The formal meeting was her mother’s idea.
Of course it was.
Everything about the past four days had been her mother’s idea, organised and scheduled and arranged into a neat structure that moved inevitably forward like a river that had decided where it was going and was not interested in discussing alternatives.
Breakfast at this hour.
Meetings at that hour.
Dinner together every evening.
The careful, relentless machinery of two people being pushed toward each other by someone who had decided it was going to happen and had the authority to make it so.
Isadora sat in the blue receiving room and waited and thought about how much she disliked the blue receiving room.
Aldric arrived exactly on time.
He came in without ceremony, crossed to the chair across from hers, and sat down.
He looked at the room once, the formal furniture, the portraits, the careful arrangement of everything, and his expression said what his mouth did not, which was that he found it exactly as useful as she did.
“Your Highness,” he said.
“Isadora,” she said.
“We are going to be married. Your Highness will exhaust both of us inside a week.”
He looked at her.
Something shifted in his face, not quite agreement, not quite resistance.
Somewhere in between, which she was beginning to understand was where he lived.
“Isadora,” he said.
Her name in his mouth landed differently than she had expected.
She did not examine why.
She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him directly and said, “I want to be honest with you about something.”
“You were honest with me this morning in the garden.”
“I want to be honest about something else.”
He waited.
He was good at waiting, did not fill it with noise or shifting or the performance of patience.
He simply waited, steady and present, and she found it both easier and harder to talk to than she had anticipated.
“I do not know how to do this,” she said.
“Any of it. Being matched, having someone in my space, the….” She stopped.
Started again.
“I have lived my whole life in very controlled circumstances. I know exactly who I am in every room I walk into. I know what is expected and I know how to deliver it.” She paused.
“I do not know what is expected here and I cannot deliver something I do not know.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“What are you asking me?”
“I am not asking you anything. I am telling you something so that when I…..” She stopped again.
This was the part she had not rehearsed because she had not known she was going to say it until she was saying it.
“When I get it wrong. When I am too controlled or too distant or I say something that sounds like I am managing you instead of talking to you, I want you to tell me. Directly. I can speak directly.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“All right,” he said.
“And when I’m difficult….”
“You are allowed to be difficult,” she said.
“This is difficult.”
Something moved across his face.
Brief.
Gone.
“You are not what I expected,” he said.
“What did you expect?”
“Someone easier to resent.”
She looked at him.
He looked back.
And underneath the conversation, underneath the formal room and the steward near the door and the careful words they were both choosing, she felt it.
The pull of it.
Low and insistent, the thing her body had been doing since the balcony that she had been filing under irrelevant information and retrieving against her will at inconvenient moments.
His scent was in the room.
She had noticed it the moment he walked in.
Subtle, he was not wearing blockers, she had established that at the ball, and in an enclosed space without the overwhelming noise of three hundred other people it was simply, present.
Clean and warm with something underneath it that her omega instincts were finding extremely interesting without her permission.
She reached for her water glass.
He noticed.
She was certain he noticed because his jaw shifted slightly and he looked at the window for a moment with the expression of a man redirecting his attention deliberately.
Of course he felt it too.
That was the entire problem.
✦ ✦ ✦
The meetings continued for three days.
Morning sessions in the blue receiving room.
Afternoon walks in the garden that her mother had scheduled as casually as possible while obviously scheduling them.
Dinners every evening where Grace talked and Gibson listened and Vivian watched everything with those sharp assessing eyes and Isadora’s father drew Aldric into quiet conversations at the end of the table that she could not quite hear but that seemed, from the outside, to be going well.
Each day the space between them shrank slightly.
Not because either of them was trying to close it, more because avoiding it required active effort and active effort was exhausting and they were both, underneath everything, practical people.
On the second afternoon walk he fell into step beside her without being directed to, the way you fell into step beside someone when the alternative was walking awkwardly offset from them.
She noticed the moment it happened.
She said nothing about it.
They walked the length of the east garden and back and discussed, of all things, the relative merits of different methods of removing difficult stains from fabric, which had come up because Isadora had mentioned Esther’s tincture and he had mentioned that he had his own method from years of laundry work and they had spent twenty minutes in genuine disagreement about it.
It was the most comfortable twenty minutes she had spent in recent memory, which she found both pleasant and alarming.
On the third day he came to the morning session already in a mood.
She could see it the moment he sat down, the set of his jaw, the controlled stillness that was slightly more controlled than usual, the way he answered her first question with two words instead of a sentence.
She looked at him for a moment and said, “What happened.”
“Nothing.”
“You are annoyed.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine. You answer in two words and you answer in two words when you are either thinking very hard or keeping something in check and you do not look like you are thinking very hard.”
He looked at her.
“One of the palace attendants,” he said, after a pause.
“This morning. He was….” He stopped.
Choose.
“He made it clear that my presence here is, unusual. For an alpha.” The word came out flat.
Controlled.
“I am aware that my presence here is unusual. I did not require the reminder.”
Isadora was quiet for a moment.
“Which attendant,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
He looked at her properly then.
“Why.”
“Because you are a guest in this palace and you will be treated as one.” She said it plainly.
Not a performance of outrage, just a fact being stated.
“Which attendant?”
A pause.
“The one with the grey uniform. Older man. Works the east corridor.”
She filed it.
She would speak to her mother.
She would do it without making a scene and without telling him she had done it, because he did not need her to fight his battles, he needed the battle to simply not happen.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“You didn’t do it.”
“No. But it happened in my house.” She looked at him steadily.
“And I am sorry.”
He held her gaze for a moment.
Something in the set of his shoulders shifted, not softened, exactly.
Released, slightly.
“Thank you,” he said.
They sat in the formal room with the morning light coming through the windows and did not talk for a little while, and it was not an uncomfortable silence.
It was the silence of two people who had said something real and were letting it settle.
Then she said, “Tell me something you are good at.”
He blinked.
“What.”
“Something you are good at. Not laundry, I know about the laundry. Something else.”
He thought about it.
“I can find my way anywhere in the dark,” he said.
“Any space I’ve been in once, I can move through it without light. I don’t know why. I always could.”
“That is a very specific skill.”
“It has been useful on occasion.”
“I imagine it has.” She thought about rooftops and dark streets and the palace wall at night, about the particular skill of moving through darkness without sound.
“I can do that too,” she said.
“Move through dark spaces.”
He looked at her.
She looked back.
And between them, in the careful space of what was not being said, something shifted and settled and became part of the architecture of them, the shared understanding of two people who moved through the dark for different reasons and had, without planning it, found each other in it.
✦ ✦ ✦
The heat started on the fourth night.
Not the full heat, that was still days away, she knew her own body well enough to read the signs.
But the beginning of it, the early warning, the slow build that started as a warmth in her blood and a heightened awareness of everything around her.
Everything.
Including him.
She noticed it at dinner.
The way his scent hit her differently than it had the evening before, sharper, more insistent, her body registering it with an attention that was entirely involuntary.
She kept her hands in her lap and her face composed and ate her dinner and talked to Vivian about something she could not remember afterward and did not look at him more than was polite.
He noticed.
She could tell the slight tension in him across the table, the way he reached for his water glass and set it down without drinking from it.
His alpha instincts read what her body was beginning to broadcast whether she wanted it to or not.
She excused herself immediately after dinner.
Esther was waiting in her room.
“It’s starting,” Isadora said, the moment the door was closed.
Esther looked at her.
“How far along.”
“Early. Two or three days before it’s significant.” She sat on the edge of the bed.
“I need you to find out if the palace physician has the suppressants in stock.”
“The suppressants.” Esther said it carefully.
“Your mother…..”
“My mother wants me mated. The suppressants would delay the heat, not stop it.” She looked at Esther.
“I am not delaying it indefinitely. I am buying two or three days to……” She stopped.
To what, exactly.
To decide something.
To be ready for something.
To stop feeling like her body was making decisions that her mind had not finished making yet.
Esther looked at her with the particular expression she had for moments when she had an opinion and was deciding whether it was her place to give it.
“Say it,” Isadora said.
“He is your scent match,” Esther said quietly.
“You felt it on the balcony before you knew who he was. Your body already knows.” A pause.
“The suppressants will not change what your body already knows.”
Isadora looked at the window.
Outside the palace was dark and quiet, the garden invisible beyond the glass.
“I know that,” she said.
“Then why…..”
“Because knowing something and being ready for it are different things.” She lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.
“I have had exactly one conversation with this man where neither of us was performing something. I have known him for four days. My body is ready to throw itself at him because that is what bodies do and my body in particular has apparently decided he is the answer to every question it has ever had.” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead.
“I would like my mind to have slightly more input in the process.”
Esther was quiet for a moment.
Then, very gently: “That is fair.”
“Thank you.”
“I will find out about the suppressants.”
“Thank you, Esther.”
She lay on the bed in the dark after Esther left and listened to the palace breathing around her and thought about ice blue eyes across a dinner table and the way his scent hit her differently tonight and the slow, building warmth in her blood that was not going to wait very much longer regardless of what her mind had to say about it.
Down the corridor, in the east wing, she was fairly certain he was not sleeping either.
She closed her eyes.
Two or three days.
She could be ready in two or three days.
She was going to have to be.