Chapter 10 Almost Believe You
"Freda… where are you?"
The words dissolved into the empty room. The map gave no answer. The frost on the windowpane held its shape, indifferent.
Lucian sat in the silence he had built around himself like a fortress, and for one unguarded moment, the fortress showed its cracks.
Then he straightened. Picked up his pen. And led his pack.
Cassandra came to his study that morning unannounced.
That alone made him look up.
She never came to the study unannounced , it was one of the unspoken arrangements of their marriage, a boundary they had both honored without ever naming it. His space. Her space. The careful geography of two people sharing a house without sharing a life.
But here she was, closing the door behind her with a quiet, deliberate click that told him this was not a casual visit.
She did not sit on the couch beside the fireplace, where the few conversations they did have usually unfolded , side by side, parallel, almost friendly in their emptiness.
She sat in the formal chair directly across his desk. Straight-backed. Hands folded in her lap. Eyes clear and absolutely steady.
He set his pen down.
"I want to talk about us," she said.
The words were simple. The weight behind them was not.
He recognized it immediately , not anger, not desperation, but something colder and more considered. She had rehearsed this. She had chosen this morning deliberately.
He felt the shift in the air and kept his face still.
"Cassandra… "
"Let me finish."
Her voice was calm. Not sharp. Calm was worse , it meant she had already moved past the part where emotion made her vulnerable.
"I am not here to ask for love. I stopped expecting that somewhere in the second year, and we both know it. I am not here to perform another version of a conversation we have never actually had."
She paused, precisely.
"I am asking you… to stop treating me like some decision you made and neatly filed away."
He said nothing. He gave her that much.
"You promised the council a stable leadership unit," she continued. "A united front. A pack that trusted its Alpha pair."
She tilted her head slightly, one degree, a gesture that on another woman might have been gentle. On Cassandra it was surgical.
"You can't even manage a civil dinner conversation, Lucian. You look through me at breakfast. You say good morning the way you read patrol reports , correctly, and without a single thought behind it."
"I have never been dishonest with you," he said carefully, "about what this was."
"No."
She agreed too quickly, and that was how he knew she had been waiting for exactly that response.
"You were precise about what this wasn't. You told me it was a political arrangement and I accepted that. I accepted it because I believed , " she stopped for just a breath , "that it would evolve. That time and proximity would build something functional. Even if it wasn't love, it would be partnership. Respect. Presence."
Her eyes held his without flinching.
"I have received none of those things."
The room seemed smaller than it was, the shadows stretching closer. The fire in the corner burned low and steady, casting warm light across Cassandra's composed face as she spoke the words that had lived unspoken in this house for a long time.
He clasped his hands on the desk. "What is it you want from this conversation?"
"The truth."
She said it without hesitation.
Then she leaned forward, just slightly, just enough to cross into the space he had always maintained between them. Her voice dropped, not in softness, but in precision.
"Because I have spent five years wondering who she was."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.
He did not move. He did not look away.
But something happened in his face , so small, so fast, that a less observant woman would have missed it entirely. A tightening at the outer corners of his eyes. A barely perceptible tension in his jaw, there for less than a second and then gone, locked back behind the controlled expression he wore like a second skin.
She saw it. She catalogued it. She kept her own face completely, flawlessly still.
The fire crackled once. The frost on the windowpane caught the morning light.
"There is no one," he said.
The words came out measured. Practiced. The tone of a man answering a question he had prepared for.
And that , that practiced quality , was what told her everything she needed to know.
She stood.
She smoothed the front of her jacket with one hand, a single unhurried motion.
She looked at him across the desk , this man she had married, this Alpha she had followed, this closed and careful stranger she had shared a house with for five years , and she held his gaze for a long, quiet moment.
"The worst part," she said softly, "is that I almost believe you."
She turned and walked to the door.
Her steps were even. Her shoulders did not drop. She opened the door, passed through it, and pulled it shut behind her without a sound.
Lucian sat still.
He stared at the closed door, at the exact place where she had been standing, at the empty formal chair that still held the faint impression of her presence.
The fire burned on. The briefing papers lay open on his desk, edges curling slightly, waiting.
He did not reach for them.
I almost believe you.
Not , I believe you. Almost.
She had chosen that word with the same precision she chose everything, and she had left it in the room on purpose. A splinter, small and sharp, placed exactly where it would be hardest to remove.
His jaw tightened.
Somewhere down the hall, her footsteps faded into the quiet of the house.
And for the first time in five years, Lucian sat at his desk feeling not the hollow absence he had carried, but the sharp, distinct discomfort of being truly seen.
And of having lied anyway.