Chapter 13 Chapter Thirteen

Chapter 13 Chapter Thirteen
Chapter 13
I woke before the light came.

Not from a nightmare, not from sound — just from the particular restlessness of a body that has never fully learned to trust sleep. I lay still for a while with my eyes open, watching the ceiling, listening to the house breathe around me. The fire had died completely in the night and the room had gone cold in that slow, thorough way that settles into the bones before you notice it in the air.

I pulled the blanket tighter and stayed where I was.

The pacing on the other side of the wall had stopped sometime before I fell asleep. I didn't know when. I had drifted under without realising it, which was unusual for me — I was generally aware of the exact moment sleep claimed me, the way people are when wakefulness has always been the safer state. That I had gone under without noticing told me something about how tired I actually was, underneath all the careful composure I had been carrying since I arrived here.

I got up when the window turned grey. Washed my face, dressed, sat at the desk. The routine of it was becoming familiar, which was its own strange thing — the idea that a place this foreign could begin to have a rhythm that belonged to me.

Mrs. Dorothy arrived with breakfast and the iron supplement and the same unhurried manner she brought to everything. I had started to rely on it without meaning to. There was something in her consistency that worked on me the way little else did here — not warmth exactly, not friendship, but a kind of steadiness that asked nothing in return.

"Did you sleep?" she asked, setting the tray down.

"Some," I said.

She poured the tea without comment. That was another thing about her — she didn't push. Most people who asked questions expected the asking itself to be enough to open a door. Mrs. Dorothy asked and then waited, and if the door didn't open she didn't lean against it.

I drank the tea. Ate the porridge. Took the supplement with the last of it.

"Is there something I could do?" I asked. "During the day. Something useful."

She looked at me with that measured expression of hers. "What sort of thing?"

"Anything," I said. "I'm not built for sitting still."

She was quiet for a moment, the way she was quiet when she was actually considering rather than just gathering a polite refusal. "I'll ask," she said finally. "There may be something in the east wing garden. It's been neglected."

I nodded. A garden. Soil under the hands, something growing or not growing, the uncomplicated feedback of physical work. Even the idea of it loosened something in my chest that I hadn't realised was tight.

She left and I went back to the window.

He was in the courtyard.

I saw him before I had time to prepare for it — before I could decide how to hold my face or where to position myself so that the looking seemed casual rather than what it was. He was standing near the far wall with another man I hadn't seen before, someone who moved and held himself with the authority of someone high-ranking, though not as high as the Alpha. Their conversation had the quality of something serious — not argued but pressed into, the way men discuss things they cannot afford to get wrong.

He hadn't looked up.

I stepped back slightly from the window. Not all the way — I wasn't willing to give up the view entirely, which said something about me that I didn't examine too closely. I watched from the edge of the frame. The morning light was doing something unfair to the angles of his face, the kind of light that belongs in old paintings and has no business being in a courtyard this grey.

He was my mate and he was selling me to himself and he didn't know the first thing about what that meant, and I had known for two days and said nothing.

The other man said something and he turned his head briefly, and for one disorienting second I thought he was looking directly at me. At the window. At me standing in it like something out of a story where the girl in the tower doesn't know she's the girl in the tower yet.

He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the building in general, something architectural, his eyes moving along the upper floor without stopping. Then he turned back to the conversation and I let out a breath I hadn't noticed I was holding.

I moved away from the window properly and sat on the edge of the bed.

This was the part that nobody prepared you for. Not the cruelty — I had years of training in surviving cruelty, I could navigate that in my sleep. It was this that I had no tools for. The quiet courtyard version of him. The way he sat in a chair like a regular person and asked how long I'd been in that house and then said nothing for a moment that felt like thinking rather than performance. The pacing through the wall at night. The fact that he'd told me the situation that caused the cortisol would be addressed — not as a promise, not decorated with anything, just said plainly the way you say something when you mean it and don't need it to sound like more than it is.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

This was the thing about the bond that the Moon Goddess had not mentioned when she showed me the mark in that floating mirror. She had said blessed and tested and left the rest for me to figure out in real time. What she had not said was that knowing the truth about someone before they knew it about themselves was its own particular kind of ache. That watching a person who was yours — fated, marked, chosen by forces older than either of you — move through his own life with no idea you existed in it as anything more than a complication was a loneliness unlike the other kind.

The other kind I was used to.

This kind was new.

And I sat with it in the cold room while the fire stayed dead and the courtyard emptied below and the morning moved through its slow, indifferent hours around me.