clean and specific and entirely useful. The anger of someone who has been told what she was worth by a man who did not know what she was, and who now knows exactly what she is, and who is ready to let him see the difference.

Three days. Let him come.

Rowan found me outside that evening. I had taken to sitting on the low wall at the eastern edge of the pack house grounds where the tree line started, partly because the air was good and partly because the moonlight reached that spot at a particular angle that made the warmth under my skin constant and steady. I had stopped hiding it from myself. It was easier to just let it be there.

He sat beside me without asking, which I had started to understand was simply how he moved through the world. He did not require permission to be present. He simply was, and he was careful about the space he took up, and those two things together were rarer than they should be.

We were quiet for a while. The night was cold and the trees were dark and somewhere in the forest something moved that was one of his border wolves doing their rounds.

‘Did you read it?’ I said eventually. ‘Before you gave it to me. No,’ he said. ‘It was addressed to you.’

I looked at him. The firelight from the pack house windows reached us just enough that I could see his face in profile the strong line of it, the particular quality of his stillness that was not absence but presence. He was not a man who needed noise to fill a silence.

I had had very few people in my life who understood that what was mine was mine. Who looked at a sealed letter addressed to me and understood that sealed meant sealed, regardless of who delivered it and regardless of what it might contain.

I did not say any of that. I just held it.

‘He’s coming to claim her,’ Sera had said earlier, in the quiet of the room we now shared. ‘Or to confirm she’s not a threat. Or to make her disappear more permanently.’ She had looked at me. ‘Which one do you think it is?’

I had thought about it seriously. ‘The first one,’ I said. ‘He rejected the bond publicly. If he wanted me gone, he could have arranged it quietly without the letter. The letter is a choice. He is choosing to come himself.’

Sera had looked at me with the expression she reserved for moments when I said something she thought was both correct and going to be expensive.

Sitting beside Rowan on the wall in the dark, three days away from whatever was coming, I thought about that expression. About what it might cost to be the thing the Lycan King had rejected and was now coming back to claim. About what it meant to have an answer ready for him that was not what he expected.

I was not the curse-born Omega who had stood in the ceremonial hall and felt the bond snap. I was not the woman who had walked to the border in the dark with nothing but the clothes on her body and seventeen copper pieces in her pocket.

I was the moon born Healer. I was carrying something he knew about and did not yet understand. I was sitting on a wall in a borrowed pack’s territory with the moon warm on my skin and a man beside me who had given me his word without requiring anything in return.

Three days. I was ready.