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He didn’t answer.

I saw the precise moment the scent reached him. Something shifted behind his eyes. His pupils thinned to slits. His jaw clenched as though he were wrestling some ancient, involuntary thing up from his very soul. And every muscle in his body went taut as a drawn bowstring. For one held breath, the air felt charged, as though the smell of her blood had woken something in him that had been sleeping for a very long time.

Hunger, or curse, or magic… I couldn’t have named it. Perhaps it was all three. But it had hold of him, whatever it was, and his expression as it took him was not greed.

It was recognition.

It was the face of a man who had been asking a question his whole long life and had just, without warning, been handed the answer.

He lifted her hand to his mouth and ran his tongue slowly across the cut. His grip was tight enough that no matter how much she tried to tug free, he wouldn’t grant her even an inch. Gods, from what little strength the girl had, he may not have even felt it. His large hand wrapped so easily around her wrist that his fingers more than met.

A muttered curse escaped me as my hand found the hilt of my sword by instinct.

The maid whimpered and tried again to pull away. She must have caught him off guard as she managed to slip free of his grasp. This gave her a chance to go scrambling an inch across the stone, and the movement broke whatever fragile leash he’d held himself to.

His grip flashed from gentle to iron. He caught her wrist again and yanked her back toward him, close, far too close. Now folding her small hand flat in his and pressing his mouth to her palm as if he refused to let a single drop of her go to waste.

“Easy,” he murmured against her skin as he must have felt it tremble in his unyielding hold. A low, dark, and unbearably soft command came next.

“Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you… Hold still now.”

The girl was shaking so hard I could see it from across the room, her free hand pressed white-knuckled to her own mouth, her eyes huge and swimming with unshed tears. And every line of Theron’s body had gone rigid and coiled. There was a possessive strength in his shoulders, his head bowed over her hand like a beast hunched over something it had claimed. I took a step toward them, ready to put my own body between this stranger-king and a frightened girl of my household. However, his gaze cut up sidelong and pinned me where I stood. There was enough in that look, enough of the old, killing stillness, that even I, in my own castle, went no further.

I hadn’t missed the warning. It was in every taut line of him.

Come closer and learn what I am.

“Please…” the maid sobbed, the word cracking apart in the middle. “Please stop.”

And this was when Theron came undone.

Not all at once.

No, it was stranger than that. His eyes flicked up to her face, truly seeing her now and not just her blood. And at the raw terror written there, something seemed to break and reverse in him all in the same instant.

The snarl that had been building behind his teeth, the wrongness that had started to ripple through his features. It was building. The suggestion of something serpentine, of a face beneath the face. Of a gaze that wanted to turn the whole world to weeping stone… and then it drained out of him as fast as it had risen. As though her small, frightened voice had reached down to wherever the monster lived and simply switched off the light.

“Theron,” I said his name again, lower, my hand still on my sword. “Let my maid go.”

He was no longer listening to me. He was looking at her.

“My apologies,” he said, and I realized he sounded genuinely shaken by himself.

By what he’d done.

He rose, and he drew her up with him, because even now he hadn’t released her wrist.

“I…” He stopped, gave his head a small, dazed shake, like a man surfacing from deep water. “I apologize,” he said again, quieter, and finally, gently, he let her go.

She staggered the instant she was free, her knees giving under her, and he caught her before I could so much as move. One broad hand spreading at her waist, steadying, the other still cradling her cut palm. He set her back on her feet with a care that was almost tender before he bent his head down to hers.

“Careful, little mouse,” he murmured, and the ghost of that infuriating smile was back at the edge of his mouth. “Don’t go falling for me now… Not yet.”

Her eyes went round as moons. A flush crept up her throat to war with the fear there, and she didn’t seem to know what to do with either. She managed a single, jerking half-curtsey, mumbled something I couldn’t catch, before she fled. Her quick footsteps slapping away across the chamber and out into the corridor, the broken jug and the scattered shards left behind.

Theron turned, without hurry, to watch her go, lifting the hand that had gripped her and slowly, like the predator he was, licked what remained of her blood from his fingers.

“I will be seeing you soon, little mouse,” he called after her, soft enough that I doubt she heard it over the sound of her own flight.