Chapter 4 The Estate
Rook Ashford arrived at my table on a Thursday morning with no escort, both hands visible at his sides, and an opener so disarmingly ordinary that I almost missed the machinery behind it.
"You patched up three of our border scouts about six weeks ago," he said, sitting down across from me without waiting for an invitation. "Didn't charge them. Told them the Confederation needed better rotation schedules."
"They did need better rotation schedules."
"They did." A small pause. "We adjusted them. The scouts specifically asked me to pass that along."
I looked at him.
He was younger than his brother by a few years and he carried himself completely differently — not the compact, controlled stillness of a man who had built his authority over time, but the easy physical looseness of someone who had never needed to perform confidence because it wasn't actually what he was selling. He had dark hair and a face that looked like it was considering laughing at something and deciding whether the timing was right.
I didn't dislike him immediately. That was notable, for me. I disliked most people immediately these days, on the theory that it was better to revise upward than to start with goodwill and have to walk it back.
"You're the beta," I said. "Rook Ashford. His brother."
"Both of those things, yes."
"I know why you're here."
"Then you know the broad shape. The Voidborne are moving through the neutral territory. You're connected to everyone in the network they're targeting. Your name is in their intelligence files — we don't know how recently, but recently enough that we're concerned." He set a folded document on my table. Confederation seal, red wax. "The arrangement we're proposing is straightforward. Protection and resources from Ironspire. In exchange, your knowledge of the neutral-territory network — who's been turned, who hasn't, how the routes run."
I didn't touch the document. I looked at it.
"What does he want?" I said.
"Practically? The network intelligence."
"And less practically?"
Rook was quiet for a moment. He had a version of his brother's stillness — not as controlled, less armored, but there. The look of someone deciding what honesty was worth.
"He hasn't slept well since the Bloodmoon," he said. "I'm not telling you that to create obligation. I'm telling you because you're walking into something and you should know the state of it."
I folded a piece of gauze that didn't need folding.
"Is that supposed to make me sympathetic?"
"No. I don't think you're particularly interested in sympathy as a metric." His tone was not unkind. "I think you're interested in information. So there it is: he's not sleeping, his wolf's been unsettled for six months, and the official story is that it's the Voidborne threat. The unofficial story —" He stopped. "Well. You know the unofficial story."
I did. Rejection sickness — the backlash that hit alphas when a bond they'd severed refused to die cleanly. Pack texts said it wasn't supposed to happen to the one who rejected. Pack texts were apparently wrong.
"I have terms," I said.
"I expected you would."
"My own room. On a floor he doesn't use, or as close as possible. Library access — full access, not curated. Nobody touches my medical supplies. And I can leave whenever I choose. That is not a point for negotiation."
"Agreed on all counts."
"Tell him three times." I picked up the document. "Whatever explanation you're planning to give him when you get back — whatever version of this conversation you're going to walk in and deliver — say it three times. He strikes me as someone who hears what he wants the first time through."
Rook made a sound. Not quite a laugh — almost one, pulled out of him involuntarily. "He's going to ask what that means."
"Tell him it means he's a slow learner and I have patience for approximately none of it."
This time he did laugh. A real one, brief and genuine and making him look about nineteen for a second.
"One more thing," I said. "Why is he sending you? Not someone from intelligence, not a pack guard. You."
Rook considered. "Because you're not going to come with someone from intelligence. You'd have spotted the angle from fifty feet and walked the other direction."
"And with you?"
"With me," he said, "it's actually a conversation."
I thought about it. I thought about Lyse's list of texts, three of which were in Ironspire's archive. I thought about the Voidborne moving faster than I was moving, and my name in their files, and the feather on my pillow. I thought about being tired of not knowing what I was.
"Pack my table while I get my kit," I said.
He looked mildly surprised, which I appreciated. He'd been expecting more resistance. Most people were.
The drive was three hours.
Rook was a good travel companion in the specific way of people who understand that silence is not a problem to be solved. He drove and I looked out the window at the neutral territory giving way to the Confederation's outer border, and we talked occasionally — about the settlements I'd worked in, about the Voidborne's movement patterns, about the particular challenges of pack medicine in areas where the dominant paradigm was that wolves heal themselves and healers are for omegas and children.
He didn't ask about the Bloodmoon. I was grateful for that.
The Ironspire border markers appeared in the mid afternoon light — stone, carved, older than the current pack structure by at least a generation. The trees on the Ironspire side were different. Older, bigger, the understory denser and darker, the whole feel of the territory settling around you as you crossed.
The estate came around a long curve in the road: four stories, stone and dark timber, built with the particular architecture of something that knew what it was and had stopped negotiating about it a long time ago. Defensive in the bones. Comfortable in the skin. The kind of building that had absorbed the weight of generations and was not bothered by it.
I stepped out of the car and set my bag down and read the building — exits, load-bearing points, the way the light fell on the entry side, which rooms would have direct sight lines to the gate. A habit. I did it with every unfamiliar space now.
Then I looked up.
Three floors, one set of windows on the left side, curtains half-drawn. The bond's ghost pulled toward that point in the building with the specific directional certainty of a compass finding north. He was there. He was watching.
I let him.
Then I picked up my bag and followed Rook inside.
He came down twenty minutes later.
I was in the entrance hall, still taking in the layout, when I heard him on the stairs. I didn't turn around. I kept reading the room — the two exits, the fireplace that had been used recently, the corridor that went east and probably led to the section of the estate that wasn't for guests — and waited.
"Seraphine."
I turned.
It had been six months. I had, in that time, constructed a fairly thorough mental model of what this moment might look like and how I planned to behave in it, and I had also not anticipated how physically strange it would be to have the bond's ghost pull sharply toward someone who was looking at me with the complicated expression of a man who had prepared himself for something and found that preparation inadequate.
He looked tired. That was the first thing. Controlled and assembled and present — he was very good at being present, I'd grant him that — but underneath it, in the quality of the lines at the corners of his eyes and the particular gray of them, tired.
Good, said a small private part of me. Then I told that part to be quiet because I was not here for revenge and I needed to stay useful.
"Alpha Ashford," I said.
"Cael."
I held his gaze and did not call him Cael. Not because I was making a point, though I was also making a point, but because we were not there yet and I had learned not to abbreviate distances that needed to be traveled.
"Rook will show you to your room," he said. "We'll start the intelligence review tomorrow. If you need time to settle —"
He let a thread of alpha command into it. Light, professional — the kind he probably used in a hundred routine conversations without thinking about it, the quiet undertow of authority that made people straighten and agree.
I felt it arrive. I felt it find no purchase.
It was like hearing a word in a language I'd never learned — I registered the sound but my body had no receiver for the meaning. The command moved through me and was gone.
I blinked once. "Tomorrow is fine," I said, and meant it, because I was tired from the drive and I wanted to get my bearings before anything began.
I watched him register it. The slight shift — not his face, which stayed composed, but something behind his eyes. He had used the command voice and nothing had happened, and he was too intelligent to miss what that meant.
"Good," he said. Even. Careful.
Rook led me upstairs. East wing, top floor, four rooms from anyone else, exactly as I'd specified. The room was large and clean and the window faced the tree line, which I preferred. I stood at it for a while after Rook left, breathing the cool air from the gap at the top, watching the light change in the canopy.
The estate was quiet. Somewhere below, in whatever room he'd retreated to, Cael Ashford was probably sitting very still and thinking about a woman who hadn't flinched when he told her what to do.
I hoped he was sitting with it.
I hoped it was uncomfortable.
Then I unpacked my kit,
because the work was still the work, and there was always work to do.