Whatever warmth had passed between Rachel and Rex the night the Gathering ended seemed, in the weeks that followed, to quietly retreat again.
Neither of them spoke of it outright.
Rex returned to his council matters with the same consuming focus as before, and Adrian Voss, whose delegation had still not officially departed despite the Gathering’s close, remained a steady, welcome presence in the long, empty hours Rachel found herself filling more and more without her husband.
Rachel had grown almost used to the rhythm of it by now — mornings that sometimes included Rex, sometimes didn’t, afternoons that increasingly belonged to Adrian, evenings spent either in Liora’s easy company or alone by her window, watching the dark pines and wondering how a marriage that had felt, for one brief, shining night, like the beginning of something real, could so quickly settle back into careful, well-mannered distance.
She had tried, more than once, to raise the subject directly with Rex, only to find him deflecting each time with practiced ease, citing council matters or treaty disputes or some other pressing business that always seemed to arrive precisely when the conversation edged toward anything real between them.
Eventually, worn down by the repeated deflections, she stopped trying, telling herself it was easier this way, though the telling never quite convinced the ache in her chest.
It was Adrian who first suggested the fighting lessons.
“You flinch every time a guard raises his voice near you,” he observed one afternoon, watching Rachel startle at the sound of two soldiers sparring in the training yard.
“That isn’t a criticism. It’s an observation. A woman who nearly lost her life to a wild wolf in these mountains should know how to defend herself, don’t you think, rather than simply hoping someone arrives in time to save her again.”
“I don’t know the first thing about fighting,” Rachel admitted.
“Then let me teach you,” Adrian said, something easy and inviting in the offer.
“Not swords. Something safer to start with. A stick will teach you the same principles without the risk of losing a finger while you learn them.”
Rachel hesitated only a moment before agreeing, some old, stubborn part of her recognizing the sense in it.
She had spent months now being protected, rescued, watched over — by Rex, by guards, by circumstance.
The idea of learning to protect herself, even a little, appealed to something in her that had grown tired of always being the one who needed saving.
“Why does this matter to you?” Rachel asked him, on that first afternoon, curious about his sudden investment in her safety.
“Teaching me, I mean. You could simply enjoy my company without troubling yourself over drills and footwork.”
Adrian considered the question with unusual seriousness.
“I’ve watched too many people I cared for assume that being cherished was the same thing as being safe,” he said finally.
“It rarely is. I’d rather you have both, if I can help provide it.”
Something in the quiet weight of that answer settled warm in Rachel’s chest, and she found herself, not for the first time, grateful for the particular kind of attention Adrian seemed to offer so effortlessly.
They began meeting most afternoons in a quiet corner of the training yard, well away from the serious business of Rex’s soldiers, Adrian patiently walking her through footwork and grip and the simple, repetitive drills that built real skill over time rather than flashy showmanship.
“Weight on your back foot,” he corrected, adjusting her stance with careful hands.
“You’re leaning forward like you intend to apologize to whoever you’re fighting. Nobody wins a fight by apologizing for it first.”
Rachel laughed, adjusting her footing.
“Noted.”
“Again,” Adrian said, raising his own stick in an easy, practiced guard.
“And this time, actually mean it when you swing.”
She was clumsy at first, missing more strikes than she landed, stumbling over her own feet more than once.
But Adrian was patient in a way she hadn’t expected from a man centuries her senior, never once making her feel foolish for her mistakes, only steadily, methodically correcting them until small improvements began to show themselves.
By the end of the first week, she could hold a proper guard without thinking about it.
By the second, she’d landed her first clean strike against him, more by luck than skill, though Adrian had grinned and declared it progress regardless.
By the third week, luck had given way to something closer to genuine ability, her movements growing surer, faster, less hesitant with every session.
Word of the lessons eventually reached Greta, who watched a single session with visible skepticism before offering, grudgingly, that Rachel’s footwork had improved considerably.
“Better than most new recruits I’ve seen come through this yard,” she admitted, the closest thing to a compliment Rachel had yet received from the older woman.
“Though I’d still recommend a proper blade eventually, once you’ve mastered the fundamentals.”
Even Liora took notice, joining Rachel for tea one afternoon still flushed and sweaty from a lesson.
“You seem different lately,” Liora observed.
“Steadier, somehow. I don’t think I’ve seen you smile this easily since you first arrived.”
“I feel steadier,” Rachel admitted.
“Which feels strange to say, given everything happening around me lately.”
“You’re a quick learner,” Adrian told her, after nearly two weeks of daily lessons, genuine approval in his voice as she landed three clean strikes in a row against his raised guard.
“Better than most soldiers I’ve trained, if I’m honest.”
“High praise, from a man who’s apparently trained soldiers for centuries,” Rachel said, breathless and flushed from exertion, though pleased despite herself.
“I don’t offer praise I don’t mean,” Adrian said, something warmer than usual in his gaze as he watched her catch her breath.
“You’re stronger than this court gives you credit for, Rachel. I suspect you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for too.”
The lessons became the best part of Rachel’s days, a rare pocket of time where she felt neither lonely nor overlooked, where someone’s full attention rested on her without qualification or distraction.
She found herself looking forward to the training yard the way she once looked forward to Rex’s morning walks, before those walks had grown so infrequent she’d nearly stopped expecting them at all.
More than once, she caught herself thinking, guiltily, that Adrian’s steady presence had become easier to rely on than her own husband’s — a thought she pushed away quickly each time it surfaced, though it had an uncomfortable habit of returning regardless.
It was around this same time that Lady Sorin’s presence at court grew harder to ignore.
She was a wolf noblewoman from one of the northern packs allied to Rex’s territory, tall and striking, with sharp green eyes and a confidence that filled a room the moment she entered it.
She had come, ostensibly, to discuss trade terms on behalf of her father’s lands, though those discussions seemed, to Rachel’s growing unease, to require rather a great deal of Rex’s personal attention to resolve.
Rachel first noticed the two of them together properly nearly a fortnight after the Gathering’s close, crossing paths with them by chance near the castle’s eastern wing.
Rex was laughing — a real laugh, unguarded and easy, the kind Rachel had only glimpsed from him a handful of times since her arrival — at something Lady Sorin had said, his hand resting briefly and naturally at the small of her back as they walked, the gesture so casual it seemed almost unconscious.
Rachel stopped where she stood, something sharp twisting in her chest at the sight, though neither of them noticed her there before she managed to slip away unseen.
She found herself, in the days that followed, watching for similar moments almost against her will — Rex and Lady Sorin sharing a private joke over dinner, their heads bent close together over some trade document, Lady Sorin’s hand briefly touching his arm as she made some point during council.
None of it was necessarily improper.
All of it left Rachel feeling smaller and more forgotten with each fresh sighting.
“She’s easy for him to talk to,” Liora observed carefully, one afternoon, watching Rex and Lady Sorin deep in conversation across the far side of the training yard, both of them laughing at something Rachel couldn’t hear.
“She understands pack politics. She was raised the way he was raised. There’s no learning curve required between them, the way there was learning curve for the two of you.”
“I’m aware,” Rachel said, more evenly than she felt, her grip tightening slightly on the practice stick still in her hand. The source of this chapter is g.com.
She told herself it didn’t matter.
She told herself Rex was allowed friendships, the same as she’d once argued to him about Adrian, and it would be hypocritical to feel otherwise now that the shoe sat on the other foot.
But telling herself something and feeling it were, she was learning, two very different exercises entirely, and watching Lady Sorin’s easy laughter fill spaces Rachel herself had only recently begun to occupy left an ache in her chest she couldn’t quite reason away.
More than once, Rachel overheard council members referring to Lady Sorin’s visit with a familiarity that unsettled her further — comments about how well she and Rex had always gotten along, even before the treaty, quiet remarks about matches that might have been made differently had the war not intervened.
Rachel told herself these were simply the idle musings of a bored court, nothing more, though the words lingered regardless, small and persistent, like splinters she couldn’t quite work free.
“He’s a prince,” Nerissa reminded her once, with characteristic bluntness, finding Rachel alone in the sitting room one evening.
“Not yet a king. His father may be gone, but the coronation hasn’t happened, and until it does, there are those in this court who believe the match to Lady Sorin’s family would have strengthened the northern packs more usefully than a treaty bride from a kingdom that spent decades at war with us.”
“Is that meant to comfort me?” Rachel asked, sharper than she intended.
“It’s meant to inform you,” Nerissa said.
“A prince without a crown yet secured has more pressures on him than you may realize, Rachel. Some of those pressures wear green eyes and speak easily of pack matters you’ll never fully share with him, whatever affection may exist between the two of you.”
“You seem to relish delivering this particular piece of information,” Rachel observed, unable to keep the edge from her voice.
“I relish honesty,” Nerissa said, unbothered by the accusation.
“Whether or not it’s comfortable to hear. I told you once before to walk into this marriage with your eyes open, Rachel. I stand by that advice now more than ever.”
The words sat uneasily in Rachel’s chest for days afterward, resurfacing every time she caught sight of Rex and Lady Sorin together, every time their easy laughter reached her from across some hall or courtyard she happened to be passing through.
She found herself, more than once, wondering whether the treaty that had bound her to Rex had truly been the best arrangement for either of them, or whether some other match, forged from shared blood and shared upbringing rather than politics and necessity, might have suited him better all along.
It was Adrian, in the end, who offered the distraction Rachel hadn’t realized she needed.
“Come outside the palace walls with me,” he suggested, one clear afternoon nearly three weeks into their lessons.
“There’s a clearing not far from here, past the training yard gates, where the ground is softer and the space wider. I think you’re ready to practice somewhere that isn’t quite so carefully controlled as this yard.”
Rachel hesitated, some old caution from the night of the wild wolf attack resurfacing briefly, though Adrian’s easy confidence, and the memory of Rex’s own distance these past weeks, pushed the hesitation quickly aside.
“All right,” she said.
“Show me.”
They slipped past the outer gates that afternoon with only a single guard’s notice, Adrian assuring the man they wouldn’t stray far, and made their way down a narrow path that wound through the pines toward a wide, sunlit clearing Rachel had never seen before.
The air outside the castle walls felt lighter somehow, freer, and for the first time in weeks Rachel found herself laughing easily, unguarded, as Adrian ran her through drills beneath the open sky instead of the training yard’s watchful walls.
“This is different,” Rachel said, breathing deep the scent of pine and warm earth, so unlike the cold stone corridors she’d grown so used to.
“I’d forgotten what it felt like, being outside without four walls pressing in around me.”
“Then we should do this more often,” Adrian said, something warm and genuine in the offer, entirely without agenda as far as Rachel could tell.
“You deserve more open sky than that castle allows you, I think.”
“Better,” Adrian said, parrying a strike she’d aimed a little too wildly.
“Though you’re still leading with your shoulder. Root through your hips, the way I showed you.”
“I’m trying,” Rachel said, laughing, swiping a strand of hair from her face.
“Try harder,” Adrian said, grinning, raising his stick again in invitation.
They sparred back and forth for the better part of an hour, Rachel’s confidence growing with every exchange, Adrian’s praise coming more frequently now as her form sharpened, her instincts quickening.
For a little while, entirely absorbed in the rhythm of strike and parry, the sunlight filtering warm through the pines above them, Rachel forgot entirely about Lady Sorin’s easy laughter, about Rex’s careful distance, about anything at all beyond the simple, satisfying focus of the lesson.
“You’ve come a long way,” Adrian said, finally calling a pause, both of them breathing hard, sweat cooling on their skin in the fading afternoon warmth.
“I don’t think the girl who first picked up that stick three weeks ago would recognize the woman standing in front of me now.”
“I don’t think I recognize her either, some days,” Rachel admitted, surprising herself with the honesty of it.
“Everything here has changed me, I think. Not always in ways I expected.”
“Change isn’t always a loss,” Adrian said gently.
“Sometimes it’s simply becoming more fully yourself than circumstance previously allowed.”
Rachel smiled at that, something warm and grateful settling in her chest, entirely unprepared for how quickly that warmth would curdle into terror only minutes later.
They had resumed their drills only a few minutes when the first growl reached them from the treeline, the afternoon light beginning its long slow slide toward evening.
It wasn’t Rex.
Rachel understood that immediately, some instinct sharpened by her earlier brush with the wild wolf recognizing at once that this was different — not one creature, but several, moving low and fast through the underbrush at the clearing’s edge, eyes catching the fading light in a way that made her blood run suddenly, sickeningly cold.
“Rachel, behind me,” Adrian said, all easy warmth gone from his voice instantly, replaced by something sharp and commanding as he stepped between her and the treeline, his own posture shifting into something coiled and dangerous, entirely unlike the patient teacher she’d grown used to these past weeks.
She barely had time to obey before the first of them broke from the trees — not wolves at all, she realized with a fresh jolt of horror, but men, rough and armed, moving with the coordinated speed of something planned rather than opportunistic.
Five of them, perhaps six, fanning out around the clearing’s edge with the practiced ease of men who had done this kind of work before.
“Bandits,” Adrian snarled, already moving to meet the first of them, his own considerable speed a blur against the dimming light, steel flashing where a blade had appeared seemingly from nowhere in his hand.
“Rachel, run for the gates. Now.”
She turned to run, practice stick still gripped uselessly in one hand, but the clearing had already filled with more of them than she’d first realized, cutting off the path back toward the palace walls.
One lunged for her, and pure instinct took over — she swung the stick exactly the way Adrian had taught her, catching the man hard across the temple, buying herself half a second before a second attacker seized her from behind, wrenching her arm back hard enough to tear a cry from her throat.
She screamed, twisting hard against the grip, and heard Adrian’s furious shout somewhere behind her, the sounds of a real fight breaking out in earnest now, steel and violence and the particular chaos of too many bodies moving too fast in too little space.
She fought against her captor with everything the past three weeks had taught her, driving her heel hard into his instep the way Adrian had shown her, twisting free just long enough to stumble two steps toward the tree line.
Something struck her hard across the back of the skull.
The world tilted violently, the clearing spinning into streaks of green and gold and darkening sky, and Rachel had just enough time to register the taste of blood in her mouth, the ground rushing up beneath her, Adrian’s voice calling her name from somewhere that suddenly felt very far away, before everything went completely, silently dark.
She didn’t see what happened next — didn’t see Adrian finish off the last of the attackers with brutal, efficient speed, didn’t see him gather her limp body against his chest and run, faster than any mortal man could have managed, back toward the palace gates, shouting for guards, for the healer, for anyone who could help.
She didn’t see the guards’ faces go pale at the sight of the vampire lord carrying the princess’s bleeding, unconscious body through the gates at a dead sprint.
She didn’t see Rex’s face when the word finally reached him.
He arrived at her bedside within minutes, having abandoned Lady Sorin mid-sentence at the sound of the commotion, his own face draining of all color at the sight of Rachel laid pale and still against the pillows, blood matting the hair at her temple, the healer already working urgently over her.
“What happened,” Rex demanded, his voice low and dangerous in a way that made even the healer flinch. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“Bandits, Your Highness,” one of the guards reported, still catching his breath.
“Outside the walls, near the training clearing. Lord Voss fought them off, brought her back himself.”
Rex’s eyes moved over Rachel’s still form with something close to desperation, cataloguing the wound at her temple, the pallor of her skin, the shallow, uneven rise and fall of her chest.
“How long has she been unconscious,” he asked the healer, his voice tightly controlled now, every ounce of fury momentarily set aside in favor of information.
“Nearly twenty minutes by my count, Your Highness,” the healer said, not looking up from her work.
“The wound itself isn’t the deepest I’ve seen, but a blow to the head carries its own dangers regardless of depth. We won’t know the full extent until she wakes.”
“Until,” Rex repeated, something in the word catching roughly in his throat.
“Not if.”
“Until,” the healer confirmed, though her tone carried a caution that did little to reassure him.
Rex’s gaze snapped to Adrian, who stood near the doorway, his own clothes torn and bloodied from the fight, exhaustion and worry etched plainly across his usually composed features.
“Outside the walls,” Rex repeated, something cold and furious building behind his pale eyes.
“You took my wife outside the palace walls, unguarded, into open ground, and you call bringing her back half dead a victory worth reporting?”
“I didn’t know they were there,” Adrian said, his own temper flaring now beneath the exhaustion.
“No one could have known. I fought them off. I got her back here as fast as I possibly could.”
“You should never have taken her out there in the first place,” Rex said, closing the distance between them, every line of him rigid with a fury that had clearly been building for far longer than this single afternoon.
“You’ve spent weeks pulling her further and further from the safety of these walls, teaching her to fight with sticks in open clearings, filling her days so completely that I barely see my own wife anymore, and now she lies here because of it.”
“Because of it?” Adrian’s voice rose now too, sharp and disbelieving.
“Or because you’ve been so occupied with Lady Sorin these past weeks that you never once noticed how lonely your wife had become, nor cared enough to ask why she’d started seeking companionship elsewhere?”
The accusation landed like a physical blow.
For a moment Rex said nothing at all, something raw and wounded flickering behind the fury in his pale eyes before hardening back into cold, controlled anger.
“This is not the moment to discuss my own failings,” Rex said, his voice dropping dangerously low.
“My wife lies unconscious in that bed, bleeding, because you took her somewhere unprotected. Whatever else may be true between us, that fault belongs entirely to you.”
“You would rather blame me than examine your own part in why she needed a reason to leave these walls at all,” Adrian shot back, though something in his own certainty had begun to waver, guilt creeping visibly into his expression despite his defensiveness.
“I would never have suggested it if I’d known. You must believe that, whatever else you think of me.”
“I believe,” Rex said, “that you have spent weeks positioning yourself in every space I failed to occupy, and now my wife pays the price for both our failures at once. Get out. Before I forget every rule of hospitality that’s kept you alive under this roof as long as you have been.”
“You think driving me out solves anything?” Adrian asked, though the fight had gone mostly out of his voice now, leaving only weary sorrow behind it.
“She will still have been lonely, Rex. She will still have needed something you weren’t providing. My leaving changes none of that.”
The words landed harder than Rex’s own fury had managed to, some flicker of grim acknowledgment crossing his face before he forced it back down beneath his anger.
“Perhaps not,” he said finally.
“But it is a start. Go.”
Adrian held his gaze a moment longer, some silent battle playing out between them, guilt and defiance warring visibly across his features, before finally, wordlessly, turning and leaving the room, his footsteps echoing away down the corridor.
Rex sank into the chair beside Rachel’s bed the moment the door closed, all the fury draining out of him at once, leaving only raw, naked fear behind it.
He took her limp hand in both of his, pressing it gently against his forehead, his shoulders shaking with something he would never have allowed anyone else to witness.
“Please,” he whispered, so quietly even the healer, still working nearby, didn’t hear it.
“Please wake up.”
The healer worked through the night, cleaning the wound at Rachel’s temple, checking and rechecking her breathing, murmuring reassurances to Rex that were only partly convincing even to his own ears.
Rex refused to leave her bedside, refused even the offer of a chair with more cushion than the hard wooden one he’d claimed, as though comfort of any kind might somehow distract him from the vigil he’d set himself.
Somewhere in the small hours of the night, Cassian found him there, still holding Rachel’s hand, his face gray with exhaustion and worry both.
“You should rest,” Cassian said gently, though he made no move to actually enforce the suggestion, understanding well enough by now that his brother would not be moved from that chair by anything short of the world ending.
“I cannot,” Rex said, his voice hoarse.
“If I close my eyes and something changes, I will never forgive myself for having looked away, even for a moment.”
Cassian was quiet a moment, studying his brother with an expression Rex couldn’t quite read in the dim candlelight.
“This is not only about the attack,” Cassian said finally.
“Is it.”
Rex didn’t answer right away, his thumb tracing slow, absent circles across the back of Rachel’s still hand.
“I have spent weeks pretending her friendship with Adrian Voss meant nothing to me,” he admitted finally, quiet enough that only Cassian could hear it.
“Pretending Lady Sorin’s company was simply easy, familiar, nothing more. I told myself I was protecting some fragile peace between Rachel and myself by refusing to examine either. I understand now how foolish that was.”
“What will you do?” Cassian asked.
“When she wakes,” Rex said, something quietly resolved settling into his voice for the first time since the guards had first brought word of the attack, “I intend to stop pretending entirely. About all of it.”
Cassian studied his brother a long moment, something gentler than usual in his expression.
“That is easier said in the dark of night beside a sickbed than done in the light of morning, once the fear has faded,” he said.
“I say that not to discourage you, but because I know you, Rex. You have always found it easier to feel things deeply in private than to say them plainly where anyone might witness the saying.”
“Then I will have to learn otherwise,” Rex said, “because I find I am no longer willing to lose her to my own carefulness. Whatever it costs me to say plainly what I feel, it costs less than sitting in this chair wondering if I waited too long to say it at all.”
Outside, the last light faded fully from the mountain sky, and somewhere in the dark pines beyond the palace walls, the bodies of the attackers who’d nearly cost Rachel her life lay cooling in the clearing where Adrian’s lessons had, until that afternoon, felt like the safest hour of her day.
Rex stayed in that chair through the whole of the night, Rachel’s hand never once leaving his, watching the slow rise and fall of her breathing as though sheer attention alone might be enough to will her back to consciousness.
Somewhere near dawn, exhaustion finally began to blur the edges of his vigilance, though he refused, even then, to let himself fully sleep, some old, stubborn fear insisting that the moment he did, he would lose the one thing he had only just begun to understand he could not bear to lose at all.
When the first grey light of morning finally crept through the window, Rachel had not yet woken.
But her breathing had steadied, the healer confirmed quietly, and the worst of the danger seemed to have passed in the night.
Rex allowed himself, for the first time in hours, a single shuddering breath of something close to relief, though he did not release her hand, not even then, not for anything.
Pls guys comment on my novel if you like it.