LILLIAN
He hasn’t said a word to me.
Not since the carriage.
Not since his mouth came down on mine like punishment and ownership braided into one, his hand at my throat, his forehead dropping against mine in that unguarded second before he caught himself and stepped back.
Not one word through the night, not through the breaking of camp this morning, not when he mounted his horse and reached down and pulled me up in front of him like I weighed nothing and settled his arms around me and clicked the horse forward.
That was hours ago.
The road stretches ahead of us through open country, the trees thinning out on either side, the sky a flat, colorless gray that promises nothing.
His chest is solid against my back.
His arms bracket me on either side, hands loose on the reins, close enough that I feel every shift of his weight when the horse moves beneath us.
The warmth of him presses through my clothes like something I can’t argue with, and I have spent the entire morning holding myself carefully away from it, keeping my spine straight, my shoulders forward, my body as small as I can make it in the space his arms have made.
It doesn’t help.
The horse’s rhythm keeps pressing me back into him anyway.
I fix my eyes on the road and breathe.
Around us, the convoy moves in its usual order — guards at the flanks, outriders ahead, Melva’s carriage a few lengths behind.
I can feel the eyes on me without looking.
I’ve been feeling them since we set out, a pressure along the sides of my face, across my back, the particular weight of being watched by people who have already decided what you are.
I reach, without meaning to.
It’s reflex now, the way breathing is reflex.
*—king’s whore, riding up front like she’s something—*
*—soft, that’s what she’s made him.
Look at him.
Three years ago he wouldn’t have stopped twice for a woman—*
*—the moment they catch the father, she’s finished.
She knows it too.
Has to.*
I keep my gaze forward.
The flat gray road.
The thinning trees.
The horse’s ears flicking forward and back.
*Count them,* I tell myself.
*Count the thoughts and put them away.
They don’t belong to you.*
But they land anyway, each one a small, dull weight settling somewhere behind my sternum, and by midday I have collected enough of them that the pile is heavy.
I had told him.
That night in the cave, before everything else happened — I had offered it to him, my secret, the one thing I swore I’d never hand over.
*I have an ability.* Those were the words I used, and I’d felt the gamble of them even as I said them.
His response had been one beat of stillness, and then his promise for Kyler’s life, and nothing after.
No questions.
No acknowledgment.
He had moved on the way he moves on from everything — completely, without looking back.
He didn’t believe me.
I can’t read his thoughts to confirm it, but I know it the same way I know weather by the feel of the air.
To him I am a wolfless half-human who arrived off a forest floor in torn clothes, and whatever words came out of my mouth in that clearing were the desperate bargaining of a woman with nothing left.
He filed them away accordingly and forgot them.
The bitterness of it sits quiet and flat in my chest.
I let it sit.
There’s nowhere else for it to go.
The horse shifts beneath us, and Azriel’s arm tightens fractionally — not intentional, just the adjustment of a rider keeping his balance — and my breath catches before I can stop it.
I feel him notice.
He doesn’t say anything.
Of course he doesn’t.
I let my eyes move, just slightly, scanning the riders flanking us.
Simon is there, a few lengths to the right, his posture as precise as ever, his eyes tracking the convoy perimeter with the particular efficiency of a man whose attention is never fully at rest.
As if he feels the glance, he turns his head.
Our eyes meet.
His gaze is not what the others’ are.
There’s no contempt in it, no flat dismissal.
It’s sharper than that — careful, measuring, the look of someone turning a problem over in his mind and not yet satisfied with any of the answers.
I reach toward him without thinking.
The thought arrives low and unhurried, weighted with something that has clearly been sitting in him for some time.
*He’s distracted.
Three months ago he would never have stopped the convoy this many times.
Three months ago there was no one he would have looked at twice.* A pause, something tighter underneath it.
*It isn’t fair to Riela.
After everything that was done to her, he deserves someone who can stand beside him properly.
Not this.*
I look away.
The thought of her moves through me the way cold water moves — sudden, complete, reaching everywhere at once.
Riela Kingsley.
I had heard the name my whole life in the way you hear the names of weather events or distant disasters — something that happened far away, to people above you, with consequences that ripple outward but never quite reach where you’re standing.
The princess.
Azriel’s elder sister.
The one the people loved in the uncomplicated way they could never quite love him — her warmth against his severity, her open hands against his closed ones.
The pride of the royal family before any of it went wrong.
And now she is broken.
Her mind, gone.
Whatever she was before, sealed away somewhere she can no longer reach herself.
*My father did that.*