Chapter Five
THANE
Iwaited until her breathing had been steady for long enough that I trusted it, then eased away from the bed with the careful movement that had become second nature after years of field camps and sleeping men who needed the rest more than I needed to stretch my legs.
Aveline didn’t stir.
She lay curled on her side, pale hair loose across the pillow, blankets layered thick around her shoulders.
Sleep had taken her gradually—not the hard collapse of someone who had run out of resources, but a slower loosening, her body deciding by degrees that it could rest. Her scent had changed with it.
Deepened. The honey note warmed and rounded.
The silver blossom settled into something less sharp, and the effect on my ability to think clearly was significant enough that I was grateful for the excuse to put some distance between us.
I tucked the blankets higher around her shoulders before I could think better of it, then stepped back and didn’t examine the impulse.
The corridor was narrow and dark—the tower’s ambient light was dimmer out here than in the chamber.
Malric stood against the opposite wall with his arms folded and his expression arranged into something that communicated controlled displeasure.
He had that skill—the ability to be furious in ways that were technically deniable.
I pulled the door closed, not quite latching it.
He looked at the door, then at me.
“She’s asleep,” I said before he could open with whatever he’d been preparing.
“I know. I could hear her breathing change through the bond.” He paused. “You were in there a long time.”
“She needed comfort.”
His jaw shifted. “She needed information.”
“She got information,” I said. “That’s why she needed someone to stay with her.”
He unfolded his arms and turned away from me, moving a few paces down the corridor before turning back. The motion was controlled, but I knew him well enough to read what was underneath it. When Malric needed to move, things had gotten under his skin.
“You’re letting her scent cloud your judgment,” he said.
“You’ve said that.”
“Because it continues to apply.”
“Malric.” I kept my voice low, not because I was managing my temper. I was handling it, but that wasn’t the point. “You cornered her in her own chamber and told her we were going to kill her father. In those words. In that order.”
“I told her the truth.”
“You threw the truth at her like a blade and watched to see where it landed.” I stepped closer.
“She’s been in this tower her entire life.
Her father has been the only person she’s spoken to in years.
Every piece of information she has about herself came from him, and none of it is accurate, and you expected her to receive all of that in one conversation and immediately become a useful asset. ”
Malric’s eyes were sharp in the low light. “I expected her to be honest.”
“She was honest, as honest as she could be under the circumstances,” I said.
“She told us to leave. She told us we’d get hurt.
She told us she hurt someone and believed every word of it.
” I paused. “That’s not a liar. That’s a woman who has been conditioned so thoroughly she can’t distinguish between truth or lies.
And we may never know the truth. Only her father knows reality. ”
Something moved behind his eyes. Not agreement—not yet. But the quality of his attention shifted, became less pointed, which from Malric was as close to concession as I was likely to get in a corridor at whatever hour this was.
“The tower,” he said, after a moment.
“Tell me what you found.”
He was quiet for a beat, and I recognized this version of him too—the one that had been turning information over while I sat with Aveline, building a model of the place and testing it against what he knew.
“No guards,” he said. “No hidden rooms. No ritual chamber. The binding work is in the stones themselves, not maintained by any fae or human—it runs on its own, fed by something internal.” He paused. “No exit.”
I looked at him.
“The wall gave way for us when I pressed it,” he continued.
“It doesn’t give way now. I tested the entry chamber, the outer ring, every point where the stone might yield.
Nothing.” He said the word with a flatness that told me he had tested it more than once and found it equally impassable each time.
“The tower opens when she allows it. Or when it decides to. The distinction may not be meaningful.”
“She said she’s tried to leave,” I said.
“I know.”
“She’s been here since she was a child.”
“I know that, too.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall, but he was tense, the movement not as casual as he made it look.
“There are wards in the tower, suppression wards to keep her omega side, to keep her from awakening. I can sense them, but I can’t do anything about them.
” Frustration laced his voice. “She’s been held in a suppressed pre-heat state for over a century. ”
The realization of her situation settled over me.
“He kept her from ever awakening.”
“Because a fully awakened omega,” Malric said, “would have required an alpha, or alphas, to bond with, to mate. If she is the last Unseelie omega, she is worth a great deal. Even more if you consider she is the king’s only heir.
” He looked at the closed door. “He needed her compliant. Isolated. Convinced of her own danger. All three of those requirements served the same function.”
The cold of it moved through me.
“I don’t remember the king having a mate or an heir. Has he hidden her all these years?”
Malric grew thoughtful. “The king is far older than you or I. Over two centuries in age. My mother told me the king had an omega early in his reign and she had a daughter. When she died, it was assumed the daughter died with her. There were rumors that the daughter killed the mother.”
I glanced at the almost-closed door. “Could she be Aveline? She doesn’t look old enough to be that old.”
“The king could have maintained her age, lengthened her life through unnatural means like he did himself. But to what end? He has never allowed her to bond with an alpha. He has never brought her to court or groomed her for the throne,” he mused, thinking aloud. “What is her role?”
I started at the door, the questions tumbling through my brain.
“She’s starting to wake up,” I said.
“Yes.” He spoke heavily, acknowledging a variable that changed all the subsequent calculations. “Our presence may have awakened her omega side. The tower’s binding work is cracking. The braids are loosening.” A pause. “Her heat will come whether he planned for it or not.”
“And when it does?”
Malric looked at me directly. The question between us was not tactical. We know what we felt on the stairwell and in that chamber. We knew we were the cause of it, her heat coming, but neither of us had addressed it because there were more urgent things to address.
But it was there.
“I don’t know,” he said. The honesty of it, from Malric, was notable.
“She trusts you less than she trusts me,” I said. Not to wound him. As information.
“I noticed.”
“You came in hard. She’s spent her entire life being managed by a man who used a cold voice and calm logic to convince her that her own nature was lethal. I doubt he was gentle and kind with her. You sound like him. You must adjust your manner around her.”
His jaw tightened, and I watched him receive that without deflecting it, which told me it had already occurred to him and he hadn’t liked it then either.
“I know,” he said quietly.
The corridor hummed beneath our boots, the tower’s low sustained note present as ever, and beneath it something that had changed since we arrived—a warmth in the stone that had not been there when we first crossed the threshold.
The place was responding to all three of us, or to whatever the three of us together constituted, and I didn’t yet have language for what that was.
“The king will come,” Malric said. “We may not have a warning.”
“Then we stay close,” I said. “We don’t split up in this place.”
His gaze moved to the door again.
I watched his face and thought about jealousy, which was not a thing I generally wasted time on. I thought about her fear, the one she had toward us and toward herself.
“She’s not the mission,” I said. “Not the way we thought she was.”
“No,” he agreed. “She’s not.”
“She’s a person who has been used as a resource her entire life and doesn’t know that’s what’s been happening to her.”
“Yes.”
“Which means when she understands it fully,” I said, “and she will, she’s going to have to decide what she does with that. And she can’t make that decision if we’re treating her as a resource too.”
Malric held my gaze for a long moment.
“I hear you,” he said.
It was not an apology. He didn’t produce those easily, and I didn’t expect them. But it was real, which was what mattered.
“We need to walk every level again. Map the exits that don’t exist. If the king arrives—”
“When,” I corrected.
“When,” he allowed. “We need to know the layout of this place better than he does.”
I nodded. Then, because it needed saying, “Whatever this is—what we felt on the stairs, what the tower is doing, the fact that it let us in—we’re going to have to talk about it. Properly. Not tonight. But soon.”
Malric’s expression didn’t change.
But he didn’t deny it, which was its own kind of answer.
A low, resonant gong sounded somewhere deep within the tower, the vibration traveling through stone and bone alike.
Malric straightened, his hand going to his sword. “What is that?”
As if summoned by the gong, the door behind me opened.
Aveline stood there, wrapped in one of the blankets I’d brought her, hair mussed from sleep, eyes clearer now despite the lingering shadow beneath them. She looked between us, then tilted her head slightly.
Aveline’s shoulders eased. “It’s time to eat,” she said. “Follow me.”