3

I didn't sleep. I lay on my cot in the servants' wing with my wrist throbbing under Cassian's fingerprints and replayed the whole night in pieces, the bell, the laughter, the crystal shearing apart in my palm like it had been waiting its whole existence for a reason to break.

Around three in the morning, I gave up pretending sleep was coming and went to sit by the window instead, and that was where I was when I heard the knock.

Not on the servants' door. On mine, specifically, the little side entrance that led straight into my room from the courtyard, which nobody used because nobody had a reason to. I opened it expecting Marta with some new chore dressed up as a favor.

It was Cassian.

He looked different than he had an hour before in the training yard, less controlled, like something had been chewing at him the whole walk over and he'd lost the argument with himself about whether to come. He was still in his ceremonial gray, the collar undone, and there was a tightness around his eyes that hadn't been there on the stage.

"You shouldn't be here," I said.

"I know."

"If anyone sees you at my door at this hour, you understand what they'll assume."

"I know that too." He didn't move to leave. He stood in the doorway with one hand braced against the frame, and I watched him look at my wrist, at the bruise already darkening there, and something crossed his face I would have called guilt on anyone else. "Does it hurt."

"Does it matter to you if it does?"

"Yes," he said, simply, like the honesty surprised him as much as it surprised me. "It matters more than it should, considering I did it."

I crossed my arms, mostly to hide the wrist, mostly because I didn't trust what my hands would do if I left them free near him. "Why are you here, Cassian."

It was the first time I'd said his name to his face. I watched it land on him like a physical thing.

"I need you to understand something," he said. "And I can only say it once, and only here, because if anyone hears me say it, it puts you in more danger than you're already in."

"I'm not in danger. I'm invisible. That's the whole design of my life, in case you missed the memo tonight."

"You're not invisible anymore." His jaw tightened. "The second that bell rang for you, every pack in that amphitheater with a functioning set of eyes understood exactly what you are to me, whether I said the words or not. Rejection doesn't erase the bond, it only refuses it in public. Everyone in that hall who matters knows the moon chose you. Which means everyone who matters is now asking why I refused what the moon chose."

"So answer them. Answer me. Why did you refuse it?"

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer at all, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone rough and low, stripped of the ice from the ceremony completely. "Because two hours before that bell rang, my father told me if I claimed a mate outside the alliance he's been building for six years, he would remove the girl from the equation permanently. Those were his words. Remove her from the equation."

The floor tilted a little under me. "He threatened to kill me before he even knew who I was."

"He didn't need to know who you were. He only needed to know you weren't Lord Castellan's daughter, which is the alliance he's spent six years building, and which I have spent six years being groomed to marry into whether I wanted to or not." Cassian's hand curled into a fist against the doorframe, not at me, I understood that immediately, at himself. "I had five seconds to decide whether to claim you and hand my father a reason to make you disappear, or reject you in front of witnesses so publicly that killing you afterward would raise questions even he couldn't survive answering. I chose the option that keeps you alive."

I stared at him. Somewhere behind my ribs, the coiled thing that had woken up on the amphitheater lawn went very still, listening.

"You could have warned me," I said. "Before you did it. You could have told me what was happening instead of standing there and calling me a mistake in front of the entire Academy."

"If I'd hesitated even a second, if I'd looked like I was struggling with the decision, my father would have read it on my face, and then the plan doesn't work. You needed to believe it. Everyone needed to believe it." His eyes met mine, and there was nothing cold in them now, nothing performed. "I needed you safe more than I needed you to think well of me. I'd make the same choice again."

"That's convenient," I said, and I hated how much I wanted to believe him, hated how the wanting made my voice thin. "A story that just happens to make you the tragic hero instead of the man who humiliated me in front of five hundred people."

"I'm not asking you to forgive me." He pushed off the doorframe and took one step into the room, close enough that I had to tip my head back again, close enough that the pull under my ribs roared back to life like it had never stopped. "I'm asking you to stay hidden. Whatever's happening to you, and something is happening to you, I felt it through the bond tonight even rejected, don't let anyone else see it. Not the Academy. Not the Thorne pack. Especially not my father's people. If they learn you're gaining strength on top of being my mate, you become a problem worth solving instead of a mistake worth ignoring, and problems get solved permanently."

"Why do you care what happens to me? You could walk away right now. Marry Lord Castellan's daughter. Let the world forget I exist."

"Because I already tried to let the world forget you exist," he said, "for exactly two hours, between my father's threat and that bell ringing, and it turns out I'm not capable of it. My wolf has been trying to climb out of my chest since the second that bond snapped into place, and rejecting it out loud didn't kill that, it just made it angrier." His hand came up, slow, like he expected me to pull away, and brushed one careful finger along the bruise on my wrist, the same bruise his own grip had left an hour before. "I did this to you tonight, and I hate that I did it, and I would do it again tomorrow if it kept you breathing. That's the truth. That's all of it. Do whatever you want with it."

I didn't pull my wrist away. I should have. I stood there in my doorway at three in the morning letting the future King of the North touch a bruise he'd given me himself, and something in my chest that had felt hollow since the amphitheater lawn filled back in, warm and dangerous and entirely against my better judgment.

"I need to go," he said, before I could decide what to say back. "If anyone finds me here."

"Cassian."

He stopped, halfway turned toward the courtyard.

"Who is your father's people," I asked. "The ones I'm supposed to be hiding from. Give me a name."

His face closed off again, fast, the mask sliding back into place like it had never slipped. "Not tonight. If I tell you and you slip, even once, it gets both of us killed instead of just me."

"That's not a no."

"It's not a yes either." He looked at me one more time, long enough that I felt it in my teeth, and then he was gone into the dark of the courtyard without another word, moving quiet as smoke for a man his size, and I stood in my doorway with my heart slamming against my ribs and a bruise on my wrist that I suddenly, furiously, did not want to heal.

I closed the door and leaned against it, and that was when I heard the second set of footsteps in the courtyard, slower, deliberate, the kind of footsteps that wanted to be heard.

I opened the door again, just a crack, and found a woman standing at the edge of the torchlight, tall and elegant in a dark green cloak I recognized from the high table that night. Lady Rosalind Vane. The King's consort. She wasn't looking at the space where Cassian had disappeared. She was looking directly at my door, like she'd been standing there the whole time, like she'd heard every single word.

"Sleep well, dear," she said, and smiled at me with all her teeth. "You're going to need it."