Chapter 10

What Cassandra Saw

Damian was going over ledgers when Cassandra let herself into his room without knocking, which should have told him something right then, honestly, because she never skipped that particular courtesy unless she was rattled.

“You need to see this,” she said. Except she didn’t have anything in her hands to show him. Just her own face, tight and pale in the candlelight, arms wrapped around herself like the walk over had chilled her a lot more than the actual weather outside could account for.

“See what.”

“The King. In the eastern gardens. With Sera.” Got it out fast, like saying it quicker might somehow make it less true. “They weren’t talking about the settlement, Damian. That wasn’t an investigation. I’ve known Sera fifteen years, I know what she looks like when she’s actually feeling something, and she was standing there looking at him like”

“Like what.”

“Like she used to look at you,” Cassandra said, and something ugly crossed her face saying it. Might’ve been jealousy. Might’ve been fear. Knowing Cassandra, probably both, tangled together so tight she couldn’t have separated them even if she’d tried. “Before. When things were simple between the two of you.”

Damian set the ledger down slow. Careful. The kind of careful that meant he wasn’t actually feeling careful at all underneath it. “You’re saying my uncle is”

“I’m saying something’s happening there. Don’t know what to call it yet. But it’s not nothing, and it’s not just business, and if it keeps going the way it’s going”

“It won’t keep going.” Flat. Final. The way he said most things when he wanted a problem already solved just because he’d decided it should be. “She’s mine. Bond’s not even formed yet, but everyone in this territory already knows she’s mine. He’s not walking in here four days into a visit and just taking that.”

“He’s the King, Damian. He can take whatever he wants.”

That landed somewhere it shouldn’t have. She watched it land, watched something flicker across his face that he covered fast with anger instead, because anger was easier for him than fear ever was. Always had been.

“Not this,” he said. “Not her.”

Cassandra didn’t answer right away. She was thinking about the two weeks she’d spent asking careful questions around the staff, trying to work out why Sera felt so different lately, and how none of the answers she’d gathered came anywhere close to explaining a woman standing in a garden at dusk looking at the Alpha King like he’d hung the moon himself. Some part of her  the part that had spent fifteen years actually loving Sera, before any of the rest of it started  hated how much this hurt to watch. Hated that some old loyalty in her still wanted to march down there and warn Sera she was playing with something that could burn her whole life down, King or no King.

The bigger part of her, though. The part that had built a whole second life on the assumption Sera would marry Damian and never look anywhere else. That part was just afraid.

“If she’s pulling away from you,” Cassandra said carefully, “and pulling toward him instead  what happens to us? What happens to the settlement, the land, everything we’ve spent years setting up?”

“Nothing happens.” Too fast for it to be entirely convincing, even to himself probably. “The bond ritual happens on schedule. She mates with me whether she’s got feelings for him or not, that’s how it works, that’s how it’s always worked. Feelings don’t override a formal bonding ceremony her own family agreed to years ago.”

“Feelings didn’t override it,” Cassandra said quietly, “when the man having them was some stranger with no actual claim on anything. This is different. This is the Alpha King. If he decides he wants her, and she’s already halfway to wanting him back  you think the elders stand in his way? You think anybody in this whole territory stands between the King and something he actually wants?”

Damian didn’t have an answer for that, and the silence after sat heavy enough that Cassandra almost regretted saying it out loud at all.

“I need to know what she’s telling him,” he said finally, low, something calculating creeping back into his voice now that the first wave of shock had passed. “About the settlement. About anything. If she’s said one word about the revision”

“She doesn’t know about the revision. Nobody told her. That was the whole point.”

“She’s smarter than we’ve been giving her credit for lately.” Said it almost to himself, working something out as it came out of his mouth. “You’ve seen it too. Watching everybody. Asking questions she never used to ask. What if she’s already figured out more than either of us think she has?”

Cassandra didn’t answer that one either. Mostly because it’d already been sitting in the back of her own head for days now, unwelcome, refusing to leave no matter how many times she tried talking herself out of it.

“We need to slow this down,” Damian said. “Whatever’s happening between her and my uncle  I need it stopped before it turns into something neither of us can undo.”

“How exactly do you plan on stopping the Alpha King from doing whatever he wants?”

“I don’t need to stop him.” Something cold slid into his voice, something Cassandra recognized from years of watching him get his way through means that had nothing to do with charm, whenever charm alone wasn’t working fast enough. “I just need her back on my side before he pulls her all the way over to his. Reminded of what she actually owes me. Reminded of what happens to people who forget where their loyalty’s supposed to sit.”

Cassandra felt something cold move through her at that, and didn’t examine too hard why, because examining it too hard would’ve meant admitting a version of Damian existed that she’d spent years choosing not to look at head on, even while sleeping with him behind his intended’s back and helping him plan things she didn’t let herself name outright, even in her own head, even alone.

“Be careful,” she said instead. “Whatever you do. Be careful. The King’s already watching this whole household like he expects to find something rotten in it. Give him one more reason to look at you specifically and you might not get another chance to fix it.”

“I know how to be careful.”

“Do you?” She looked at him a long moment, something in her voice going thinner, sadder, in a way she didn’t fully get herself. “Because from where I’m standing, careful stopped being something either of us was good at the second that man rode through the front gate.”

She left before he could answer that. Walked back to her own room through corridors gone dark and quiet, lay awake a long while after, turning over what she’d watched settle into his face right before she walked out  that particular cold, calculating look he got whenever he’d decided a problem needed handling and had already stopped caring much about the method.

She didn’t know yet what exactly he meant to do about Sera. Didn’t let herself guess too hard at it, honestly, because some part of her suspected she already knew the shape of the answer and didn’t especially want to be the one holding it first.

What she didn’t know at all  couldn’t have known, lying there in the dark  was that three floors up, Sera was standing at her own window wide awake, staring out at the same gardens where she’d stood with Kael only hours earlier, replaying his last words over and over until they’d worn a groove in her chest.

You don’t have to carry it alone. Not anymore.

She wanted, badly, dangerously, to believe him.

She had no idea yet just how fast that want was about to get tested.