Chapter Eleven The Snow Night
Chapter Eleven: The Snow Night
The water dungeon is below the silver level.
I know this because my wrists stop aching somewhere on the third staircase down, the constant low burn of silver-laced stone fading out like a signal losing range.
My knees keep going. The guards keep their grip. The fever doesn't care about any of it.
He hates me.
The thought arrives without weight, the way thoughts do when your body is too busy keeping you upright to give them much attention.
I let my head hang and watch my feet move across wet stone.
If today is the day, dying in his hands clears the debt. It's a fair enough trade.
The iron door at the bottom groans open.
The cold that comes out of the room is not the cold of stone or water. It's the cold of a place that has been cold for a very long time.
My knees go in first, and then the rest of me, and then the door closes behind me, and the dark swallows the sound of retreating footsteps.
The floor is wet.
I press my cheek against it and let the cold come up through my face, and somewhere in the space between the fever and the dark, the four-year-old winter finds me.
***
The snow had been falling for three hours by the time I reached my father's reception room.
I didn't have shoes. There hadn't been time. My mother had started coughing blood and the look on her face was the kind that doesn't leave room for shoes.
My feet stopped hurting somewhere past the fountain. I kept running. The reception room windows were still lit when I came around the corner, and I didn't slow down.
The guard at the door didn't even look at me when he put out his arm.
Then the door opened.
Cassian walked out.
He was twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. Already my father's Lead Enforcer, already the kind of man that other men stepped around without meaning to.
He looked at the guard first, then down at me — bare feet, nightgown, snow in my hair — and his face didn't do very much.
"Let her in," he said to the guard.
That was all.
I got my audience with my father. I asked for a healer for my mother.
My father gave me three minutes and then had me escorted out. When I walked back into the empty corridor, there was a pair of fur-lined boots sitting against the wall beside the door.
They were still warm.
I stood there for a long moment in the dark hallway, holding one boot in each hand, and I thought: there it is.
After that I was methodical about it.
I learned his patrol routes. I arranged to be in his path. I fell once on the east corridor staircase, calculated it perfectly, the sound, the angle, and he came around the corner and caught me before I hit the bottom step.
His arms closing around me with the speed of someone who'd been watching the space where I was a half-second before I was in it.
I baked things I didn't know how to bake and gave them to him badly wrapped and he ate them without comment.
And in a quiet moment, the one I'd planned for, I would let my head dip forward. Just slightly. Enough to bare the nape of my neck in his direction.
The first time I did it I heard his breath change.
He knew what it meant. Every wolf knows what it means. That pale strip of skin at the back of the neck, offered without defense. It is the oldest language between wolves, and it says things that words aren't built for.
I felt his stillness as a pressure, the whole shape of him going very controlled and very careful.
Then his mouth touched the back of my neck. Soft. Like a question.
Then he turned me around and kissed me. Hard and deliberate and he didn't stop. He didn't stop until my lungs were burning and my hands were in his shirt and I had forgotten what I'd been planning.
The plan was working so well it started doing something else.
I don't know exactly when it crossed over. The lines blurred in the wrong direction.
His arms went from careful to close, and then closer, and the kisses he pressed to my hair when he thought I was asleep went from something I was cataloguing to something I was waiting for.
The line between the performance and what was underneath it stopped being a line and started being a question I was avoiding.
I had everything arranged. All I needed was to ask him to take us. Two women, one night, out through the eastern forest. He would have done it. I knew he would have done it.
Then my father noticed.
The door opened at midnight, three days later.
Cassian came through it.
He was bleeding from his side. His left hand was bleeding too, the kind that had been going long enough to darken the skin around it.
He grabbed my wrist and his grip was rock-solid despite all of it, despite the way he couldn't quite get his breathing even.
"I'm getting you out."
He didn't wait for an answer. He pulled me into the corridor and then down the back stairs and then we were outside, the cold hitting all at once, snow coming down hard enough to muffle sound.
I was following him. I don't know when I decided to follow him. My feet just went.
Then I looked down.
The blood from his side was dropping into the snow. Dark against white. Each print he left had a small dark center where it had fallen.
I stopped.
He turned back.
I looked at his face, which was the face of a man who had already decided and was only here for the logistics.
My mother is two floors up and he can barely stand and the wolves will be on us before we reach the tree line.
I made the decision in the same moment I understood I had to make it. No pause between. Pausing would have killed us both.
I pulled my wrist out of his grip.
"My father made me an offer." My voice came out level. I needed it level and it cooperated.
"If I come back willingly, he'll let me marry an Alpha. A real one." I watched his face. "I'm going to be Luna of this pack. I'm not leaving with a traitor who has nothing."
Cassian went still.
Then he crossed the distance and wrapped his arms around me and I felt every wound on his body in the way he did it, the careful shift of weight to spare his side.
I could feel his heart through the prison shirt and it was going too fast, the way hearts go when they are losing something they can't afford to lose.
"I have Alpha blood." His voice wasn't steady. It was the first time I'd ever heard it not steady. "Give me time. I'll get us out. I'll give you everything you want — just give me time."
The search party's footsteps hit the stairs inside.
I pushed him back with both hands.
"Get out." The words came out with a shape I'd never heard in my own voice before. I reached for anything that would make him go, anything with enough edges to cut him loose.
"Get out — what do you have? Right now, what do you have? Nothing. You're a traitor with nothing and I will not throw my life away on — "
I swung my hand.
The slap landed hard enough that his head turned with it.
There was a cut along his cheekbone after. My nail. It was thin and bright against his skin.
He didn't move for a moment.
Then he looked back at me, and his eyes were wet, which was the only time I had ever seen that, and the expression on his face was the expression of a man who has just understood something terrible and is too proud to look away from it.
I pointed at the tree line. Snow and dark beyond it.
"Go."
He went.
***
The memory drops me back into the cold of the water dungeon like a stone into a well.
My cheek is still against the wet floor. There is something warm on my face that isn't fever.
I don't wipe it away.
It's a debt I owe him.