Chapter 4 Dinner

Sofia

The dining room was the kind of room that made you feel underdressed just by existing in it.

I was wearing the same clothes I'd been wearing at the auction, a plain dress that had seen better days and shoes that had seen even worse ones, and the room, with its long polished table and its candelabras and its walls hung with dark oil paintings of landscapes I didn't recognise, had absolutely no sympathy for that.

Susan stopped at the doorway, performed a small bow that managed to exclude me entirely, and left without a word.

Draco was at the head of the table.

He had changed dark shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled to the forearm in a way that should not have been as arresting as it was. He was looking at something on the table in front of him, and he didn't look up immediately when I walked in, which gave me approximately three seconds to compose myself before he did.

I used them.

"Sit," he said, when he finally looked up. Not unkindly. Not warmly either. Just a word, like sit was the most natural thing in the world and the only possible response to it was compliance.

I sat. Not because he'd told me to. Because my feet hurt and the chair was right there.

Three women in aprons stood along the far wall, still and attentive. The table between us was covered in more food than I had seen in four years collectively, roasted meats and steaming vegetables and things in small dishes that I couldn't name but that smelled extraordinary. My stomach made a decision about all of this entirely without my input, and I hated it for that.

"What would you like?" the oldest of the women asked, stepping forward.

"Nothing," I said.

Draco looked at me.

"Leave us," he said, to the women. They filed out silently, and then it was just the two of us and approximately forty dishes neither of us were eating, which felt like a metaphor for something.

"You're not hungry," he said.

"I didn't say that."

"You said nothing."

"Nothing, and not hungry are different things."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. More like the ghost of one, quickly dismissed. "Then eat."

"I don't want to eat with you."

He leaned back in his chair, unhurried, and looked at me with that steady, unreadable attention that I was beginning to find more unsettling than anger would have been. Anger I knew how to navigate. This, this patience was something else.

"You haven't eaten since before the auction," he said.

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

"Because I know what they fed you in that place." His voice didn't change, but something underneath it did, a tightening, brief and controlled. "Which was very little, and not enough, and not acceptable."

The word acceptable sat strangely in the room. Like he was the one who got to define what was and wasn't acceptable for what had been done to me. Like he had some kind of stake in it.

"That's an interesting thing for you to have an opinion about," I said, "given that you brought me here against my will."

"I did."

"And that doesn't strike you as its own category of not acceptable?"

"It strikes me," he said carefully, "as a complicated situation."

"Does it." I folded my hands on the table. "From where I'm sitting it seems fairly straightforward. You walked into that building and you took me and you put me in your car and drove me to your house and told me I was going to marry you. Which part of that is complicated?"

He was quiet for a moment. The candles between us threw warm, wavering light across the table, and somewhere outside, something moved in the grounds a night bird, maybe, calling once and then going silent.

"The part," he said finally, "where I had been looking for you for two years and found you on a platform about to be sold to men who would have destroyed you."

The room felt suddenly very still.

"Two years," I said.

"Yes."

"You've been looking for me for two years."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said: "You know why, Sofia."

I didn't. Or I did, in the way that you sometimes know things in your bones before your mind has caught up, a wordless, animal recognition that I had been steadfastly refusing to examine since the moment his gaze had found mine across the auction house. Since the sparks that had moved through me when his hand closed around my wrist. Since the smell of him in the car, sandalwood and something older and darker, making the wolf in me sit up and pay attention in a way I was not prepared to discuss.

"Don't," I said.

"Sofia,"

"Don't." I pushed back from the table and stood. "Whatever you're about to say, don't. I don't know you. I don't owe you anything. You can tell yourself whatever story you need to tell yourself about why you took me, but that's what it was. You took me. You don't get to dress that up as something else just because the alternative was worse."

He stood too.

He was very tall when he stood. I had registered this before, it was difficult not t but across a dinner table in a quiet room it hit differently, all that height and stillness and the particular quality of his attention, focused entirely on me.

"I know," he said simply without defense.

I blinked. "What?"

"I know what I did. I know how it looked. I know that telling you it was necessary doesn't change the experience of it." He held my gaze. "I'm not asking you to forgive it. I'm asking you to eat something."

I stared at him.

He gestured at the table. "Start with whatever smells best to you. Everything else can wait."

I didn't move for a long moment. My brain was doing something it rarely did, which was failing to produce a response, because I had prepared for anger or arrogance or the particular condescension of men who believed that owning something meant understanding it, and I had not prepared for I know said in that tone quiet and direct and undecorated with excuses.

"If you continue to stand there," Draco said, with the faintest trace of something that might, in better lighting, have been dry humour, "the food will get cold and we'll have to start this conversation over."

"I'm not having a conversation with you."

"You've been having a conversation with me for the past five minutes."

That was, irritatingly, accurate.

I sat back down. I pulled the nearest dish toward me something with roasted vegetables that smelled extraordinary, and I served myself a portion, and I ate it, and I did not look at him, and he had the good sense not to say anything.

We sat in that strange, charged silence for a while. Him watching me. Me pretending not to notice.

Then he said: "Your friends are settling in."

"I know. I saw them last night."

Despite everything, something flickered in my chest. "That sounds right."

"The quiet one.."

"Lilly."

"Lilly." He said it carefully, like he was placing it somewhere specific. "She's alright?"

I looked up at him then, because the question was, it was too specific. Too considered. Not are your friends comfortable but is Lilly alright, and something about the way he asked it suggested he already suspected the answer was complicated.

"She's resilient," I said. "She always has been. She had to be."

He nodded slowly.

I put my fork down. "Why do you call me that? Lobita."

"Because that's what you are."

"I'm an Omega."

"You're a wolf." His eyes held mine. "Rank isn't the same thing as nature."

I thought about that longer than I meant to.

"It means little wolf," I said. "Kara told me."

"Kara talks to Xavier."

"Yes. I've been trying to discourage that."

The ghost of a smile again. "I know. He told me."

I looked at him. He looked at me. And for one unguarded moment just one, just a fraction of a second before I pulled it back, I felt it properly. The thing I had been refusing to examine. The pull low and certain and nothing like the faint, romantic notion I had grown up associating with the concept of fated mates. This was something older than that. Something that had nothing to do with silk bedspreads and chandeliers and everything to do with the specific way he said my name.

I stood up.

"Thank you for dinner," I said, which was not something I had planned to say and which came out sounding almost genuine despite itself.

He stood when I did automatically, like it was instinct, and the formality of it knocked me slightly sideways.

"Sofia."

I stopped at the door.

"I dismissed them," he said. "This morning. All of them."

I didn't turn around. "I heard."

"I want you to know that."

I stood there for a moment, my hand on the door frame, not quite able to make myself leave and not quite able to make myself stay.

"It doesn't change anything," I said.

"I know," he said. "I'm telling you anyway."

I left.

The hallway outside the dining room was long and quiet, lit by wall sconces that threw soft gold across the dark wood panelling. I walked without a destination, which was something I used to do at the slave house when the walls felt too close just move, just keep moving, let the body do something purposeful while the mind sorted itself out.

I had a lot to sort out.

I turned a corner and nearly walked directly into a wall of muscle.

"Whoa.."

Xavier caught my arm to stop me stumbling, then immediately released it and stepped back with both hands up. He was grinning, a wide, easy grin that had no business being that disarming.

"Sorry," he said, not sounding particularly sorry. "You alright?"

"Fine." I straightened. "Where did you come from?"

"Around that corner." He nodded behind him. "Where are you going?"

"Nowhere."

"Nowhere's a long walk."

I looked at him properly for the first time. He was younger than Draco, similar colouring, similar height, but where Draco was carved from something cold and certain, Xavier had a warmth to him that sat easily on his face. Like someone who had decided the world was manageable and was mostly being proven right.

"You're Xavier," I said.

"And you're Sofia." He tilted his head. "How was dinner?"

"Fine."

"He didn't say anything terrible?"

"He said several things." I paused. "None of them were terrible."

Xavier's expression shifted not quite surprise, but something adjacent. A reassessment. "Good. That's good." He glanced down the hallway. "He's not good at.." he seemed to search for the word, " people. In the way that most people are good at people. But he tries. With you, specifically, he tries."

"He tries by telling me we're getting married without asking."

"Yeah." Xavier winced slightly. "That's a him thing. He's working on it." He paused. "Slowly."

I looked at him for a moment. "Thank you," I said. "For getting them out. Kara and Lilly and the others."

Something crossed his face, it was genuine. "Of course."

"He didn't tell me you had. In the car. He let me think.." I stopped. "He didn't tell me."

Xavier was quiet for a moment. "He doesn't explain himself much. It's a flaw." "One of several."

"How many are there?"

"I've stopped counting." But his voice was fond, in the way that only people who had known someone a very long time could be fond of their faults.

I almost smiled.

"Goodnight, Xavier," I said.

"Goodnight, Sofia." He stepped aside to let me pass, then called after me: "He was looking for you for two years, you know. Not just looking. Looking. Like a man who wouldn't stop until he found you."

I kept walking.

"Just thought you should know," he added, to my retreating back.

I didn't respond. But I didn't forget it either.

I carried it up the stairs and down the hall and into my ridiculous beautiful room, and I sat on the edge of the silk-draped bed, and I thought about a man who had walked into an auction house and crossed a room full of bowed heads to reach me specifically, who had told me I know when I accused him of taking me, who had dismissed his mistresses and not mentioned it, who had let me believe the worst of him in that car rather than offer a single word of reassurance.

And I thought: what kind of man does that?

I didn't have an answer.

But for the first time since the auction, I thought I might want one.