Chapter 15

FREYA

When I woke fully, the first thing I registered was the ceiling. Wood beams, dark and old, crossing overhead in a pattern nothing like the pale stone arches of the Ashford house. It took me a full minute of staring at them to remember why that mattered, and then the whole night came crashing back at once. My father’s hand across my face. The walk out of that hall with nobody following. Damien’s voice telling me there was no back to go to.

I sat up too fast and regretted it immediately, my head swimming, my bandaged feet aching under a blanket that wasn’t mine, in a room that wasn’t mine, in a bed I had no memory of being placed in.

“Careful.” The voice came from a chair near the window, and I turned to find Alpha Kendrick Hamilton sitting there like he’d been waiting for exactly this moment, one leg crossed over the other, watching me with the same unreadable expression he’d worn the night before. Or whenever it was. I’d lost track of how much time had passed since the marker stones.

“Where am I,” I said, though I already knew, the question just a way of buying a few seconds before I had to deal with what came next.

“My house. My territory.” He said it plainly, no threat in his voice, which somehow made it more unsettling than if there had been one. “My son found you unconscious past your family’s border and decided, against every piece of advice I would have given him, to bring you here instead of leaving you for your own pack to find in the morning.”

“I don’t have a pack anymore.”

“So I’ve heard.” Something in the way he said it told me the news had traveled faster and further than I wanted to think about. Nine packs had watched my father strip my title from me in front of the whole council. By now it was probably a story being retold in kitchens and border patrols across half the region.

I pulled the blanket tighter around myself, suddenly aware of how exposed I felt, still in the ruined remains of the gown from the night before, sitting in enemy territory with the most feared Alpha in the region studying me like I was a puzzle he intended to solve before breakfast.

“Why am I still here,” I asked. “You could have sent me anywhere. You could have had me carried straight back to the border and left there.”

“I could have.” He didn’t elaborate, just let the words sit there in the space between us, and I understood he wasn’t going to give me an easy answer to that one. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

“Tell me what happened at Ashford last night,” he said.

“No.”

His eyebrows rose slightly, the first real reaction I’d gotten out of him since I’d opened my eyes. “No?”

“You’re the enemy,” I said, and even as it left my mouth it sounded thinner than I meant it to, less certain than the story I’d grown up believing without question. Twenty-three years of my father’s warnings, and here I was in this man’s house wearing his blankets, and the word enemy didn’t sit in my mouth the way it used to. “Whatever you want with that information, I don’t think it’s out of concern for how my night went.”

Something flickered across his face, and for a second I thought I’d made him angry, thought I’d overstepped in a house where I had no standing left to overstep from. Instead, he almost smiled, just at the corner of his mouth, gone as quickly as it came.

“Tell me about Lucian Aurelius,” he said instead, watching my face carefully when he said the name, like he was measuring something in how I reacted to it.

I went very still. “Why.”

“Humor me.”

“No.”

“Your sister, then.”

“She’s not my sister,” I said, sharper than I meant to, and then hated myself a little for how fast the correction came, like some part of me was still trying to win an argument that had already ended the night before in front of three hundred witnesses who’d already made up their minds about who I was.

Kendrick studied me for a long moment after that, and I braced myself for whatever came next, some version of my father’s fury, some demand delivered with the full weight of an Alpha order behind it, the kind that had pinned my mother back into her chair the night before whether she wanted to sit or not. It didn’t come. Instead he sat back in the chair, something almost thoughtful settling over the hard lines of his face.

“You understand I could make you answer,” he said. “I have every right, sitting in my own territory, speaking to someone who has no pack protecting her anymore. You have no bond to fall back on. No family standing behind you, no Alpha father who’d come looking if I decided to press the issue. If I wanted the truth out of you this morning, there would be very little you could do to stop me.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

“Because you said no,” he said, “and you said it like someone who’s spent her whole life having that answer taken away from her anyway. I find that more interesting than whatever gossip you’d hand me if I forced it out of you.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. I’d expected cruelty from Hamilton territory, had braced for it the entire walk from the border markers even half-conscious, had spent years absorbing every story my father ever told about this family and what they were capable of. Instead I was sitting in a warm room being told my refusal was being respected, by the very man those stories had built into a monster.

“What happens to me now,” I said, because it was the only question that actually mattered, the only one I hadn’t let myself ask since the moment I collapsed on Ashford land with my feet bleeding and my chest still raw from where the bond had torn loose.

Kendrick rose from the chair, unhurried, and walked toward the door instead of answering right away, like he wanted to leave the words behind him on his way out rather than watch my face while he said them.

“There’s a healer coming by this afternoon to look at your feet properly,” he said. “Damien did what he could last night, but he’s not exactly trained for it, whatever else he might tell you about himself.” A ghost of dry humor moved through that, gone as fast as it arrived. “After that, it’s up to you.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have right now.” He paused with his hand on the door, and for the first time since I’d woken, something almost gentle crossed his face, quickly masked but not quickly enough that I missed it entirely. “You can stay. For now. Until you decide otherwise, or I do. Nobody in this house will hurt you while you’re under my roof, whatever your father might have told you about what that means coming from a Hamilton.”

He left before I could respond, the door clicking shut behind him with a quiet, final sound.

I sat there in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a house that belonged to the family my father had taught me to fear my entire life, trying to understand why the offer felt less like a trap than anything anyone in my own pack had given me in the last twenty-four hours. I thought of my mother’s chair scraping back, her voice cut off mid-sentence by an order she couldn’t refuse. I thought of Lucian staring at the floor while my father’s hand connected with my face. I thought of three hundred people watching it happen and none of them moving.

Nobody here owed me anything. Nobody here had any reason to be kind to an Ashford, banished or not, given the history between the two territories. And yet a man I’d been taught to fear my whole life had just walked out of a room and left me safer than my own father had left me standing in that hall.

I pulled the blanket up over my knees and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling for a long time, waiting to feel something like relief, and finding instead only the strange, disorienting quiet of a girl who no longer knew which stories about her life were even true.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​