Chapter 11 The Handcuffs
Three nights after that, Nia comes in alone.
I notice before she sets the tray down. The absence in the room has a shape and a temperature.
"Where is he?"
Nia does not look up from arranging the bowl, the cup. "The king went to the battlefield. There was a counterattack from the last campaign. He went to finish it."
The words arrive one at a time.
Battlefield. Counterattack. Finish it.
My face has gone cold. I can feel my own breathing change.
The thing inside him lied to Leo.
It bypassed whatever surveillance Leo thought he was doing. It hijacked the body of a good man, and now it is out there using Leo's hands to slaughter the very people Leo spent his life trying to save.
And it has put my husband in danger. Again.
Nia sets the bowl in front of me. It smells like herbs and warm broth and something that must have taken real effort to prepare. She looks at me with the attentive blankness of someone waiting for a response.
My hand moves before my mind approves it. The bowl hits the floor. Porcelain, a clean crack, then pieces, then the spreading stain of everything it contained.
Nia goes still. She looks at the broken dish, then at me, then at the broken dish again. The fingers of her left hand curl. The knuckles shift, just slightly, the skin pulling taut over something that is no longer quite the right shape.
They all do this. The more human they become, the easier it is to forget what they are. Until something cracks through the surface and the old shape pushes back.
"Eat." Her voice comes out uneven. "You — eat. The child needs." She takes a step toward me, stops herself.
"He comes back. Very soon. Alpha comes back very soon."
I don't answer.
Then she kneels and picks up every piece with her bare hands and carries them out.
I stare at the door.
Five minutes later she comes back with a metal container, dull gray, the kind that will not shatter when thrown. She sets it on the table. She leaves.
I do not touch it.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my back against the headboard and I look at Luca in his crib. He shifts in his sleep, makes a sound that isn't distress but might become it, and I lean over and lift him out and hold him against my chest until he settles.
His weight. His warmth. The small smell of him.
I have been eating their food. Sleeping in their beds. Using the blanket she brought for me. Letting myself sink into the evenings like they were a life I was allowed to have. And while I was doing that, the thing wearing Leo's face was out there with its hands in—
No.
I press my mouth to the top of Luca's head and I make myself think clearly.
He's smarter than we thought. Than everything we observed suggested. The result can't lie. We can't control him.
But the reverse is also true. He can't fully control us either.
If I can plan it properly, if I can think it through and be ready when the moment comes, we can leave. All three of us. In the dark, with Leo at the wheel, before the thing inside him wakes up and takes it all back.
We need something that works during the day. Something that doesn't depend on Leo at all.
Maybe something physical.
I just need some time.
***
Four nights later, Nia tells me he should be back today. But he does not come back when dark falls.
I lie awake past midnight, past the hour when the estate goes fully quiet, past the point where even the wolves on patrol have found their rhythm and stopped moving. The lamp is off. I watch the ceiling and I listen.
There is a plan I have been turning over for four days: tell Leo, use the nights, make a map of what I know about the layout and the patrol patterns, ask him what he knows from his side of things.
Then we plan together. How to contain it. How to leave.
I don't know when I fall asleep.
The smell wakes me before anything else does: soap, and beneath it something he could not entirely wash away. Something with an iron edge. Something that had gotten into the fabric of him.
He finds me in the dark and pulls me close without speaking, his face pressed against the top of my head. I feel the long exhale move through his whole body like something releasing a grip it has held for days.
I turn toward him. I have things to say. I have had them ready for four days.
But his heartbeat under my hand is already slowing, emptying out, and before I can find the first word he is gone. One minute, maybe less.
I lie still and look at the window.
The sky is already changing. Black pulling back into gray, the slow announcement of a sun not yet visible but coming. I have maybe thirty minutes.
I don't know how it happens. I have watched for it when I can, and I still don't know.
Sometimes I wake to a kiss before he leaves, and that is Leo. Sometimes I wake to an empty bed and footsteps already moving toward the door, and that is not. Whether there is a seam at all, or whether one simply becomes the other without either of them knowing.
I look at him.
I don't know if I should wake him. I don't know who would open his eyes.
But I am sure that when daylight comes, it will not be Leo who wakes. He will get up and walk out that door and there is nothing I can do to stop that, and another day will pass, and Leo will be in danger.
No.
Not again. Not today.
I reach under the pillow.
The cuffs are exactly where I left them, cold and heavy and specific in my hand. Heavier than the ones Leo used to carry. Not standard issue. Someone built these for something stronger than a person.
I have watched these creatures hunt. I have observed them in the city: the way they strike, the way they tear, working on teeth and claws and sheer weight. They are devastating. But I have never seen one snap solid metal.
Flesh has limits. Steel doesn't.
My hand is steady.
I find his left wrist where it rests against the mattress, the way it always falls in deep sleep, open and loose and trusting. I move it by degrees, slow enough that the change does not register against whatever part of him is still listening even now. He does not stir.
I bring the cuff to his wrist.
The click it makes in the gray morning quiet is very small and very final. The other end goes around the metal post of the headboard. I tested it three days ago. It does not move.
I sit back.
His breathing has not changed. He sleeps on with the absolute depth of something that has not rested in days, unaware of the small mechanical fact now attached to his wrist.
I pull the key out of the cuff mechanism and close it in my palm.
Outside, the first bird starts.
The light comes up slow and certain through the window.
I wait.