Chapter 3 Reunion

Sofia

Kara had opinions about the mansion.

This was not surprising. Kara had opinions about everything, the thread count of the sheets at the slave house, the particular injustice of being served cold porridge on Tuesdays specifically, the correct way to braid hair when you had no mirror and limited patience. In four years, I had never once seen her walk into a room without immediately forming a view on it.

She formed several on this one.

"Sofia." She stood in the centre of my bedroom with her hands on her hips, turning slowly, taking it all in. "Sofia, there is a chandelier."

"I see it."

"It has crystals on it."

"Kara..."

"Real ones, I think. And the bed..." She crossed to it and pressed one hand into the mattress, and her expression did something involuntary and reverent. "Oh. Oh, that's not fair."

Lilly was already sitting in the armchair by the window, her notebook open on her knee, watching Kara with the quiet amusement she reserved for moments when words would only slow things down.

"We don't know anything about this place," I said. "Or about him. Can we not decorate the cell before we've established whether the door locks from the inside or the outside?"

Kara turned to face me. "It's not a cell."

"It might as well be."

"A cell," she said, with exaggerated patience, "does not have a four-poster bed and fresh flowers and..." she picked up one of the crystal perfume bottles from the dressing table and sniffed it, "... oh, that's expensive."

"Put that down."

She put it down. Then she sat on the edge of the bed which she had clearly decided was hers to evaluate and looked at me properly. The performance dropped, just slightly. Underneath it was the same thing that was underneath everything with Kara: someone paying very close attention.

"Talk to me," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You've said you're fine approximately forty times since we got here and every time you say it you look less fine. Try again."

I sat down on the floor, the floor was still honest, and leaned back against the bed frame. Lilly looked up from her notebook and tilted her head in a way that meant she's right, you know.

"He called me his," I said. "Downstairs. Before he left. He said... " I paused. The words sat strangely in my mouth. "You are mine, Lobita."

Kara's eyebrows went up.

"Whatever Lobita means," I added.

"It means little wolf," Kara said.

I stared at her. "How do you know that?"

She looked, briefly, like she was deciding something. "Xavier told me,"

"Of course he did." I rubbed my face with both hands. "Kara. We have been here for a matter of hours. We don't know these people. We don't know their intentions. We don't know why Draco brought us here or what he wants or what happens when he decides he's done being," I gestured vaguely, "hospitable."

"He saved us."

"We don't know why."

"Does the why matter that much right now?"

"The why is the only thing that matters."

Lilly held up her notebook. She had been writing while we talked, in that quick, efficient way of hers, she could fill a page before most people had formed a sentence. The words said: Kara is right that he saved us. You are right that we should be careful. Both things can be true.

I looked at her. "You're supposed to be on my side."

She wrote: I am on your side. That's why I'm being honest.

Kara pointed at her. "What she said."

I dropped my head back against the bed frame and stared at the ceiling. The chandelier threw small fragments of light across it, restless and scattered. Somewhere in the house, a clock was ticking.

"He dismissed his mistresses," Kara said, after a moment.

I looked at her.

"This morning, apparently. The whole palace is in shock." She paused. "Xavier told me."

"You have to stop talking to him."

"He keeps appearing."

"That's not the same as having to."

She gave me a look that suggested she found this argument unpersuasive, and I decided not to pursue it because I was tired and the floor was starting to hurt and I had approximately seventeen more pressing problems to think about.

"He's going to ask me to marry him," I said.

The room went quiet.

"He already did," I admitted. "Sort of. He told me. That's how he said it. We'll be getting married, Lobita. Like it was already decided. Like I was going to.." I stopped. Shook my head. "I asked him why he needed a wife when he already had mistresses. He didn't answer. He saw my scars and.."

"Your scars?" Kara's voice sharpened.

"He reached for them. I accused him of.." I stopped again. The memory of his expression that flash of something that was not anger but was adjacent to it, cold and controlled sat uncomfortably in my chest. "He left."

Lilly wrote: Did he hurt you?

"No." That, at least, was straightforward. "He didn't. He left."

Another silence. Lilly wrote again, and turned the notebook to face me: A man who has everything you just described, who could do anything, left when you asked him to?

I looked at the page for a long moment.

"I didn't ask him to," I said. "I accused him of something. He was angry. He left anyway."

Lilly's expression said: Yes. That's exactly what I mean.

I didn't have an answer for that, so I pushed myself up off the floor and went to the window instead, mostly to give myself something to look at that wasn't their faces.

The grounds stretched out below, silver and still in the moonlight. I could see the fountain from here, the paths winding between the hedgerows, the other buildings set further back on the estate. It was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they're built by someone who has never had to ask the price of anything.

"I don't trust him," I said, to the window.

"That's fair," Kara said.

"I don't trust this place."

"Also fair."

"I don't know what he wants from me or why he chose me or what little wolf is supposed to mean or why every person in that auction house dropped their eyes when he walked in like he was.." I paused. "What is he, Kara? Do you know that too? Did Xavier tell you that?"

"He's an Alpha," she said carefully. "A very powerful one."

"How powerful?"

Another beat, slightly longer. "The most powerful one."

I turned from the window. "What does that mean?"

"It means.." She hesitated, then seemed to decide on honesty. "It means when Draco walks into a room, other Alphas bow. It means there are packs across three territories who answer to him. It means the men in that auction house weren't just being polite."

I thought about the silence that had fallen the moment he appeared. The bowed heads. The auctioneer's open mouth, frozen mid-syllable.

"Right," I said.

"Sofia..."

"I'm fine," I said, and this time I almost meant it. Or at least, I meant the version of fine that means I have filed this information in the relevant place and I am continuing to function. "I'm going to sleep. You should both sleep."

Lilly wrote: We're two doors down. Come and get us if you need anything.

I nodded.

Kara stood and crossed to me and took my face in both hands for a moment, a thing she did sometimes, brief and certain, when she wanted me to understand something without having to say it. Then she let go, and she and Lilly slipped out, and the door clicked shut, and I was alone again.

I stood at the window for a while longer.

Little wolf.

He had named me before I had agreed to be named. Had decided something about me before I had decided anything about myself. Had looked at me in that auction house like he had been looking for me specifically like I was the reason he had come, and everything else in the room was irrelevant detail.

Someone who has been looking for you for a very long time.

I pressed my fingers against the cold glass and thought about that, and tried to decide whether it frightened me.

It did.

But not, I was beginning to suspect, entirely for the right reasons.

I didn't mean to fall asleep.

One moment I was sitting on the edge of that ridiculous silk-draped bed, still dressed, still trying to think, and the next moment I was waking up to pale morning light coming through the windows and a silence so total it felt deliberate.

I lay still for a moment and took inventory, the way I always did: where am I, what are the exits, what do I know.

Where am I: a mansion belonging to a man called Draco, who is apparently the most powerful Alpha alive and who has decided, for reasons still unclear, that I am his.

Exits: the door, the windows, neither of which were currently viable.

What do I know: that Kara and Lilly were alive, two doors down. That the fire had been deliberate. That he had told Xavier to save them, and Xavier had, and Draco had said nothing in the car to let me know that.

I sat up.

That last part was still sitting strangely in me. He could have told me. One sentence, in the car, while I sat beside him white-knuckled and hollow with grief: your friends are alive, I had them taken out first. One sentence, and the entire drive would have been different.

He hadn't said it.

I didn't know yet if that was cruelty or something else entirely.

A knock at the door.

"Come in," I called, assuming it was Kara.

It wasn't Kara.

Susan opened the door with the expression of someone performing a task they found personally offensive. "The Alpha requests your presence for dinner," she said. "He's waiting."

I looked at her. "Tell him I'm not hungry."

Something moved in her expression, a flicker of what might have been satisfaction, quickly covered. "I would strongly advise against that."

"Would you."

"You may not be aware of how things work here." She clasped her hands in front of her, patient and precise and sharp-edged underneath both. "No one declines the Alpha's invitation. Not if they have any sense of self-preservation."

I held her gaze. "Thank you for the advice."

A beat. She seemed to be deciding whether this counted as compliance.

"I'll go," I said, before she could decide. Not because I wanted to. Because I had questions, and the only person who had answers was apparently waiting downstairs, and I had never in my life been good at leaving questions unanswered.

Susan's expression suggested this was not the victory she had hoped for.

She led the way.