Chapter 6 The Dungeon

Sofia

I found him in the library the next morning.

He was standing at the far end of it with a book open in his hands, reading with the focused stillness of someone who had learned to be unreachable in the middle of a room full of people. He didn't look up when I came in, which I suspected was less about not hearing me and more about giving me the choice of whether to approach.

I approached.

He closed the book when I was a few feet away and looked at me with that steady, waiting attention.

"Thank you," I said. "For my grandmother."

He said nothing for a moment. Then: "You don't need to thank me."

"I'm choosing to, because I have to. It means a lot." I held his gaze.

Something shifted in his expression that small, almost imperceptible shift I was beginning to recognise. Like I kept saying things he had not quite prepared for.

"She's well?" he asked.

"She's wonderful. She reorganised my room this morning while I was at breakfast." I paused. "I didn't ask her to. She said the chair was in the wrong place."

"Was it?"

"Apparently. It's by the window now." I looked at him. "She told me you found her two months ago. That you told her you'd bring her when it was safe."

"Yes."

"You were already planning to bring me here two months ago?"

"I was already planning to bring you here considerably longer than two months ago," he said. "The auction complicated the timeline."

I absorbed this. "You were going to find me another way."

"Yes."

"How?"

"However was necessary."

I studied his face for a long moment the flat certainty of it, the complete absence of drama. He said things like however was necessary the way other people said probably Tuesday. Like there were no outcomes he considered impossible, only timelines.

"Xavier said you were looking for two years," I said.

"Xavier talks too much."

"He talks the right amount." I paused. "Why? You didn't know me. You'd never met me. Why spend two years.."

"Sofia." His voice was quiet. "You know why."

There it was again. The same answer as before, patient and immovable, and underneath it the same thing I kept refusing to look at directly.

"I want you to say it," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"You're my mate," he said. Simply like the words were so obvious that saying them out loud was almost redundant. "You have been since the moment I caught your scent for the first time, two years ago, in a city I was passing through, and then you were gone and I spent every day after that looking."

The library was very quiet.

"I was a slave," I said. My voice came out even, which surprised me. "For two years while you were looking, I was.."

"I know." The two words landed with weight. "I know what was happening to you while I was searching. I will carry that for the rest of my life."

"That's not, I'm not saying that to make you feel guilty. I'm saying it because.." I stopped. I pressed my hands together, and started again. "I'm saying it because I need you to understand that I am not the same person I would have been. If none of that had happened. I am not .." I gestured, helplessly, at myself, " uncomplicated."

"I know that too."

"And you still.."

"Yes." No hesitation. "Without qualification."

I looked away from him, at the shelves, the books, the window seat where I had spent three days reading pack law and pretending I wasn't listening for his footsteps. Then I looked back.

"You said yesterday you had something else to show me," I said. "After my grandmother."

He had said something I owed you, and my grandmother had been in that room, and I had assumed that was the whole of it. But standing here now, looking at his face, I understood that it wasn't.

"Yes," he said.

"Show me."

The dungeon was not what I expected.

I had expected something that matched my memories of the one at Greg's pack damp stone, low ceilings, the smell of mould and something worse underneath it. The kind of place designed to make you feel small.

Draco's dungeon was cold and clean and lit with a quality of light that was almost clinical. The cells were separated by iron bars, each one large enough to be functional, and there was nothing in the construction of it that suggested cruelty for cruelty's sake. It was simply containment. Very efficient and deliberate.

There were three cells occupied.

I knew before I saw their faces. I think I had known since yesterday, when he said something I owed you, and my mind had done the calculation and then immediately refused to complete it, because completing it meant acknowledging a possibility I wasn't sure I was ready for.

Greg was in the first cell.

He was sitting on the cot with his elbows on his knees, and he looked up when we came in, and for one unguarded moment his expression did something completely involuntary shock, then something that might have been relief, then a very quick attempt at composure that didn't quite work.

He had changed. Not in any way I could have predicted. Greg had always been handsome in an obvious way, Alpha-built and certain of himself in every room he walked into. That certainty was gone. What was left underneath it was something smaller, and I found, to my own surprise, that I did not feel triumphant about that.

I felt very little, actually.

Which was its own kind of answer.

"Sofia." His voice was rough. "Sofia, I.."

"Don't," I said. Not harshly just clearly.

He stopped.

My stepmother was in the next cell. She saw me and got to her feet with an expression I recognised the particular combination of fear and calculation that had characterised most of my interactions with her since I was sixteen. She was still calculating. I could see it happening, even now, even here. Looking for the angle. Looking for the version of this that ended with her walking away intact.

"Sofia," she said, in the voice she saved for situations where being warm to me was strategically useful. "Sofia, darling..."

"No," I said.

Her mouth closed.

Kayla was in the third cell.

She was sitting in the corner with her knees pulled to her chest, and when she saw me she flinched, a full-body thing, instinctive and honest in a way that nothing else about her ever had been. Her eyes were red. She had been crying, recently and probably at length.

"Sofia," she whispered.

I looked at her for a long time.

Kayla, who had shared a house with me for four years after our parents married, who had borrowed my clothes and eaten at my table and known, she had known what Greg was to me, and had chosen anyway. Who had watched them drag me away and said nothing. Who was the last face I had seen before the dungeon, and she had not looked sorry.

She looked sorry now, i didn't say anything.

I turned and walked back to the stairs, and Draco fell into step beside me without a word, and we climbed back up into the light and the warmth of the house above, and only when we were back in the hallway with its wood panelling and its wall sconces and its complete removal from the world below did I stop.

"What are you going to do with them?" I asked.

"Whatever you want," he said.

I looked at him. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one that matters." He met my gaze, steady and certain. "They're yours, Sofia. The decision is yours."

I thought about that for a long moment. About what it would have meant to sixteen-year-old me to hear those words that I had power over the people who had taken everything from me. I had imagined it, in the slave house. In the small hours, in the dark, when imagination was the only thing that belonged to me. I had built very detailed versions of this moment.

None of them felt like this.

"I don't want to hurt them," I said, and the truth of it surprised me even as I said it. "I thought I would. I thought when I finally.." I stopped. "But I don't. I want them to understand what they did. I want them to have to sit with it. But I don't want to...." I shook my head. "I'm not that person."

"I know," Draco said.

"You know a lot of things about me for someone I've only known a week."

"Ten days," he said. "And yes."

Something fluttered in my chest, brief and inconvenient. "I want to talk to Greg," I said. "Alone, not today. When I'm ready."

"Whenever you want."

"And I want my stepmother and Kayla kept here until I've decided what happens next. Not harmed. Just here."

He nodded.

"Draco." The name sat strangely in my mouth, the first time I had said it directly to him. He noticed, I saw him notice. "Why did you bring them here? You could have I don't know, left them where they were. Why bring them here for me?"

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Because you spent four years at the mercy of people who had power over you," he said, "and I wanted you to know what it felt like to have it the other way."

The hallway was very still.

"That's.." I started. Stopped. "That's either the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me or completely terrifying."

"It can be both," he said.

I looked at him, this man who was too much of everything, too tall and too certain and too present, who had spent two years looking for me and brought my grandmother and my enemies to the same house and said whatever you want like it cost him nothing.

"I need to think," I said.

"I know."

"I'm going to go think."

"I know that too."

I turned to go. Then stopped. Then turned back, because there was one more thing.

"You should have told me," I said. "In the car. That they were alive. You should have told me."

He held my gaze. "Yes," he said. "I should have."

No excuse, no context, just yes.

I nodded once, and walked away, and tried to figure out when exactly the ground had shifted beneath me without my permission.

Kara cried when I told her.

Not dramatically, Kara's tears were always brief and fierce, like summer rain. She pressed her fingers to her eyes for a moment, exhaled hard, and then straightened up and said "Okay" in the voice that meant she was filing the emotion away for later, when she had time for it.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

"I don't know." I was on the floor again I kept ending up on the floor; there was something about it that felt honest with my back against the bed. "I thought I'd feel something. Seeing them, something large. Anger, or.."

"But?"

"But I mostly just felt tired." I looked at my hands. "Four years of carrying all of that, and then I walked into that room and looked at them and I just felt tired."

Lilly, from the armchair, held up her notebook: Maybe that's what the end of something feels like.

I looked at her.

Not dramatic, she continued, writing quickly. Just tired. Like you've been holding something heavy for a long time and you finally put it down and your arms ache.

"When did you get wise?" I asked.

She smiled and wrote: Always. You just don't always listen.

Kara laughed, wet and genuine, and leaned over to squeeze Lilly's hand.

"He said whatever I want," I said. "About what happens to them."

"And what do you want?" Kara asked.

I leaned my head back against the side of the bed and stared at the chandelier.

"Right now?" I said. "I want dinner. I want to eat it with you two and my grandmother and not think about any of it for one evening."

"That," Kara said, getting to her feet with decision, "I can absolutely arrange."

Lilly was already writing: I'll get your grandmother.

"Tell her the chair placement in her room is perfect," I said. "She'll want to hear that."

Lilly's shoulders shook with silent laughter as she headed for the door.

I stayed on the floor for another moment, alone in the room, and thought about the light in Draco's window burning long after everything else had gone dark.