Chapter 17 17

Chapter 17 17
Chapter 17
Daphne's POV

I thought about what Vera said for the rest of the day.

Not obsessively — I had learned long ago that turning things over too many times was a way of wearing yourself down without arriving anywhere useful. But it sat with me the way certain things do, not loudly, just present. The way a stone sits in a shoe. You are aware of it with every step without it being the only thing you are aware of.

He noticed.

I didn't know what to do with that. I had stayed seated because standing felt like a surrender I wasn't prepared to make, not because I was trying to communicate anything. It had been instinct, or something close to instinct — the decision of someone who has been made small for so long that the refusal to make themselves smaller becomes less a statement and more a quiet act of self-preservation. I had not done it for him. And yet he had seen it, and Vera had seen him seeing it, and now I was sitting with the knowledge that something I had done without calculation had been read more clearly than most things I had done with it.

That was its own unsettling kind of information.

I went back to the garden in the afternoon. The sky was still the flat undecided white it had been all morning but the temperature had lifted slightly and the air smelled of wet stone and something green underneath it, the particular smell of a garden that is beginning, very slowly, to wake up. I worked on the south bed, turning the soil at the deeper level where the clay began, trying to break it up enough to give the lavender roots room to breathe if they decided to come back.

Physical work had always been the place where my thoughts organised themselves without my help. Something about the body being occupied freed a part of the mind that didn't do well when given nothing but itself to work on. By the time my arms were properly tired I had arrived, without quite deciding to, at a clearer understanding of my situation than I'd had in the morning.

I was going to have to tell him.

Not now. Not tomorrow. But at some point, and probably before whatever window existed for telling it honestly had closed and the only option left was him finding out some other way. A revealed secret has a different weight than a shared one. I had learned this the hard way and more than once. The longer the withholding, the more the truth, when it came, became about the withholding rather than the thing itself.

The mark. The vision. What it meant.

I pressed the trowel into the soil and turned it.

The question was not whether to tell him but how, and more than how, when. There needed to be something between us first — not warmth exactly, not trust in the full sense, but enough of a foundation that the telling didn't land on bare ground. What Vera had said about availability and presence moved through my mind again. He was doing something. Whatever was happening in that room through the wall at night, the pacing, the restlessness, the grief that was six years old and still alive — something was shifting in him, incrementally, and I did not think it had nothing to do with me. I did not think I was imagining it.

I was still in the garden when the door opened.

I had stopped assuming it would be Mrs. Dorothy. I looked up.

It was one of the men I hadn't seen before — young, broad through the shoulders, with the particular bearing of someone who had been trained to it rather than born to it. He stopped at the edge of the cleared bed and held himself with the careful neutrality of someone delivering a message they have been told to deliver without editorialising.

"The Alpha asks if you would join him for dinner," he said. "In the east dining room. At seven."

Not a summons. An ask. The distinction was deliberate or it wasn't, but either way it registered.

"Yes," I said. "Tell him yes."

The man nodded and left and I stayed where I was for a moment with the trowel in my hand, looking at the soil.

Dinner. A room I hadn't been to. The two of us across a table without Mrs. Dorothy nearby, without the clinical framing of medical results or cortisol levels to give the conversation a defined purpose. Just dinner, which was either a simple thing or was not simple at all, and I suspected I already knew which.

I went in and washed properly this time, not just my hands but everything, and changed into the better of the two blouses that had appeared in the wardrobe. I looked at myself in the mirror above the basin for a moment — not with any particular feeling, just taking stock. I had slept better the last two nights. The shadows under my eyes were still there but lighter. I looked, faintly and for the first time in longer than I could account for, like someone who was being adequately fed and was not in immediate danger.

It was extraordinary how much difference adequate and not in immediate danger could make to a face.

Mrs. Dorothy appeared at five to seven and walked me down a corridor I hadn't used before, further into the house, past doors that were closed and rooms that were dark and one that was not — a library, glimpsed briefly as we passed, shelves floor to ceiling and a fire going and the smell of old paper that reached me even through the door and made something in me go very still with wanting.

The east dining room was smaller than I had imagined. One long table but set only at one end, two chairs, candles already lit. He was standing when I came in, which I had not expected.

He waited until I was seated before he sat down himself.

And then he looked at me across the small pool of candlelight between us, and said, "Tell me something true."