Chapter 19

FREYA

I didn’t leave my room for the rest of that day. I told Marta I was tired when she came to check on my feet, which wasn’t entirely a lie, and I told myself I wasn’t hiding, which was.

By evening, hunger finally won out over pride, and I made my way down to the kitchen hoping to avoid running into anyone who might ask how I was doing. I found Damien instead, sitting at the long wooden table with a bowl of something that smelled better than it looked, and he glanced up when I came in with an expression that told me he already knew more than I wanted him to.

“You look like someone ran you over,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I meant it as a compliment. You’re still standing, which is more than most people manage after a conversation with my brother.” He nudged the empty chair across from him with his foot. “Sit. Eat something. You’ve been avoiding the kitchen since yesterday and I refuse to believe that’s a coincidence.”

I sat, mostly because I didn’t have the energy left to argue, and let him slide a bowl toward me without asking whether I wanted it.

“He told you,” I said.

“He didn’t have to. I heard about it from three different people before lunch, and none of their versions matched, which usually means the truth is somewhere worse than all of them combined.” He studied me for a moment, something more careful in his expression than the easy teasing from before. “You don’t have to tell me what he said. I can guess it wasn’t kind.”

“He said he should have left me where he found me.”

Damien’s jaw tightened, just slightly, the first real flash of anger I’d seen from him since he’d stood in that courtyard defending me against Rowan. “That doesn’t sound like something he actually believes.”

“It sounded pretty convincing coming out of his mouth.”

“My brother has a talent for sounding convincing about things that aren’t true,” Damien said. “It’s practically a family trait. Comes from growing up with a father who taught us that showing what you actually feel is the same as handing someone a weapon to use against you.” He pushed his bowl aside, leaning forward slightly. “Can I tell you something, and you don’t ever tell it to him, because he’d never forgive me for it?”

I nodded, curious despite myself.

“He didn’t leave your side,” Damien said. “The whole first night. I checked on you twice, once right after Marta finished with your feet and once a few hours later, and both times he was sitting in that chair by the window, not sleeping, not doing anything except watching you breathe like he thought you might stop if he looked away.” He said it plainly, without any of his usual humor, like he wanted to make sure I understood he wasn’t exaggerating for effect. “My father found him there the second time. Told him to go to bed. He didn’t move.”

I stared at him, my chest twisting at the image, the two versions of Dante refusing to line up no matter how I tried to fit them together. The man who’d sat by my bed all night without sleeping. The man who’d told me two days later that he wished he’d never bothered.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“No,” Damien agreed. “It doesn’t. Welcome to a lifetime of trying to understand my brother.” He said it lightly, but there was something underneath it, some old exhaustion that told me this wasn’t the first time he’d watched Dante contradict himself into something unrecognizable. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he meant what he said to you. I think he meant something else entirely and didn’t know how to say it, so he grabbed the cruelest version instead because being cruel is easier for him than being honest.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

“I’m not making one for him. I’m just telling you what I saw, because I think you deserve to know it even if he’d never admit it himself.” He picked his bowl back up, some of the lightness returning to his voice, like he’d decided I’d had enough weight dropped on me for one evening. “Eat. You look like you’re about to fall over, and I don’t feel like carrying anyone else across a border tonight.”

I managed something close to a laugh at that, small and surprised, and ate in silence for a while, turning what he’d told me over and over without finding any way to make the two pieces fit.

Later that night, unable to sleep, I found myself standing at the window of my room, looking out over the dark shape of the training yard below. The house had gone quiet hours ago, most of the pack long since retired for the night, and I told myself I was just getting air, just needing a few minutes away from the walls that had started to feel close again.

That was when I saw him.

Dante stood near the tree line at the edge of the yard, alone, still, looking up toward the house in a way that made my breath catch somewhere in my throat. He couldn’t have known I was watching, not from this distance, not in the dark, and yet something in the stillness of him told me he’d been standing there for a while, exactly like Damien had described him sitting at my bedside the first night, watching without moving, without explaining himself to anyone.

For a long moment neither of us moved, though I doubted he even knew I was there at all. I watched him from behind the glass, some part of me aching at the sight of him standing alone in the dark like that, and I thought about what he’d said in the training yard, the wall he’d put up the second I got too close to whatever he was actually hiding behind it.

I thought about Damien’s version of him too, the one who hadn’t left my side, who’d been ordered to bed and refused to go.

Neither version explained the other. I didn’t understand him, and some tired, worn-down part of me wondered whether if I ever would, whether the man standing in the dark below my window was even capable of being understood by someone he’d apparently decided from the start he regretted saving.

I stayed at the window until he finally turned and disappeared back toward the house, and even after he was gone I stood there a while longer, staring out at the empty yard, trying to decide which version of Dante Hamilton I was supposed to believe.

I thought about the marker stones again, the last thing I remembered before waking up here, and wondered how much of that first night I’d actually gotten right and how much I’d simply reconstructed out of scent and fear and the desperate hope that someone had wanted to save me rather than just happening to find me first. Damien’s version made it sound deliberate. Dante’s own words made it sound like a mistake he was still paying for.

I climbed back into bed without any real intention of sleeping, and lay there listening to the house settle around me, old wood creaking somewhere down the hall, wind moving through the trees outside. I kept circling back to the same question, turning it over until it wore smooth in my mind. If he regretted saving me, why hadn’t he simply let Damien carry me the rest of the way alone that first night. Why show up at all, if the plan from the start was to make sure I understood, two days later, exactly how unwelcome I was.

None of it added up cleanly, and somewhere in the middle of trying to force the pieces together, exhaustion finally won out and pulled me under.

I woke the next morning to pale light coming through the curtains and the faint, distant sound of the pack already moving through their day below, and for one disoriented moment before memory caught up with me, I almost forgot where I was. Then it all came rushing back, my father’s hand, Rowan’s cruelty, Damien’s quiet defense of me, Dante’s words in the training yard landing like a closed door.

And underneath all of it, stubborn and unwelcome, the image of him standing alone at the edge of the yard in the dark, looking up at a window he had no reason to think anyone was watching from.

I didn’t know what to do with that image yet. I only knew I couldn’t stop turning it over, the same way I couldn’t stop turning over anything else that had happened to me since the night I’d walked away from Ashford land with nothing but the clothes on my back. Two brothers, two entirely different ways of showing up for someone, and I still couldn’t tell which of them, if either, actually knew what he wanted from me.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​