Julian didn’t turn around for a long time.
Kristen stood barefoot in the cold grass, his arms crossed over his chest, and waited.
The morning sun had climbed higher now, filtering through the gnarled oak branches and casting dappled shadows across the graveyard floor.
The lilies at the base of the grave stirred in a breeze Kristen couldn’t feel.
When Julian finally spoke, his voice was flat.
“The gate alarm went off the moment you climbed the wall.
You’ve been out here for a while.”
Kristen tensed.
He’d known Julian was aware of him.
He hadn’t known Julian had been tracking him the entire time—probably mocking him for enjoying the mouth chewed ‘freedom’ he was offered.
“That’s not creepy at all,” Kristen muttered.
“You’re on my estate.
Everything you do, I know about.” Julian still didn’t turn.
“You destroyed several flower beds.
I hope the run was worth it.”
“It was.”
Silence.
The wind moved through the oak branches overhead, and the lilies rustled against each other like dry paper.
“I found your graveyard,” Kristen said.
“Evidently.”
“Who is she?”
The question hung in the air.
Something in the stillness of him changed—a tightening, a withdrawal, as if the words had touched a nerve he’d spent years deadening.
“Someone my father decided I shouldn’t have,” Julian said.
His voice was still controlled.
But there was something underneath it now, something cold and old and barely restrained.
“She made the mistake of thinking my protection meant something.
She was wrong.”
Kristen looked at the grave.
The worn inscription.
The browning lilies.
The name that had been lost to time and weather.
“Your father killed her.”
“Indirectly.
Directly.
I guess it doesn’t matter.” Julian turned his head, just enough for Kristen to see the hard line of his profile.
“She’s dead.
She’s been dead for forty years.
And you’re standing at her grave, naked and covered in dirt, asking questions that have nothing to do with you.”
Kristen opened his mouth to fire back—something sharp, something cutting—but the words died in his throat.
Julian’s voice had stayed emotionless through every word, every clipped syllable.
But his hands were white-knuckled.
And his eyes, when the dappled sunlight caught them, weren’t hard.
They were hollow.
The way a house was hollow after a fire had swept through it—walls still standing, roof still intact, but everything inside reduced to ash.
Kristen had seen grief before.
He’d seen it in his mother’s face when pack members didn’t come home.
He’d seen it in his father’s eyes when he talked about the hunters who had nearly killed him.
He knew what it looked like when someone was still carrying a loss they’d never learned to put down.
He hadn’t expected to see it on Julian Vance.
For a single, disorienting moment, Kristen felt something that sat heavy in his chest and made his throat tighten.
He shoved it down.
Hard.
Unwilling to give a name to it.
This was the man who had choked his family.
This was the monster who had humiliated him in front of his entire pack.
Whatever grief Julian was carrying, whatever wound his father had carved into him forty years ago, it didn’t erase what he’d done.
It didn’t erase who he is.
It didn’t make him safe.
Kristen shook his head, once, sharp, as if he could physically dislodge the unwelcome sympathy.
When he spoke again, his voice was steadier than he felt.
“They have everything to do with me.
Your father already has his eyes on me.
You think I don’t have a right to know what happened the last time he set his sights on someone that stayed near you?”
Julian turned fully then, and his crimson eyes were hard.
No longer vulnerable.
“What happened to her is none of your concern.
What should concern you is that my father will be at the wedding.
The entire senior council will be at the wedding.
They will stare and size up not only you, but your family.”
Kristen’s jaw tightened.
“A wedding?
You’re telling me about a wedding, now?”
“My father wants it within the month.
He’s already arranging the guest list.
You’ll need to be fitted for the proper attire.
It’s only thanks to me that you get to enjoy such luxury after all.” Julian’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smirk.
“Try not to look so thrilled.”
“I’m not marrying you in front of an audience.”
“You already married me.
The contract was the marriage.
The ceremony is theater.” Julian took a step closer, and the temperature around them seemed to drop.
“You can hate it.
You can hate me. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
But you will stand at that altar, and you will look like you belong there, because if you don’t—if you give my father or the council or anyone else in that room a reason to doubt this alliance—the consequences will fall on your pack.
Not on you.
Never on you.
That’s how he works.”
Kristen’s hands curled into fists at his sides.
“You keep saying that.
That the consequences will fall on them.
That I’m too valuable to hurt.
But you’re the one who put them in danger in the first place.
You’re the one who blocked our routes, disrespected our pack and called me your submissive bride in front of my entire pack.”
“I know what I did.”
“Then stop pretending you’re protecting me from a situation you created.”
The words landed.
Julian’s expression didn’t change—the mask was firmly in place now, cold and impenetrable—but his silence was sharper than any retort.
“Your father is a threat,” Kristen continued, his voice rising.
“I’m not arguing that.
But so are you.
You’re the one who forced my hand.
You’re the one who made sure I walked into this estate whether I wanted to or not.
You don’t get to stand there and lecture me about danger when you’re the reason I’m in danger in the first place.”
Julian watched him for a long moment.
When he spoke, his voice was quiet.
“Are you finished?”
“No.”
“Then keep going.
Get it out.
Whatever you’ve been holding onto, say it.
You’re angry.
You’re humiliated.
You’re trapped in a marriage you didn’t choose with a monster you can’t escape.
I know all of this.
Tell me something I don’t know.”
Kristen stared at him.
The words were there, crowding his throat—insults, accusations, the raw, bleeding fury of a man who had been stripped of everything and told to be grateful for the cage.
But something in Julian’s expression stopped him.
Not softness.
Not vulnerability.
Just a bone-deep exhaustion, the weariness of someone who had been fighting in a war for so long he’d forgotten what peace looked like.
“You could have asked,” Kristen said finally.
His voice cracked on the last word, but he forced it steady.
“You could have come to us as an ally instead of a conqueror.
You could have negotiated instead of threatening.
You could have—”
“Could have what?” Julian cut him off.
“Could have been kind?
Could have been gentle?
Could have asked nicely and hoped my father didn’t notice?” He shook his head, a short, sharp motion.
“You don’t understand the coven.
You don’t understand my father.
If I had come to your territory with flowers and a treaty, he would have seen it as weakness.
He would have exploited it.
And your pack would be dead by now.
All of them.
Including you.”
“So you humiliated me instead.”
“Yes.” Julian met his eyes without flinching.
“I humiliated you.
I made you bow your head in front of your pack.
And every single one of them is still alive because of it.
You can hate me for how I did it.
You should hate me.
But don’t pretend the alternative was better.”
Kristen’s chest was heaving.
His wolf was pacing, snarling, clawing at the inside of his skull.
But underneath the anger was something else.
Something colder and quieter and infinitely more unsettling.
Julian wasn’t lying.
That was the worst part.
Kristen could see it in the rigid set of his shoulders, in the flat, unadorned way he’d delivered every word.
Julian hadn’t been cruel for the sake of cruelty.
He’d been cruel because he believed—genuinely, completely believed—that cruelty was the only thing standing between Kristen’s pack and extinction.
It didn’t make it right.
It didn’t make it forgivable.
But it made it true.
“The wedding,” Kristen said, forcing the words out through clenched teeth.
“What do I have to do?”
Julian’s expression flickered—surprise, maybe, or something close to it.
“Stand at the altar.
Recite the vows.
Accept the ceremonial binding.
It’s mostly symbolic.
The contract is the real marriage.
This is just the performance.”
“A performance for your father.”
“You’ll need to look convincing.
Not happy—no one will expect happy.
But not broken, either.
My father will be looking for cracks and the council will be looking for weakness.
You need to stand there like you chose this.
Like you’re exactly where you want to be.”
“I’m not.”
“I know.” Julian’s voice was quieter now.
“But you’re a good actor when you want to be.
I’ve seen you do it.
At the coven gathering, you walked into a room full of vampires and looked my father in the eye and didn’t flinch.
Do that again.
Just for one day.”
Kristen looked at the grave.
At the lilies.
At the name worn away by weather and grief and forty years of silence.
He thought about the woman who had trusted Julian, who had thought his protection meant something, who had died in the wings of this very estate.
He thought about his pack.
His mother, who had wept as she told him the truth.
His father, on his knees, begging for forgiveness.
Scarlet, with her bruised throat and her defiant eyes.
Dalton, Malachi, Theo—his friends, his pack, his family, the people he’d spent his whole life learning to protect.
He thought about Jonathon Vance, cold-eyed and smiling, whispering what a pity and promising consequences.
“Fine,” Kristen said.
“I’ll do your performance.
I’ll stand at your altar and recite your stupid vows while pretending I chose this.
But I’m not doing it for you.
I’m doing it for them.”
Julian nodded once.
“I wouldn’t expect anything else.”
The wind shifted.
Somewhere beyond the graveyard, a bird called out—a living thing in a place of the dead.
Kristen uncrossed his arms and turned away from the grave.
“I’m going back inside.
I need clothes.”
“Use the east entrance.
The staff will see you otherwise, and my father’s informants don’t need a report about the future Pack Alpha streaking through the formal gardens.”
Kristen flushed, opened his mouth to retort and paused.
Glanced back over his shoulder.
“Your father’s informants?
In your own house?”
“Every house has rats.
Mine simply have better..hmm accomodation.”
Kristen turned and walked back through the wild grass, towards the room that was his cage and his sanctuary all at once.
He made it ten paces before he glanced back.
Julian hadn’t moved.
He stood at the grave with his hands still clasped behind his back, but something in his posture had shifted—a subtle, almost imperceptible slump of the shoulders, as if the weight of forty years had pressed down on him all at once.
His head was bowed.
Kristen felt it again.
That unwelcome ache in his chest.
That pull of sympathy he didn’t want, didn’t have any right to feel for the man who had stolen his life and called him a bitch in heat in front of a room full of vampires.
He looks sad, a small voice whispered.
Kristen crushed the thought before it could take root.
He turned back toward the east wing and kept walking, his bare feet leaving prints in the damp grass.
Sad or not, Julian was still the enemy.
Still the creature who had humiliated him in front of his pack and trapped him in a contract he couldn’t escape.
Feeling sorry for him was dangerous.
Feeling sorry for him was exactly the kind of weakness Julian’s father would exploit.
Kristen shook his head, as if he could physically dislodge the unwelcome sympathy.
It didn’t matter what wounds Julian carried.
It didn’t matter how many graves he kept flowers on.
Kristen hadn’t asked for any of this.
He’d been forced into it.
He’d been made powerless.
And he wasn’t going to forget that just because his captor had a bleeding heart buried somewhere under all that ice.
Behind him, Julian remained at the grave.
He didn’t follow.
Didn’t call out.
Didn’t move.
The lilies rustled in the breeze.
The sun climbed higher.
The monster, it turned out, had a dead person living in in his heart.
The monster had been trying, in his own brutal way, to protect something his father wanted to destroy.
The monster was still a monster—Kristen wasn’t foolish enough to forget that.
But he was a monster with a wound.
A monster who bled.
That didn’t make him safe.
It made him dangerous.
If a monster is bleeding and quiet, it’s preparing to lash out.
Seeking shelter is the only way to escape its wrath.
But, who shall he run to?
Julian?…being vulnerable?
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