Chapter 2— They Come Anyway

The blindfold smelled like pine resin and something older. Something with no name in any world she had lived in before tonight.

Sera counted seconds. Then minutes. Then she stopped counting because the numbers were not helping and what she needed right now was not comfort. She needed information. She needed to stay sharp and present and stop her hands from shaking in her lap.

She breathed through her nose. In. Out. Slow.

The vehicle moved fast. They had left the city within minutes, the stop-and-go of traffic gone, replaced by open road and speed and the kind of silence that meant distance. Real distance. The three men around her barely made a sound. Their breathing was too even, too controlled, measured in a way that raised the hair on her arms.

Whatever they were, they were not nervous.

That told her something.

She filed it away and kept breathing.

The vehicle stopped.

A door opened. Cold air hit her face and it was different from city cold. Cleaner. Heavier. She felt it at the back of her throat first, that charged quality the air gets before a storm, electrostatic and alive.

Hands closed around her arm. The grip was firm but impersonal. She was guided out and her feet found gravel and she stood still for a moment with her face tilted up, listening.

Wind through trees. A lot of trees. Dense and close.

No city sounds. No traffic. Nothing familiar.

The blindfold came off.

Sera blinked against the sudden darkness that was not as dark as it should have been. A full moon hung low and enormous, washing the world in silver. She stood in a wide courtyard of black stone.

And in front of her, rising against the moonlit sky like something dreamed by a mind that had given up on daylight, a castle.

Her brain rejected it briefly. Offer alternatives. Old estate. Gothic hotel. Film location. Anything that fit inside the world she had woken up in this morning.

None of them held.

Ancient. Vast. Its towers pressed into the clouds and amber light burned behind its windows and the stone of its walls had the particular darkness of something that had absorbed centuries of weather and come out harder for it.

Her stomach dropped straight through the gravel.

"Move." The blond man. His voice carried the casual certainty of someone who had never once needed to repeat himself.

She moved.

Inside, the cold of the courtyard gave way to warmth that pressed against her skin from every direction. The entrance hall was enormous. High ceiling disappearing into shadow. Stone floors worn smooth from use. Torches in iron brackets throwing amber light across walls hung with dark paintings she could not look at long enough to understand.

And eyes.

Everyone stopped when she entered. A slight pause in whatever they were doing, a collective awareness shifting toward her, and she felt it on the back of her neck like a hand not quite touching.

These were not ordinary people.

She walked through the hall with the blond man at her back and she kept her chin up and her pace even and her face showing nothing because showing nothing was the only armor she had left.

Up a staircase. Down a corridor that smelled of old wood and candle smoke and underneath both, something warm and animal that she could not name and could not stop noticing.

A door opened.

The room inside was not a cell. That was the first thing she registered and it unsettled her more than a cell would have. Wide. Stone walls hung with dark curtains. A bed that could sleep four. A fireplace is already burning. A window facing the night.

Comfortable.

Calculated.

She understood, standing in the doorway, that this was not kindness. Comfortable people were manageable people. She was being managed and whoever had decided this room was the right choice was considerably smarter than she had hoped.

The blond man stopped at the threshold. "Sleep. You'll be seen in the morning."

She turned to face him. "What's your name?"

A pause. Those amber eyes moved over her with a cool assessment. "Riven."

"Riven." She held his gaze. "Tell your Alpha I'm not afraid of him."

Something crossed his face. Gone before she could read it.

"I'll pass it along," he said.

The door closed.

Sera stood in the firelit room and did not move for a long time.

Then she crossed to the window and looked down at the courtyard and the iron gate and the forest beyond it, black and absolute, swallowing the moonlight at its edges.

She pressed her forehead to the cold glass.

Somewhere outside, deep in those trees, something began to howl.

Then another voice joined it. And another. Rising and overlapping until the sound filled the sky and moved through the glass and into her chest and pressed against something there that had no name.

She did not pull back from the window.

She stood in the dark and listened to the pack sing to the moon and told herself she was not afraid.

She told herself that until her legs stopped shaking enough to carry her to the bed.