AVELINE
Iheard them on the stairs.
Not the words, not at first—just two voices with an edge between them that set my teeth on edge. I sat in the nest with my hands in my lap and told myself it wasn’t my concern. Then sat there anyway, listening, because my future depended on them and what I was hearing did not sound like strategy.
It sounded like an argument—about me.
I caught fragments. Thane’s voice, stripped of its calm steadiness, sounded more like someone keeping anger on a short leash. Malric’s voice was lower, more controlled, but with an edge I didn’t understand. I caughtbondandchoiceand then something from Thane that I didn’t fully hear, but that hadforce herin it somewhere.
I braced my hands flat on my knees.
Malric had not answered me in the bath. He had sat in warm water with every opportunity to be like Thane and connect with me, and he had walked away. Repeatedly. I had stood up and wrapped myself in linen and asked them both to leave because that was the only dignified option available to me. And then tonight, after the circle and the cold and my father’s failedportal, he had looked at me with that sharp expression and gave me one option.
Bond with an alpha.
He didn’t ask me. Didn’t say that he wanted it. It was all tactics and strategy. Nothing personal. Just like something my father would do.
And now he was two floors below me, making Thane understand why they needed to leave. Save themselves.
I knew that was what was happening. I didn’t need to hear the words to know they were making decisions, then trying to figure out a way to tell me. My father had done this. He had come to me already resolved and walked me through his reasoning with the patience of someone who needed my cooperation rather than my consent. I had always eventually arrived at the conclusion he’d built for me because I hadn’t known there was information being withheld.
I knew what it felt like now.
I pushed myself up from the nest.
I was going down there. I was going to stand in the dining room with its broken circle and its displaced furniture, and I was going to tell Malric directly that he didn’t need to convince Thane of anything, that if he had decided this wasn’t worth the cost, then he could say so to my face and I would?—
I stopped on the first step.
The candle on the landing had changed.
It was still lit, still the same candle it had always been, but its flame was behaving oddly. Not flickering in any draft but bending, directional, pointing down the staircase with an almost deliberateness that a candle should never have. As I watched, the candle on the next landing below it did the same thing. And the one below that.
A line of bent flames, pointing down, past the dining room.
I stood on the step and looked at this and thought about the tower and its book left on a table at exactly the right moment, its water always the right temperature, its food appearing without visible hands, its stones vibrating when I was angry, and its portal repelling my father tonight with something that was not quite magic and was not quite will.
Come, it seemed to say to me.
I followed.
Past the landing where I could hear Malric’s and Thane’s voices more clearly now—I didn’t stop, deliberately didn’t stop, because I would deal with whatever that was after—past the library floor, past a second bathing chamber that I never used but clearly Malric and Thane had used at least once, to the ground floor entry, where I had rarely been. The candle flames flared along the walls, lighting the space.
The stone changed beneath my feet. The smooth stone of the tower’s upper floors gave way to something older, rougher, the stone slightly uneven as if the builders expected this space to be rarely used. The air changed too, cooler and still, as if it had been closed for a very long time. Two piles of bedding lay in the corner where I had overseen Malric and Thane connected as lovers.
I walked around the space, trailing my hands over the wall. There had to be a reason why I was guided down here, but why? I pressed my palms to the stone and probed along the seams, following the mortar lines in the dark, and found nothing for long enough that I started to think I’d misunderstood.
Then my fingers found the rune. It was small. Carved at roughly the height of my shoulder, positioned to the right of center, with the fine detailed depth of work done by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. I traced the lines of it with my fingertips—nothing like the blunt utilitarian cuts of the circle upstairs. This was careful. This was made by someone who cared what it looked like.
I pressed my palm flat over it.
The wall opened.
Not dramatically—no grinding of stone or rush of air. It simply became a door, swinging inward on hinges that made no sound, as if they had been waiting to be used and had maintained themselves accordingly. Beyond it, a room. Small, low-ceilinged, with a single shelf carved into the far wall and a floor that was cleaner than the stairs suggested it should be.
On the shelf, there was a book, small and bound in dark leather. And beside it, a flat stone disc, palm-sized, with a cord threaded through a hole at its edge. The disc was covered in the same careful runes as the door, and in the center of it, worn slightly smooth in a way that meant hands had touched it many times, was a symbol I didn’t recognize.
I picked it up.
