Chapter 48 Everyone Knows

Chapter 48 Everyone Knows

AZIZA

The door banged open at half past seven.

I sat up so fast I hit my shoulder on the wall and grabbed the blanket up to my chest before I registered that it was Hessa from the third room down, wide-eyed and vibrating, with two women I recognised from the laundry rotation pressing in behind her.

"Is it true?" Hessa asked, already halfway across the room. "People are saying — the garden last night, and Lady Vessa — is it true he was with you?"

I opened my mouth.

More people came through the door.

I didn't even know all of their names. A girl from the kitchen supply line. Two older women from the household administrative staff, one of whom had her arms crossed before she was fully through the doorway. A runner I had seen a dozen times in the corridors but never spoken to, who was standing on his toes trying to see over the women in front of him.

"Someone said Lady Vessa threw a rock," the girl from supply was saying to nobody in particular.

"She tried to hit her," Hessa confirmed, pointing at me, "with a rock. An actual rock."

"It wasn't—" I started.

"She screamed the whole way back to her quarters," said the woman with her arms crossed, looking at me like she was deciding something. "Half the compound heard her."

"The other half heard about it by breakfast," the second older woman added.

I got out of bed. My feet hit the cold floor and I pushed through the three people closest to me toward the window, mostly because I needed a wall at my back. My hair was still half-loose from the night and my eyes felt swollen and the room was full of people I had not invited and everyone was talking at the same time.

Some of them looked excited. Genuinely delighted, the way people get when something dramatic happens to someone else. The runner had given up trying to see over people and was just standing there with his mouth slightly open. Hessa was telling someone what she had heard with her hands moving and her eyes bright.

The women with their arms crossed were not delighted.

"It's disgraceful," the one who had spoken first said, still looking at me. "An omega. A household staff member. In the garden with the Crown Prince."

"She didn't exactly drag him there," someone muttered.

"She's been working at him for months," the woman said. "Everyone could see it."

My hands tightened on the windowsill behind me.

Then Sena appeared.

She came through the door in a house servant uniform, a beige one I didn't recognise, her hair pinned up under a cloth that was slightly crooked on one side. She took one look at the room and pushed her way through to me with her elbows and planted herself at my side and grabbed my arm and squeezed it once, hard.

She looked at my face for a second. Then she looked at the room.

"How did all of you get in here?" she asked.

"The door was—" Hessa gestured.

"It's closed now," Sena said. She was not loud about it. Just firm in the way she was firm about most things, the particular quality she had of meaning what she said without needing to perform it. "Ana needs to get dressed. Give her the room."

People shuffled. Hessa looked like she wanted to object. The woman with her arms crossed looked like she wanted to say several more things. Neither of them said anything out loud, and slowly, unevenly, the room emptied until it was just me and Sena and the sound of voices moving back down the corridor.

Sena looked at me. "Are you hurt?"

"No," I said.

"Are you all right?"

I pressed the heel of my hand to my left eye socket, which was throbbing for no reason I could identify. "I don't know yet."

She nodded and went to sit on the edge of the bed and waited.

I was still standing at the window when the knock came. Two guards, both in full compound uniform, who did not come in but stood in the doorway with their backs straight and their eyes somewhere over my head in the way people looked at you when they were trying to communicate something without words.

"You're summoned to the great hall," the nearer one said. "You are to appear at Noon. Lord Rhydian and the Alpha will be present." He paused. "Don't be late."

He handed me a sealed note through the doorway without stepping in and then both of them left and I stood holding the note and looking at the corridor for a moment after they'd gone. The way they'd looked at me — not angry, exactly. More like they'd already filed me under something and the filing wasn't flattering.

I closed the door and locked it.

Sena was still on the bed. She watched me lean against the door and look at the ceiling.

"Sena," I said. "He wants to name me his concubine. Formally. In front of the pack."

Silence.

"He said when he's Alpha he'll make me Luna."

More silence.

I looked at her. She was sitting with her hands in her lap and her head tilted slightly and her expression was the one she used when she was running through something from several directions at once.

"Sena."

"I heard you," she said. "I'm thinking."

"He can't do it," I said. My voice came out rougher than I expected. "His father won't agree, the council won't agree, it'll destabilise everything and draw attention to me and if anyone starts digging properly into where I came from—"

"Ana." Sena held up one hand. "Stop."

I stopped.

She looked at me for a long moment. "Think about what you just told me," she said carefully. "He wants to formally declare you to the pack. As his concubine first, Luna when he has the power to make it stick." She kept her eyes on mine. "You would have access to the inner circle at a level that no household staff position ever gave you. You would be at his table. In his meetings. In the rooms where his father makes decisions." She paused and let that sit. "Ana. This is everything you needed and couldn't get because you were too low in the compound hierarchy to reach it."

I looked at her.

My back hit the door and I slid down it until I was sitting on the floor with my knees up and my hands on my face. The sealed note crinkled against my palm.

"It's not—" I started. "Sena, it's not that simple. If I take this position and the records room move goes wrong, if Vessa or the Alpha find something that ties back to me, if the blood magic fails completely before I get what I need—"

"Then you'll be further inside than you've ever been when it happens," Sena said. "Instead of a household staff member with limited access and a failing disguise."

I pressed my palms harder against my face.

She was right. The logic of it sat in my chest and I went over it again and it was still right. Closer access. Inner rooms. His protection over me formally, in pack law, which meant Vessa could do nothing more without it coming back to Rhydian directly. Two corridors from the records room rather than six. Every door that had been closed to a household staff member now open on legitimate grounds.

My mother would have said take it without pausing.

My father's careful voice in my head said: and what happens to the man who opened those doors when the truth comes out?

"I'm scared, Sena," I said into my palms.

It came out smaller than I meant it to.

Sena crossed the room and sat on the floor beside me and put her shoulder against mine. She didn't say anything for a moment. Outside, the corridor was settling back into its ordinary noise. Somewhere down the hall someone laughed at something, short and bright, completely indifferent to the fact that my entire situation had shifted overnight.

"You've been scared before," Sena said finally. "You were scared in the throne room and you did the working anyway. You were scared in the holding area and you walked in anyway." She looked at the side of my face. "Being scared hasn't stopped you yet."

I lowered my hands and looked at the sealed note in my lap.

The wax was pressed flat and plain with no crest. Same as the letter from the garden. His handwriting on the front, my name in that precise economical hand.

I had a noon summons to the great hall and a concubine offer from the Crown Prince and a blood magic working cracking a little more every day and a records room two corridors away and a mission I had walked through a palace fire to complete.

I broke the wax on the note and read it.

Then I folded it and held it against my sternum with the rings.

"Help me get dressed," I said. "I can't be late."