I have been circling that thought for days, the same way you circle something you’ve dropped in deep water — knowing exactly where it is, unwilling to reach in after it.
But Simon’s thought has pulled it to the surface, and now I have to look at it directly.
I had known, once.
Not everything — my father was careful, meticulous, the kind of man who kept his worst intentions distributed among only his most trusted: a handful of warriors, his oldest sons, Luna Meena.
The full shape of the plot was never something he said aloud around me.
But I had been reading him since I was a child, long before I understood what the ability was or where it had come from, and I had felt the direction of his ambition the way you feel a current in water even when you can’t see it moving.
I had told myself I could guide him.
That if I stayed close and listened, I could catch him before he went too far and pull him back.
It was the story I told myself for years — that my silence was strategy, that knowing without acting was a form of protection.
The moment I understood about Riela — not the details, just the shape of it, just *her*, a woman’s name that my father turned over in his mind with the particular cold satisfaction of something useful — I stopped looking.
I just stopped.
I told myself I didn’t want to know more.
That ignorance was safer.
That there was nothing I could have done anyway, that I was a child, that a half-blood omega had no leverage against a Beta and his allies.
I never read him again after that.
Not deeply.
Not the way I had before.
And it happened anyway.
Whatever he did to her, it happened.
I kept my eyes closed and it happened anyway, and now I am riding toward the capital of the kingdom my father tried to tear apart, pressed against the body of the man whose sister paid the price for my father’s ambition and my own cowardice.
I breathe in slowly through my nose.
He always treated me gently.
That is the thing I cannot reconcile, no matter how many times I turn it over.
While the rest of the pack looked through me, while Dylan found new ways to remind me of what I was, while Julia sharpened herself on my existence like a blade on stone — my father was careful with me.
Not warm, never warm the way a father should be, but careful.
He never called me half-blood.
He never raised his voice at me the way he raised it at the servants.
The summer I turned twelve and fell sick for a week, he sat with me one evening, and I had thought then — I had believed, genuinely — that underneath all his indifference, something lived that was mine.
That version of him shaped me.
I cannot cut it out cleanly and leave the rest intact.
And yet.
I look at Azriel’s hands on the reins.
The same hands that tore through guards in a forest clearing without hesitation, that lifted me from the ground with something that felt almost like care, that closed around my throat last night in fury and then — stopped.
The hands of a man whose sister is broken and whose world was rearranged by the same man who raised me.
I kept silent.
And here I am.
The horse slows.
Azriel brings us to a stop at the edge of a shallow clearing where the tree line opens up on one side.
Around us, the convoy begins the practiced choreography of making camp — riders peeling off, tents emerging from supply carts, fires being laid.
Azriel dismounts first, fluid and unhurried, and then his hands find my waist and lift me down with a brief, steady grip.
His eyes don’t meet mine.
He turns immediately and moves toward a cluster of his commanders, posture shifting into the particular rigidity of a man conducting business.
His voice carries across the clearing in low, clipped instructions, and within moments he is entirely absorbed in it — maps, a report from one of the outriders, a question from Daven about the morning route.
Melva materializes at my side.
Two warriors close in from either direction, positioning themselves at a distance that is clearly not coincidental.
The ring settles around me with the quiet efficiency of a habit.
I watch him with his men.
The set of his shoulders.
The way he turns his head to hear a report, nods once, gestures at the map.
Even from here, across the length of the clearing, the weight of him is unmistakable — the thing that fills a room without asking to.
A thought reaches me from somewhere to my left, low and irritable.
*Should have been at the Capital two days ago.
Stopping like this, for her — tie her to a shifted wolf and be done with it.
She’d make it in half the time.*
I look away quickly.
Then, slowly, I look back at him.
His back is to me.
He hasn’t glanced in my direction once since he lifted me down.
Cold.
Distant.
Everything between us from last night folded away somewhere I can’t see, locked behind the same wall his thoughts have always been behind.
And still — we stopped early.
Again.
We have stopped early every day since I woke up in the carriage, and no one has said why, and I have not asked, and Azriel has not explained.
There are warriors around me right now who would rather I was dragged to the Capital like cargo, and instead I am standing in a clearing with Melva at my side and a fire already being built nearby and his careful, wordless caution arranged around me like a perimeter.
He has not chained me.
He has not degraded me.
He put his coat around my shoulders in a forest when I was on the ground, and he has not once, in all of this, taken back the protection he extended that night even when I gave him reasons to.
*Count yourself lucky.* I hear the thought in my own voice, quiet and deliberate.
*This is what mercy looks like from a man like him.
Small and unspoken and never explained.
Count it.
Hold onto it.
It may be the only kind the heavens have left for you.*
I let the thought settle.
I let myself believe it, just for a moment — that the bond is real, that it reaches even him, that somewhere underneath all that controlled distance something pulls toward me the way I pull toward him without wanting to.
That the stops are not inefficiency.
That the ring of warriors is not just strategy.
That I am not entirely alone in this.
The thought finds its place in me, quiet and tentative, and I breathe around it carefully, the way you breathe around something fragile you’re afraid to disturb.
Then it hits.
A thud — sharp and wrong, slamming into the center of my chest like something struck from the inside.
My hand flies up and presses flat against my sternum.
My heart lurches, skips, and then pounds — hard, violent, so loud I feel it in my ears, in my throat, in the backs of my hands — like something enormous has just woken up inside me and is trying to get out.