Chapter 311

KAEL'S POV

Three days.

Three full days of closed doors, heavy silence, and a mate bond that confirmed she was breathing, alive, present—but couldn't tell me anything more useful than that. Three days of standing in the same corridor, pressing my hand to the same door, having the same exhausting argument with myself about whether giving her space was still the right answer or whether it had crossed some invisible line into abandonment.

I paced the corridor outside her chambers for what had to be the fortieth time today alone—possibly the fiftieth, I'd genuinely lost count—hands shoved deep in my pockets, jaw working, running out of ways to convince myself that staying out here was still doing anything productive for either of us.

She asked for it, I reminded myself. The same reminder I'd been cycling through every few hours like a prayer I'd stopped believing in. Specifically. Clearly. She looked at me and asked for space and I said yes because that's what she needed.

It didn't make it easier. Not even slightly. Not on day one, and certainly not now.

"You're going to wear a groove in that stone."

I turned. Morgessa came down the corridor carrying a stack of documents thick enough to use as a blunt instrument, watching me with an expression that somehow managed to be both genuinely sympathetic and profoundly, bone-deep tired simultaneously. The expression of someone who had been keeping a very large number of things running without the person who was supposed to be running them.

"I'm fine," I said.

She stopped, shifted the documents in her arms, and gave me a look that communicated clearly how little she believed that. "You're pacing like something cornered. Men only pace like that when they are very specifically and completely not fine."

"Thank you for the insight. Truly invaluable." I stopped moving and leaned back against the wall, crossing my arms. "Has she sent for anything? Through the door—food, water, any message to anyone?"

"The guard assigned to her door confirms she's been accepting meals when they're left." Morgessa's voice was careful, measured in a way that told me she was curating what she said and how she said it. "She's eating. Which tells us she's maintaining herself at a baseline level. Beyond that—no messages out. No requests. No responses to anything left for her."

"But she's eating." I exhaled slowly. "Okay. That's something. That's not nothing."

"It's something," she agreed. But her tone made clear she understood that something and enough were very different categories.

I looked back at the door. Just a door. Solid wood, perfectly ordinary construction, no different from any other door in this castle. And yet somehow the most genuinely impenetrable thing I'd encountered in my entire life, including feral wolves and assassination attempts and every other obstacle this realm had thrown at me.

A door was beating me. Three days running.

"Morgessa." I turned back to face her properly. "Tell me what's actually happening out there. The realm. Everything she's been separated from while she's been in there."

She set her documents against the corridor wall with the air of someone who had made the calculation that this conversation needed her full attention. "The eastern border situation has stabilized somewhat. The reinforcements we dispatched have established a defensive perimeter and are holding it. No new confirmed feral attacks in the last forty-eight hours."

"That's the good news."

"That's the good news," she confirmed. "The rest is more complicated. Word has spread about the ambush. About the losses we took. About the soldiers who didn't come back." She paused, choosing her next words with obvious care. "And about the High Fang's absence since returning. People are asking questions that we don't currently have satisfying answers to."

"What kind of questions?"

"The fundamental kind." She met my eyes directly. "Whether Fangspire can actually protect them. Whether the leadership can hold under this kind of pressure. Whether the High Fang is—" She stopped, leaving the end of the sentence conspicuously empty.

"Whether she's capable," I said, filling it in flatly.

"I wouldn't phrase it that way."

"No. But that's the question."

Morgessa neither confirmed nor denied it, which was confirmation enough.

"She's fine." The words came out sharper than I'd intended, with an edge I hadn't planned on using. "She went through something significant. She's processing it. There is a meaningful difference between that and incapability."

"I know that." Morgessa held my gaze without flinching. "I know her well enough to know that. The packs outside these walls don't know her the way we do, and they can't feel what you feel through that bond. They only know what they can observe. And what they can observe right now is absence."

I pushed off the wall, the restlessness winning over the attempt at stillness, and started moving again. Two steps. Turn. Two steps back. The groove was definitely getting deeper.

"There's something else," Morgessa said.

Her tone shifted. Something more deliberate in it, more weighted. It made me stop mid-stride and turn back.

"Thane," she said, and she said his name the way you said something you'd been carrying carefully for a while, waiting for the right moment to put it down. "Nobody has seen him in three days. Not since the night you and Elsie came back through the gates."

That landed differently than anything else she'd said. I went still in a way that had nothing to do with tiredness.

"Three full days," I said slowly.

"His chambers appear undisturbed on the surface. Nothing to suggest hurried departure—no belongings taken, no correspondence left explaining an absence, no word to Cassie or myself or anyone else on the advisory staff." She shook her head slightly. "He is simply not here. And the timing of it—"

"The same night we returned," I said.

"Precisely the same night."

I took that information and placed it somewhere cold and deliberate in my mind, somewhere I could examine it properly later without acting on incomplete information now. Whatever Thane had done—and the growing weight of suspicion in my gut was telling me the answer to that was something significant, something that connected to everything else that had gone wrong—it needed to reach Elsie before it reached anyone else.

"She deals with Thane when she comes out," I said.

Morgessa's frown was immediate. "If his disappearance is connected to the events of that night—if there are active situations in this castle that his absence is part of or enabling—"

"She deals with it." I kept my voice level but put enough weight behind it that she understood I wasn't offering this for debate. "Whatever Thane is. Whatever role he played in any of this. It is her realm, her advisory structure, her decision, and her judgment call. Not ours. Not without her."

"And if waiting creates consequences we can't undo?"

"We document absolutely everything. Every detail, every observation, every timeline. We hold our positions, we maintain operations, and we wait for her." I met her eyes and held them. "When she comes out—and she will come out—she'll need complete information and a situation that's still manageable. Not a castle full of advisors who decided to start making unilateral decisions in her absence because they got impatient."

Morgessa was quiet for a long moment, looking at me with an expression that was doing something more complicated than her usual careful professionalism.

"You know her well," she said finally.

"I'm still learning." I glanced at the door again. "But I know that much."

She picked her documents back up from the wall. "I'll coordinate with Cassie. We'll ensure the documentation on Thane's movements—and his absence—is comprehensive and timestamped." She paused at the point of leaving. "For what it's worth—she's fortunate to have someone willing to stand in a corridor for three days without breaking the door down."

"It's not worth much if standing here isn't actually helping her."

"Sometimes," Morgessa said quietly, "presence is the help. Even when it doesn't feel like anything." She walked away down the corridor, footsteps fading.

I turned back to the door.

Three days, Elsie. The mate bond hummed steadily back at me from the other side—alive, present, warm in the particular way it always was, but quieter than usual. Turned inward. Processing something I couldn't see or reach or help with. I'm here. Still here. I'm not going anywhere. Whenever you're ready, I'm here.

I pressed my palm flat against the wood, letting the warmth of the bond carry through it if it was capable of carrying anything.

Please come back out. I'm not asking for much. I just need to see your face.

I stood there with my hand against the door for another full minute, listening to the silence on the other side.

Then I made the decision.

Three days is enough. I'm going in.

I pulled my hand back and raised it to knock—

Footsteps. Running footsteps. The very specific cadence of someone moving significantly faster than any ordinary errand required, the sound of someone who had been told to hurry and had taken that instruction seriously.

I was already turned toward the corridor by the time the guard rounded the corner, every trained instinct sharpening into something alert and ready.

He came around the bend and stopped hard when he saw me, one hand braced against the wall to kill his momentum, breathing audibly, expression doing several complicated things simultaneously—alarm and uncertainty and something that looked very much like relief that there was already someone standing here capable of receiving whatever he was carrying.

"Talk," I said, before he'd even fully caught his breath.

"Sir." He straightened. "The gates. The outer castle gates."

"What about them?"

"Wolves." He steadied himself, finding the thread of his report. "Pack members—we're identifying multiple banners, at least a dozen separate packs represented so far, possibly significantly more that we haven't catalogued yet. They—" He stopped, reorganized. "It happened fast, sir. A small number of scouts arrived first, perhaps an hour ago. Then the main body built up quickly. Very quickly. We're estimating hundreds at current count, and more are still arriving from what the perimeter guards can see on the approach roads."

"Are they armed?" I asked. "Formation? Aggressive posturing?"

"Not in a combat formation, no. No weapons drawn, no challenge issued to the gate guards." He hesitated. "But they're—vocal, sir. Loud. They're making their presence very clearly known. Calling out—they're calling for—" He stopped again, and I could see him deciding how to phrase whatever the people outside the gates were actually shouting.

"For her," I said flatly. "They're calling for the High Fang."

The visible relief on his face at not having to say it himself was almost poignant.

"Yes, sir. They want to be addressed directly. They're asking questions about the eastern border situation, about the soldiers who were lost. About—" He exhaled. "About whether they're protected. Whether Fangspire is still capable of—"

"Protesting," I said.

He exhaled the word along with his remaining breath. "Yes, sir. That's the accurate description."

I stood completely still for a long moment.

Then I turned and looked at the closed door behind me.

Then at the guard.

Then back at the door.

Perfect, I thought, with precisely zero humor whatsoever. Absolutely perfect timing.

The realm, it seemed, had also run out of patience.