A Seat at the Table
? Ivy ?
I thought Roman’s silence was a wall.
Now I wonder how much of it is a bandage.
The thought follows me from the training yard to the Luna rooms, quiet and stubborn as the ache in my palm. I sit near the hearth with a copy of the eastern ledger spread across my knees, but the numbers keep blurring into silver.
Roman’s scar curves through my memory, pale and uneven across his ribs. The throne gave it to him, named the wound a curse, and kept walking.
He hadn’t sounded bitter when he told me. He had sounded factual.
My wrist burns beneath my sleeve, not sharply and not enough to call Nora. It’s only a low, steady reminder that his scar answered the mark, and the mark answered back.
I set the ledger aside. Nora would call that progress. Dane would call it avoiding work. Both would be annoying enough to be right.
A knock comes at the outer door, and I straighten in my chair. “Yes?”
The guard speaks through the wood. “A private letter arrived for you, Luna. It has a Brooks seal.” My stomach tightens.
It isn’t Marissa. I know that before I open the door. Marissa’s cruelty arrives like polished silver, heavy and formal, meant to cut where everyone can see it. Sloane’s always comes wrapped in silk.
I cross the sitting room and open the door.
The guard holds out a small envelope sealed in pale blue wax. There’s no crystal vessel this time, no public flowers arranged for the whole fortress to see. This is worse because it’s private.
“Thank you,” I say.
The guard bows and steps away.
I close the door but don’t lock it. The choice feels important, though I don’t have the strength to examine why.
The envelope sits light in my hand. Sloane’s wax bears the smaller version of the Brooks crest, the one she used for personal letters because she once said the full family seal looked too severe for a girl with charm.
I used to envy her that. She could make severity soften around her. I break the seal.
Her handwriting is pretty, rounded, and graceful. Every letter looks as though it’d apologize if it cut me. Ivy,
There’s no title and no Luna. There’s only my name, as though she still has the right to make it smaller by sounding familiar.
I hope you’re recovering after everything. Truly. The North must be difficult for you. Cold rooms, blunt wolves, and all that blood-stained loyalty must feel very far from home. My mouth tightens.
Home, as though the Brooks house had ever been one.
I heard Roman has been very public in his defense of you. How fortunate. Do be careful not to mistake command for affection. Wolves kneel when Alphas order them to.
The words slip under my ribs. I keep reading because stopping won’t make them vanish.
Roman has always had a taste for broken things, hasn’t he? Perhaps it flatters him to rescue what Jace refused. Men like that enjoy proving other men wrong.
My hand tightens around the paper.
I’d hate for you to embarrass another Maddox man by needing more than he means to give.
There’s no signature. There doesn’t need to be.
The fire snaps in the hearth, and I flinch as though the sound has touched me.
Sloane knows exactly where to press.
The North does kneel when Roman orders it. Kerr apologized because Roman made him. The guards lower their heads because Roman named me Luna before they knew what else to call me. Dane listens because Roman gave me a seat at the table.
Maybe that’s all this is: command, duty, and honor. Maybe the fortress has rearranged itself around a vow no one planned, while I stand in the middle of it and pretend the shape of it means belonging.
I fold the letter once, then again.
The small drawer beside the bed already holds Marissa’s letter beneath a clean handkerchief. Evidence, Roman called it.
My hand reaches for the drawer pull and stops.
If I put Sloane’s letter away without showing anyone, the old pattern closes around me as neatly as a clasp.
I hide it. I absorb it. I make the wound convenient.
I don’t trouble Roman with Brooks cruelty when he already has stolen medicine, eastern route audits, old scars, and a throne that made him into a warning.
I don’t make Nora worry. I don’t make Dane think court women are exhausting. I don’t let anyone see that Sloane can still reach me from leagues away with ink and a soft hand.
I stand there with the letter half-hidden against my palm while my breath comes too shallow.
Then Nora’s voice rises in memory.
Convenient women die young in hard places. Roman’s words follow.
Letters come to you unopened unless you ask me to handle them.
Then I remember Roman in the training room, saying the throne preferred its weapons quiet.
Hiding the letter won’t make the wound smaller. It’ll only make sure Sloane owns it alone.
I close the drawer without putting the letter inside, then walk to the door.
The guard straightens when I step into the hall. “Luna?”
“Where is Roman?”
His gaze flicks toward the western passage. “He’s in the map room, I believe. Dane is with him.”
“Show me.”
He hesitates only a second, not because he doubts me, but because everyone in this fortress still looks for the nearest rule before moving around me. Then he nods.
“This way.”
The hall feels colder than the Luna rooms. Stone keeps every sound sharp. My boots click softly beside the guard’s heavier steps, and Sloane’s letter rests at my side, not hidden and not yet shown.
By the time we reach the map room, I realize that I’m angry.
The feeling doesn’t fit comfortably, but it’s warmer than shame.
The door is half-open. Low voices come from inside, Roman’s controlled and clipped, Dane’s blunt.
The guard stops beside the doorway. I knock once against the open wood. Both men look up.
Roman’s eyes go to my face first, then to the letter in my hand. His expression changes so slightly that anyone else might miss it. I don’t.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
“No,” I say as I step inside. “I’m angry, though.”
Dane looks from me to the letter. “Brooks?”
“Sloane.”
He mutters something that sounds unkind.
Maps cover the long table. Eastern routes are marked in dark pins, and two red markers sit near the outpost where the medicine never arrived.
Roman stands at the far side with his coat removed and his sleeves rolled to his forearms.
The scar is hidden again, and somehow that makes me remember it more.
Roman holds out his hand, then stops before taking the letter. “Do you want me to read it?” The question steadies me.
“Yes,” I say. “I want you to read it.”
I cross the room and give him the letter. His fingers take it carefully, touching only paper. The small restraint shouldn’t matter. It does. Roman reads.
His face doesn’t change, but the air around him tightens. Dane watches Roman’s expression, then looks at me.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asks.
I almost say yes. Then I think of him in the council room, blunt and irritated and honest. I think of his apology after Kerr, and the way he understood that valuable things are often guarded or stolen.
“This concerns court letters and fortress language,” I say. “You can stay.”
Dane inclines his head once. It isn’t dramatic, which makes it easier.
Roman finishes reading and sets the letter on the table as though it’s something sharp. He doesn’t tell me to ignore it or dismiss Sloane as jealous. He doesn’t make the wound smaller because the words came from a woman who smiles.
“Which part got under your skin?” he asks.
The question is too accurate. I look down at the maps, at lines and roads and places supplies should have gone. They’re easier than my own face.
“She said I shouldn’t mistake command for affection,” I say. “She said wolves kneel when Alphas order them to.”
Dane’s jaw shifts. Roman is quiet long enough that my stomach begins to sink. Then he says, “At first, that was true.”
His honesty shouldn’t surprise me anymore. It still does.
“Ordered respect can keep a wound from being touched,” Roman says. “It can’t make loyalty. That part is yours to earn or refuse.”
The words move through me slowly.
They aren’t asking me to perform. They aren’t asking me to beg. They aren’t asking me to be grateful enough that people stop seeing the scandal first.
Dane leans one hip against the table. “Kerr knelt because Roman ordered it. Holt apologized because he knew he was wrong. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“The North is blunt,” he says. “It isn’t blind.”
Something in my chest loosens, though not all the way.
I turn back to Roman. “Did you give me the council seat because I was useful, or because you wanted to defend me?”
“Both can be true.”
I hate that the answer makes my throat tighten.
Roman comes around the table slowly, stopping far enough away that I don’t have to move back. “I defended your right to stand there. You made the room listen.”
The vow mark pulses once beneath my sleeve, soft and dangerous. I fold my bandaged hand over it. Roman notices, but he doesn’t mention it.
Dane studies the map as though the eastern road has suddenly become fascinating.
“Do you want the letter burned?” Roman asks.
I look at it. Sloane’s pale blue wax is broken now. Her words are out in the room, no longer pressed against my skin alone. Once, that would have terrified me. Now it feels cleaner.
“No,” I say. “I’m keeping it.”
“Do you want to keep it as evidence?”
I think of Sloane’s rounded letters, her pretty cruelty, and her certainty that I’ll always mistake being chosen for being used because that’s what the Brooks family taught me choice meant.
“I want it as a reminder,” I say.
Roman’s gaze stays on mine.
“It isn’t a reminder of what she thinks I am,” I add. “It’s a reminder of what she sounds like when she’s afraid I might become something else.”
Dane’s mouth curves faintly. Roman doesn’t smile, but his eyes change.
“Good,” he says.
The word lands with more weight than praise should.
I reach for the letter at the same time Roman does. Our fingers brush, barely, with paper between us and skin at the edge. The mark answers.
It isn’t bright like the moon lily or painful like the council room. A warm-cold pulse moves from my wrist into my palm and up my arm. Roman stills. So do I.
His fingers lift away first, but not sharply. He moves with care, as though he knows sudden distance can bruise too.
Dane clears his throat. “I’m going to check the eastern dispatch.”
Neither of us looks at him.
“I’ll do it slowly,” he adds, dry as dust.
Then he leaves. The door closes behind him, and the map room grows quiet.
Roman remains across the table from me, with Sloane’s letter lying between us like a challenge.
“Tomorrow isn’t a test,” he says.
Tomorrow means the council and the seat he offered. My pulse quickens. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“No,” I admit.
The corner of his mouth almost moves.
He looks tired then, not weak, but worn at the edges in a way the court would probably call monstrous because it doesn’t understand what duty does to a body that keeps standing.
“The seat is yours because the work is yours,” he says. “Medicine, food, borders, wounded wolves. That’s Luna business.”
The words should scare me. They do. They also stand beneath my feet like stone.
“And if I’m wrong?” I ask.
“Then we correct it.”
“That isn’t how mistakes usually work.”
“It’s here.”
The echo of his rules from the first morning settles between us. I breathe around it.
Roman picks up the letter and holds it out to me. This time, our fingers don’t touch.
I feel both grateful and disappointed, and neither feeling is convenient.
“You need rest tonight,” he says.
“Nora told you to say that?”
“Nora told me, and I agree.”
“Are you ordering me?”
“Yes.”
My brows lift. Roman’s eyes hold mine. “I’m telling you as your Alpha because your healer will skin me if I don’t. I’m not telling you as your husband.”
I shouldn’t like the distinction. I do anyway.
“I’ll rest,” I say.
“Good.”
When I turn toward the door, Roman says my name.
“Ivy.”
I look back.
“If Sloane writes again,” he says, “show me before it gets inside your head.”
My hand tightens around the letter.
It’d be easier if he were kind in the wrong way, if he smothered, claimed, or turned every wound into his pride. Instead, he gives me sentences I don’t know where to put.
“All right,” I say.
This time, I almost mean it.