LILLIAN
The carriage sways with the rhythm of the road, and I let it rock me without resistance, my cheek resting against the wooden panel beside the window.
Outside, the morning is pale and unhurried.
Trees drift past in long, quiet rows.
Inside, it smells like the cedar oil Melva uses on her hands, and something about that small, ordinary detail makes the whole world feel slightly less uncertain.
Azriel hasn’t come.
Not last night, not this morning.
The tent had been his, the night before that—and now the carriage is mine, and the distance between us has returned without explanation, the way weather changes.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter.
I tell myself I wasn’t waiting.
I watch the trees.
“You know,” Melva says from across the carriage, folding a piece of cloth in her lap with the unhurried precision of someone who has folded ten thousand pieces of cloth and will fold ten thousand more, “he’s been very kind to you.”
I glance at her.
“I know.”
“I mean it.
I’ve served him for twenty-three years.” She smooths a crease with her thumb.
“I know the difference.”
I don’t argue with her.
Melva isn’t someone who says things she doesn’t mean, and she isn’t someone who mistakes routine courtesy for something more.
If she says it, she believes it.
I just don’t know yet what to do with it.
She looks up at me, studying my face the way she sometimes does—like she’s reading something I haven’t said.
“Has it started yet?
The healing?”
“Some.” I flex my fingers in my lap.
There’s less ache in my knuckles than there was two days ago, and the bruise along my ribs has softened from sharp pain to a low, dull pressure.
“Slower than I’d expected.”
“It will come.” She says it with the certainty of someone stating a fact about the weather.
“You carry his mark now.
You’re protected.
Whatever else is uncertain, that part isn’t.”
Protected.
I turn the word over quietly, the way you test ice before you step on it.
She’s right that I’m safer than I was a week ago.
I can feel it—not in any grand or dramatic way, but in the absence of certain fears.
No one in this caravan will touch me.
No one will drag me through a forest or throw me in a dungeon or decide I’m a useful thing to discard.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, I am not in immediate danger.
It should feel like relief.
It does, in the way that setting down a very heavy weight feels like relief—not joyful, just an absence.
The ache is still there.
The muscles still remember.
If I knew what he wanted, I think, watching a bird break from the treeline and vanish into the grey sky, I could give it to him.
I could adjust.
I could survive this.
That’s the piece I keep circling.
Not love—I have no illusions about love.
The mark on my shoulder means I belong to him, not that he wants me.
He marked me because his wolf wouldn’t allow his mate to die before she’d given him an heir.
That’s the truth of it, plain and quiet and without malice.
I can work with truth.
What I can’t work with is the blank wall his mind makes when I reach toward it—that absolute, impenetrable silence where everyone else leaks feeling and thought and want.
What happens after?
That’s the question that sits at the bottom of everything, still and cold.
After I’ve given him what I’m here to give—what becomes of me then?
Does safety run out?
Does usefulness?
I press my lips together and say nothing, because Melva is watching, and I don’t want to make her worry about something neither of us can answer.
The morning passes.
***
By the time the caravan stops for the night, the sky has gone the color of a bruise—deep amber at the horizon bleeding into violet overhead.
Camp rises quickly around us: tents and torches and the low, steady sounds of a company that has done this a hundred times.
Melva and I eat in the carriage.
She has produced, from somewhere in her seemingly bottomless bag, a small pot of something warm and thick, and we sit with our bowls in the fading light like two ordinary women at the end of an ordinary day.
It almost feels like one.
Then the voices drift in through the carriage walls—low, but not low enough.
She should be kept like a prisoner, not—
—what right does she have, a wolfless half-breed—
—the wolf king’s mate?
Please.
If you can even call her—
I set my spoon down.
It’s not the words themselves that sting—I’ve heard worse, from people whose opinions I understood far less.
It’s something about eating a warm meal and almost feeling safe and then having the walls of it picked apart so easily, like it was never real to begin with.
Like safety is a thing I can only borrow, and the lenders are always, always watching.
Don’t.
I breathe slowly through my nose.
Don’t let it in.
I pick my spoon back up.
Then something cold moves through my chest—sudden and wrong, a sharp, hollow sensation that has nothing to do with the whispers outside.
I press my hand flat against my sternum and stay very still, waiting for it to pass.
It doesn’t pass.
Melva’s eyes are on me in an instant.
She sets her bowl down.
“Lillian.”
“I’m fine.”
“You went pale.”
“I’m always pale.”
“Not like that.” She’s already half-risen from her seat, expression doing the particular thing it does when she is trying very hard to be calm and not quite managing it.
“I should get the healer.
I should—” She stops.
Her hands press together in her lap, and I see the calculation move across her face: the fear of what happens if she calls attention to this, the fear of Azriel’s anger, the fear of doing the wrong thing.
“Should I?
If I do and he—”
“Melva.” I reach across and touch her hand.
“Sit down.”
She sits, reluctantly.
“I know my own body,” I say.
“I’ve felt this before.
I can handle it.”
Melva looks at me for a long moment.
Then she exhales, something between relief and skepticism settling over her face.
“Mm.” She straightens her spine.
“You can handle it.”
“I can.”
“You can handle it,” she repeats, with the specific tone of someone about to say something devastating with complete pleasantness.
“The same Lillian who drank poisoned wine straight from the bottle without noticing anything was wrong until she was halfway unconscious.”
I open my mouth.
I close it.
Melva tilts her head at me, waiting, the picture of patient innocence.
“That,” I say, “is—that’s completely different.”
“Is it.”