Chapter Five #2
She turned without waiting for agreement and began walking down the corridor, the blanket trailing behind her.
The movement revealed bare feet on stone, the hem of her gown brushing her ankles.
She looked smaller wrapped in the blanket, softer, and something in my chest tightened painfully at the sight.
Malric followed, posture rigid, gaze locked forward.
We entered the dining hall, and the long stone table was set neatly with three places. Plates already held steaming food. Bread. Meat. A bowl of fruit. The scent of it made my stomach twist sharply with hunger I hadn’t noticed building.
Aveline took her seat at the head of the table, blanket still wrapped around her shoulders, posture straightening as she settled.
Something about her shifted then, subtle but unmistakable.
Her chin lifted. Her gaze sharpened. The frightened woman in the bedchamber receded, replaced by something composed and reserved.
A princess.
Malric noticed it too. His expression went thunderous, though he kept his arms folded.
“I wouldn’t eat that,” he said flatly, shooting me a glare.
Aveline shrugged. “Then don’t.”
He stared at the food. “Are you sure it’s not drugged?”
She looked at him as if the question bored her. “To what purpose?”
He frowned, clearly unsure what to respond.
I didn’t hesitate. I sat and reached for the bread, tearing off a piece and biting into it. The taste was real. Warm. My stomach unclenched with a grateful ache.
“I’m starving,” I said. “And if she wanted us dead, we’d already be dead.”
Malric’s jaw worked. He didn’t sit.
Aveline’s attention shifted to me instead, curiosity brightening her gaze. “Tell me about yourself, Thane,” she asked.
I swallowed. I wasn’t looking forward to sharing my past. “I grew up on the borderlands—second son in a noble family. When my magic manifested, my family sent me to the king for ‘training.’ But it wasn’t all it was supposed to be.
Malric saved me and I joined the rebellion because there wasn’t anything else left. ”
She listened, really listened, head tilted slightly, eyes steady on my face. Her scent shifted again, warm interest threading through it, and my body responded in kind, heat coiling low and tight.
She asked, “Why are you here?”
I hesitated, then answered honestly. “Because people are dying. And because I couldn’t stand by and watch it happen.”
Malric made a sound under his breath, arms still crossed, gaze flicking between us like he was watching something unravel that he couldn’t stop.
Aveline nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”
She didn’t look at Malric when she spoke again. “You have many questions,” she said coolly. “But I’ve eaten alone for years. If you want answers, you can wait.”
Malric’s eyes darkened, but he didn’t argue.
I ate. She watched. The tower hummed on.
And for the first time since we’d entered the Wyrdwood, I had a faint, terrifying certainty that nothing about this was accidental, and that whatever had begun here wouldn't let any of us leave unchanged.
Aveline
Food had always arrived without explanation.
Not with fanfare, not with the sound of footsteps or the clatter of preparation—simply there when the bell rang, as if the tower conjured meals from the same patient magic it used to keep the floors clean and the linens fresh.
I had stopped wondering about the mechanism years ago.
There had been no one to ask and the tower never offered explanations, only routine.
Tonight, three places were set.
I stood in the doorway for a moment before entering, looking at the table.
The symmetry of it pressed against something I had no clean name for—three cups, three plates, three sets of utensils arranged with the same precise care as always.
The tower had done this without being asked. It had simply known.
I was not certain whether that comforted or unsettled me.
Both, probably.
I took my seat at the head of the table. The blanket was still around my shoulders and I didn’t remove it.
Thane sat without hesitation, reached for the bread, and ate with the controlled efficiency of a man who had learned not to trust food to remain.
He kept his attention moving—to the room, to me, to Malric—but his gaze returned to me most often, and each time it did, he looked away quickly, as if afraid of what he might give away if he held the contact too long.
Malric didn’t sit.
He stood with his arms folded and his weight distributed like a man waiting for the attack he had decided was coming, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
He looked at the food the way he had looked at me earlier—as a variable whose full implications he had not yet resolved.
His gaze moved between the table, the walls, the corners of the room, mapping geometry he had already mapped.
I watched him from the edge of my vision and kept my face arranged around mild disinterest.
His scent reached me anyway. It didn’t ask permission and it didn’t require proximity.
It simply existed in the room, the way all things in this tower existed once they arrived: completely.
Sun-warmed stone and steel worn smooth, something grounded beneath both, old in a way that felt less like age and more like deep roots.
There was a pull to him that scared me and excited me at the same time.
I took a careful bite and chewed, and kept my attention on my plate.
Thane’s questions were patient. He asked about the tower, about the food, about how the rooms arranged themselves, and his voice had the quality of someone who was genuinely curious rather than mining for tactical information.
When I answered, he listened. Not in the way Father listened—waiting for the moment my words became useful or threatening—but with the whole of his attention turned toward me as if what I said mattered in itself.
I didn’t know what to do with that kind of listening. It made something in my chest ache in a way I didn’t examine.
Malric’s questions were different. He didn’t phrase them as questions.
He stated things and waited for me to confirm or deny, more of an interrogation.
But I was accustomed to his tone and style.
He was like Father, a comparison I sensed he would reject.
His gaze when it landed on me was sharp and assessing, and beneath the assessment, something else—something that moved too quickly for me to catch and examine.
I watched him watch Thane.
Not obviously. But the awareness was there, constant and focused, tracking Thane’s movements with a knowledge so ingrained it no longer looked like watching.
He knew the rhythm of Thane’s breathing, the shift of his weight, the way his shoulders changed when something concerned him.
Their bodies angled toward each other without consultation, covering the other’s blind spots from years of shared instinct.
The observation sat in me and turned over slowly.
When I looked at Malric again, his gaze met mine and the air in the room changed. Not aggression—something more precise than that. A flicker, barely present, gone before I could fully name it.
My pulse skipped.
Heat moved low in my belly, a throbbing pressure that I had never experienced before, and I set my fork down, took a slow breath, and directed my attention back to my plate.
“You’re staring,” Malric said.
I looked up at him. “You’re standing.”
Beside me, Thane made a sound he shaped into something neutral that didn’t quite get there.
Malric’s expression tightened. “Eat.”
The word landed like a command—brisk, automatic, the tone of a man who expected the people around him to order themselves according to his assessment of what was needed.
Something old rose in me. Not anger, exactly. Something more tired than anger, and more certain.
“I am,” I said. Evenly. Without looking away.
His jaw worked. He had expected the word to land and produce compliance, and it had not, and he was deciding what to do with that. I watched him decide and kept my face pleasant and waited.
He said nothing else.
I finished what was on my plate and set my utensils down, lining them with the same precision the tower had used to set the table, and stood.
“Where are you going?”
Not a question. A demand with the afterthought of a question, as if he was trying to be kinder, and failing
I turned back toward him slowly. He stood with his arms still folded, gaze fixed on me, and I recognized the posture—the immovability of it, the expectation that the question itself would be sufficient to stop me.
“You’re a guest,” I said.
His eyes narrowed.
“You don’t make demands in my tower.” My voice stayed level. I had no interest in raising it. Raised voices were what Father used when he wanted to remind me the space between us could collapse without warning. I had learned to hold my ground in a lower register. “I’ll go where I choose.”
Thane’s breath shifted, a small, careful sound that might have been surprise.
Malric looked at me for a long moment with something moving behind his eyes that I didn’t entirely understand. Then the tower hummed beneath our feet, a subtle change in the vibration, and whatever he had been about to say didn’t come.
I turned toward the corridor.
The blanket caught under my foot on the second step.
The floor came up fast. I reached for the wall and my fingers found stone without purchase, my weight already pitching forward.
A hand closed around my arm.
The grip was immediate, unyielding, certain in the way his voice was certain—as if hesitation had not been a consideration.
He pulled me back to vertical with an efficiency that spoke of physical strength and long practice, his other hand bracing at my waist, and for one suspended moment, I stood pressed against him with his breath warm in my hair and his scent enveloping me.
Sun-warmed stone and steel and that deep, grounded undercurrent.
Heat broke over me, low and sudden and sharp, my omega senses answering with an immediacy that bypassed every conscious objection I had. My fingers closed over his forearm without deciding to. My breath came quick.
His hand at my waist didn’t move for a moment too long.
I felt the stillness that moved through him, the tightening of the hand that held me. He was fighting the same biology that I was. His grip on my arm adjusted, not releasing, confirming something.
“You won’t get far if you can’t walk,” he said near my ear. Low, with an edge that was half contempt and half something that slid beneath my skin and refused to behave like contempt at all.
I turned in his hold and pulled my arm free.
My face was warm. I was angry at my face for being warm.
“Let go.”
He looked at me—dark, unreadable, the wall of his composure fully restored as if the moment before had not occurred—and stepped back. Hands dropping. Expression closing.
Thane had risen from his chair. He had not moved toward us, but his posture carried the tension of a man who had been deciding whether to move and had not yet stood down from that decision.
His gaze dropped to Malric’s hands and then came back to my face with an expression I recognized from earlier—careful, reading the signals I was giving without asking me to perform clarity I didn’t have.
I gathered the blanket with both hands, pulling it clear of my feet, and turned to the stairs.
“Don’t follow me,” I said.
I heard Malric shift. Heard the soft scrape of Thane’s chair settling again as he lowered back into it.
I stopped in the doorway and looked back at both of them—at Thane with his patient attention and his storm-bright eyes, at Malric with his arms refolded and his jaw set and whatever he had felt in the moment before dismissed behind competence and control.
“You are not welcome in my nest,” I said. “Neither of you.”
The word arrived on my tongue before I had used it. Old. Instinctive. Mine in a way that had no explanation I could reach from where I stood.
Thane’s face shifted—something passing through it that was quiet and recognizing and gone before I could examine it. Malric’s eyes narrowed a fraction, and he said nothing.
I walked.
The tower’s hum changed under my feet as I moved up the stairs, the vibration sharpening, the air cooling against my flushed skin.
The stones didn’t obstruct me. But the shift in the quality of the hum was unmistakable—something in the structure pulling, resistant, the way a tide resists the shore that is moving away from it.
I kept my pace even.
Heat still coiled low in my belly, a slow and unwelcome reminder of Malric’s hands and the way his scent had broken through every barrier I had erected during dinner. My arm remembered his grip. My skin remembered his warmth.
I had spent years learning not to want anything I couldn’t have.
I was uncertain that the lesson was going to hold.
My nest waited at the next level, the room I had built from the tower’s offerings over decades—furs and cushions and layered warmth, the one space that had always been entirely mine.
It had been my refuge because nothing threatened me there and nothing required anything of me there, and I had been the only thing breathing in it.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it.
Then I went inside and pulled the door shut, and sat in the middle of all that familiar warmth and tried to remember what quiet had felt like before two alphas had walked through the tower’s walls and the tower had simply let them in.
The hum beneath the floor didn’t stop.
It had not stopped since they arrived, and I didn’t think it ever would.