But it was the most honest thing he’d said since we walked through the tower door, and I recognized the cost of it the way I recognized all his costs, because I’d been paying attention for three years and I wasn’t planning to stop.
“I’m going back upstairs. Come when you’re ready.”
I opened the door and went up.
Chapter Twelve
MALRIC
Ididn't go upstairs.
I stood in the library for a long time after Thane left, listening to his footsteps climb, listening to the tower settle back into quiet around me, and I forced myself to stay where I was even as the tug of the bond urged me up to the nest. It was a technique that worked on battlefields. It worked in negotiation rooms when the other party was waiting for you to fill the silence with something they could use. It worked in most places.
It wasn't working particularly well here.
Come when you're ready.
The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t ready. I had been ready since the moment I heard her voice through the tower wall, low and careful and trying to sound unafraid, asking Thane what he wanted from her. Something had happened in my chest in that moment that I had spent three days refusing to examine.
I knew what a bond felt like. I had one with Thane, worn thin at the edges now but still present, still mine. I understood the significance of someone else’s presence in your mind, how they filled a part of you without a physical or logical basis. I'd had that with Thane for three years and I'd learned to carry it, learnedto live alongside it without letting it become a liability. It was comfortable, important.
What I felt when I was near Aveline was not the same.
It was larger. That was the only honest word for it. Like the difference between a candle and the thing that made candles possible. When she was in the room, my control came easier, not harder. My thoughts moved in straighter lines. The constant grinding effort of keeping myself functional and strategic and present, the effort I'd grown so accustomed to that I'd stopped noticing it as effort—it eased. As if something that had been pulling against me my entire life had briefly let go.
That terrified me more than anything else about this situation.
I knew what a bond could do. Not in the abstract, not from books. I had watched my father come apart from the inside out, and that knowledge terrified me.
My mother had been an omega.
She had been an omega—brilliant and particular—with a laugh that I remembered more clearly than her face. She had bonded to my father in the way true mates bonded, completely, irrevocably, in a way that had no middle ground. He had loved her with the totality of a man who had never learned to love in portions.
The king had wanted her. Had decided, with the casual acquisitiveness of power, that she would be more useful to him than to my father. She was a seer—could see the future—which is why she marked me to bind my power until I found my true mate, my own omega. She didn’t want the king to take me. But when the king came for her, to break her bond with my father and take her for his own, she had made a choice. She had made it before anyone could stop her, before my father could find her, before I was old enough to understand what I was watching.
My father had lived for eleven more years.
I used the wordlivedloosely.
I had spent my entire adult life making sure I would never be that exposed. I had built my control stone by stone with intention and redundancy and the understanding that the structure was only as reliable as the foundation it sat on. I had learned to want things in proportion to how much losing them would cost me. I had accepted Thane, accepted the bond with him, because Thane was like me in the ways that mattered. He understood the mission. He understood what we were both here for, and his continued existence was something I could take practical steps to ensure.
Aveline was in a tower her father had built specifically to contain her. She was at the center of a conflict that would resolve one way or another in the next two months. She was an omega in full heat, surrounded by a king who had been siphoning her power for years and who would not stop wanting her simply because we had inconveniently arrived.
Loving her completely would be handing someone a knife and asking them to be careful with it.
I pushed off the window and moved.
If I stayed still, I would think in circles, and that was not productive. What I needed was information. What I had always needed, in every situation that had tried to overwhelm me, was something concrete to put my hands on.
I went down.
The ground floor first. I'd done a cursory search the day after we arrived, but cursory wasn't the same as thorough, and I was more attentive now than I'd been then. I moved through the entry, checking the walls methodically, pressing the stones at the junctions where mortar met edge. Nothing. I checked the floor along the baseboards. The usual stuff of old stone buildings—dust at the edges, the faint impression of foot traffic in the center, nothing that shouldn't be there.
I climbed past the library, having already explored it the previous day. Next on my path was the dining room.
The table was long enough to seat twelve, which told me something about the theater of this place—a king who imprisoned his daughter in a tower still needed her to feel, on some level, like a household. Like a normal life with larger furniture. The chairs were real wood, heavy, not decorative. Nothing unusual about any of it.
I crouched and checked under the sideboard. Stone floor, the slight unevenness of age, a gap where the mortar between two flags had worn down.
