Chapter 7

Questions She Wasn’t Ready to Answer

Morning found Sera running on almost no sleep. She was annoyed with herself about it, honestly  annoyed that a man she’d known for the length of one dinner had somehow taken up that much room in her head overnight, when she had actual things to be losing sleep over. Damian. Cassandra. A glass of water that was still three years off but coming, always coming, no matter how careful she tried to be about any of it.

Tessa clocked the shadows under her eyes at breakfast and didn’t say anything, which somehow felt worse than if she had.

The summons showed up before Sera had even finished her tea. One of the King’s guard at the door, polite about it but not really asking, saying His Majesty would like a word with Miss Voss, if she had a moment. She did not have a moment, particularly. Didn’t matter. Wasn’t really the kind of invitation you turned down.

She found him in the little study off the east wing that the household had apparently handed over to him for however long he was staying  papers already spread across the desk like he’d been up working since before the sun bothered showing up. Bastian was there too, off to the side, arms crossed, watching her walk in with a look on his face she couldn’t quite place and didn’t much care for.

“Miss Voss.” Kael didn’t stand. Didn’t do the little half-rise most men did around her out of habit more than any real respect. Just glanced up from whatever he’d been reading, and there it was again  that same directness from dinner, like he was taking inventory of her all over from the start. “Thank you for coming.”

“Not sure I had much of a choice.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. “You’ve always got a choice. You just might not like the other option.” He nodded at the chair across from him. “Sit. Won’t take long.”

She sat. Hands in her lap, doing her absolute best to look like a woman with nothing whatsoever to hide  which, she thought, a little wild around the edges, was maybe the first time in either of her lives that had actually been true.

“Your family’s land borders the eastern trade routes, I understand,” Kael said, all business now, his voice a completely different animal from the low careful thing it’d been at dinner. “And your marriage settlement has those routes passing formally over to Crimson Moon Pack.”

“That’s right.”

“Who negotiated the terms of it?”

That one caught her off guard. Not because it was a strange question  because she’d genuinely never asked it herself. Not the first time around, anyway. She’d been eighteen and half in love with the idea of being chosen by somebody, and it had never once crossed her mind to wonder who’d actually sat down and hammered out the fine print of her own life while she wasn’t looking.

“The elders, I assume,” she said slowly. “And my aunt, on my behalf. I wasn’t of age yet when it was first put together.”

“So you never actually saw the terms.”

“No.”

Kael and Bastian traded a look she wasn’t meant to see. Saw it anyway.

“Is that strange?” she asked, before either of them could smooth it over. “For someone in my position, not seeing the terms of her own settlement?”

“Not unheard of,” Kael said, which really wasn’t an answer, and she got the distinct sense he knew that as well as she did. “Makes it harder to know who benefited most from how it got written, though. And when.”

“You think somebody changed something.”

“I think,” he said, careful about it, “a lot of coin’s moved around your engagement over the years, in directions that don’t line up with a simple land transfer. I’d like to know where it went. Who arranged for it to go there.”

She sat with that for a second, turning it over. In the life she remembered, none of this had ever come up  the King had been dead, Damian’s authority nobody questioned, and whatever happened with her inheritance had just quietly disappeared into the ordinary business of being married to a man who never let her look too hard at any ledger. She’d figured that was normal. Figured every wife got kept a little in the dark on money, same as every wife got kept a little in the dark on plenty of other things.

“I don’t have those answers,” she said, and meant it. “But I’d like them too.”

That got her a longer look than the sentence probably deserved. Bastian shifted where he stood by the window. Kael’s whole face did something complicated for a second, like he hadn’t been expecting that particular reply and wasn’t sure yet what to make of it.

“Most people in your position would rather not know. Tends to be easier.”

“I’ve been finding lately that easier isn’t the same thing as better.” It was out of her mouth before she’d really thought it through, and she watched him catch the weight underneath it, watched something in his face go a shade more careful, like he’d heard more in that one sentence than she meant to give him.

“Strange thing for a woman about to be Luna to say.”

“Is it?” She held his eyes, something a little reckless rising up in her that she hadn’t planned on and couldn’t have explained if pressed. “I’d have thought a King who rides four days to personally dig into his own nephew’s household would understand exactly what I mean by it.”

The room went quiet. Bastian, to his credit, didn’t say one word, though she could feel him watching the two of them like he was watching something catch fire in slow motion and hadn’t decided yet whether it was his job to put it out.

“You’re very direct, Miss Voss.”

“Decided it’s more useful than the alternative.”

Something almost like an actual smile made it onto his face that time. Gone fast. But it had been there.

He asked a few more questions after that  smaller stuff, dates, names, whether she remembered certain meetings or the people who sat in on them  and she answered honest as she could without handing over the one truth that would’ve gotten the whole household deciding she belonged somewhere locked up for her own good. Eventually he thanked her, said someone would follow up if more came up, and let her go.

She was halfway down the corridor, still a little shaky from the whole thing, when she nearly walked straight into Damian coming the other direction.

“There you are.” He grabbed her arm, easy, familiar, same as always  except something in his face wasn’t quite as easy as his voice. “Vivienne said the King wanted you this morning. Personally.”

“He had questions about the settlement.”

“Did he.” His jaw did that thing again, same tight set as dinner the night before. “Funny. Didn’t ask me one single thing about my own settlement, and I’m the one getting married here.”

“Maybe he figured I’d know things you didn’t.”

“Maybe.” Light enough on the surface, except his grip on her arm hadn’t loosened one bit, and the way he was looking at her now felt less like affection and more like somebody running a tally. Checking her over for what exactly, she couldn’t have said. “Long while in there, for a few questions about a land deal.”

“Felt long. Wasn’t, probably.”

“Sure.” He let go finally, stepped back, smile not quite sitting right on his face  a shade too tight at the edges. “Just be careful with him. He’s not exactly known for warm. Whatever he’s doing with all this, I’d rather you not end up caught in the middle of it.”

She almost laughed. Almost told him, right there in that empty corridor, that she’d already been caught in the middle of something with his name written all over it, once, in a life he didn’t remember and she couldn’t forget no matter how hard she tried  and that being caught in the middle of whatever the King was doing sounded like a serious improvement by comparison, honestly.

Didn’t say any of it. Just nodded. Let him walk off toward the training yard like the conversation had settled something. Stood there a while after he’d gone, heart still going too fast for reasons that had nothing to do with him at all.

She didn’t know yet that Damian had walked straight from that corridor to his mother, quiet and urgent, and asked her  first time in his whole life  whether the old settlement papers might be worth a second look before anybody else got there first.