Chapter 6

A Question Nobody Was Supposed to Ask

The room they’d given the King for the night was bigger than it needed to be. Dark wood everywhere, a fire already going, somebody clearly deciding a King couldn’t possibly sit in a cold room even for one evening. Kael didn’t care much either way, honestly. He’d slept in worse. Slept in actual ditches during the succession war, back when sleep was something you grabbed in twenty minute pieces between one disaster and the next, and a room this warm still felt a little like a joke somebody was playing on him.

Bastian let himself in without knocking. Which was normal. Which was, so far, the one single thing about this entire visit that had felt normal at all.

“You’re doing the thing,” Bastian said, dropping into the chair across from the fire like he owned it, like it was his fire and his room and not the other way around. “Where you go quiet and I’ve got to guess what’s actually bothering you instead of you just saying it like a person.”

“I’m tired. That’s not a mystery, Bastian. It’s a four day ride.”

“Sure it is.” Bastian didn’t believe him, obviously, and didn’t bother pretending otherwise either. He’d known Kael longer than anybody left alive knew him  long enough to have earned the right to just say things plainly instead of tiptoeing the way everybody else at court had learned to do over the years. “You went quiet at dinner. Before that too, actually. In the courtyard, when you were staring up at that gallery like you’d seen something worth a second look.”

Kael didn’t answer right away. Poured himself a drink he didn’t especially want, mostly just for something to do with his hands, and tried to work out how to say this without it sounding as insane out loud as it already sounded rattling around in his own head.

“The girl,” he said finally.

“Sera Voss.” Bastian said the name like he was already three steps ahead, which, knowing him, he probably was. “Damian’s intended. What about her.”

“Nothing about her.” Kael turned the glass in his hand, watched the firelight do something strange to the liquid inside it. “Everything about her. I don’t have a better way to explain it than that, so don’t ask me to.”

Bastian leaned forward slightly anyway. “Try.”

“I looked up at that gallery and I knew somebody was standing there before I even properly saw her. Knew it the way you know somebody’s behind you in a room even with your back turned.” Saying it out loud made it sound worse somehow. More like a symptom than an instinct. “And then at dinner she said one true thing out loud that nobody else at that table had the nerve to say, and I” He stopped. Shook his head. Didn’t have a good ending for that sentence and wasn’t going to force one.

“You felt something.”

“I felt something,” Kael admitted, and hated how much it cost him just to say it that plainly. He’d spent years training himself out of saying anything plainly, out of feeling much of anything where it might show on his face and get used against him later by somebody smarter and hungrier than they looked. “Which is exactly the problem, because I’ve met that woman exactly once, for the length of one dinner, and I have no business feeling anything about her whatsoever.”

Bastian went quiet for a second. Not the comfortable kind either  the kind where Kael could practically watch him running through several unhelpful things to say and throwing all of them out in favor of something worse.

“You know what that sounds like,” Bastian said eventually.

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying what it sounds like.”

“I know what it sounds like.” Kael set the glass down harder than he meant to, the sound of it too loud in the quiet room. “It sounds like a bond. Which is impossible, because bonds don’t work that way for a man my age who’s already” He didn’t finish that one either. Didn’t need to. Bastian knew the whole ugly history as well as anybody alive did  the one bond Kael had almost had decades ago and lost before it ever properly started, and every year since spent convincing himself that particular door was shut for good, no sense standing around hoping it opened twice.

“Bonds skip people sometimes,” Bastian said carefully. “You know that better than most. Doesn’t mean they can’t find somebody twice.”

“She’s engaged to my nephew.”

“Intended to your nephew,” Bastian corrected, like the difference actually mattered, like there was some meaningful gap between those two words Kael could crawl through if he tried hard enough. “Not mated yet. Not married yet. Nothing’s actually settled, whatever everyone in that hall wants to act like.”

“Everyone in that hall talks about it like it’s already done.”

“Everyone in that hall also talks about Damian like he’s some kind of golden example of what an Alpha’s supposed to look like,” Bastian said, and something in his voice went flatter, more careful all at once. “Which is part of why we’re actually here, if you remember. That’s the job. Not the girl.”

Kael knew that. Knew it better than Bastian did, if he was honest, since it was Kael who’d ordered this whole investigation in the first place  quiet reports drifting up from Crimson Moon Pack for the better part of a year now. Coin going missing in amounts too small to prove and too consistent to be an accident. A couple of merchants grumbling about deals that went strangely one-sided right around the time Damian got involved. Nothing damning on its own. Just enough small threads that somebody eventually had to come pull on them properly.

“I haven’t forgotten the job,” Kael said.

“Could’ve fooled me, the way you were looking at that gallery like the job had a face and gold-brown hair.”

“Auburn,” Kael said, before he could stop himself, and immediately, immediately wished he hadn’t.

Bastian raised an eyebrow slowly, deliberately, clearly enjoying this a great deal more than the situation actually deserved. “Auburn.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s a little bit the point.” Bastian leaned back, arms crossed, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who was supposedly here to help and not just torment him. “Look. I’m not telling you to do anything about it. Goddess knows the timing’s a nightmare, given who she’s set to marry, given that we’re literally here to dig into that same family. I’m just saying  I’ve known you a long time, Kael. I sat through years of nothing. Years of you deciding you didn’t have room in your life for anything that wasn’t the crown, or the next fire that needed putting out. I’ve never once, in all that time, watched you go quiet over a woman across a dinner table. Not once.”

Kael didn’t have anything to say to that, which was itself its own kind of answer, and they both knew it without either of them saying so.

“So here’s my actual question,” Bastian said, tone shifting into something more careful, the way it always did right before he said something Kael didn’t especially want to hear. “What are you going to do if it turns out you’re right? If this is what it feels like it might be, and it’s not just nerves after a long ride?”

“Nothing.” Kael said it flat, final. “I’m going to do nothing. She’s promised to my nephew, we’re here to investigate that same nephew’s household, and the last thing this territory needs right now is its King deciding he’s got feelings for the one woman sitting at the center of all of it.”

“That’s not an answer to what I asked.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

Bastian looked at him a long moment, firelight shifting across his face, and didn’t push it any further tonight, which was its own small mercy. He got up, stretched, headed for the door like the conversation was already over  and then stopped, one hand on the frame, not quite turning back around.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “she said one true thing out loud at a table full of people who’ve spent years agreeing not to. That’s not nothing, Kael. Whatever else this turns out to be, that girl’s paying attention to something the rest of this household stopped paying attention to a long while ago.”

He left before Kael could ask what exactly he meant by that, and Kael sat there alone by the fire a long while afterward, turning the empty glass over and over in his hand, trying and mostly failing to convince himself Bastian was wrong about any part of it.

He didn’t sleep well. Kept thinking about grey eyes across a dinner table, and one flat, quiet word  convenient  that had apparently been sitting in his own chest longer than he wanted to admit, just waiting for somebody brave enough, or careless enough, to finally say it out loud.

Three floors below him…

Sera Voss lay awake too.

One of them couldn’t stop thinking about a woman he had no right to want.

The other couldn’t stop thinking about a man who wasn’t supposed to exist.

Neither of them knew fate had already begun pulling them toward each other.