Chapter 5 Cracks

Sofia

I found out about the mistresses from Kara, which meant I found out approximately four minutes after everyone else in the mansion did.

She appeared at my door before I had finished dressing, still in her nightclothes, eyes wide with the particular energy of someone carrying news they consider urgent. Lilly was behind her, notebook already in hand, expression carefully neutral in the way it got when she was trying not to have an opinion before I'd had time to form one.

"He dismissed them," Kara said, without preamble. "All of them. This morning. They're gone."

I pulled my hair back. "You mentioned that last night."

"I know, but Sofia, the whole palace is talking. Susan looks like she swallowed something unpleasant. Two of the kitchen staff are apparently in shock. Xavier said he's never seen Draco.."

"You spoke to Xavier this morning already?"

She paused. "He was in the hallway."

"Kara."

"He keeps showing up,"

"You could walk in the other direction."

She sat down on my bed with the air of someone who had considered this option and found it lacking. "He's nice, Sofia."

"He works for the man who took us against our will."

"He also saved our lives." She folded her legs underneath her. "I'm allowed to find that relevant."

I looked at Lilly, who wrote without looking up: She has a point. So do you. Good morning.

"Good morning," I said, despite myself.

She smiled.

I finished dressing and went to the window. The grounds below were already busy figures moving along the paths, a group of men training in a courtyard I hadn't noticed the night before, a woman cutting flowers from one of the gardens with the focused efficiency of someone who had done it ten thousand times. It looked, from up here, almost like a small self-contained world.

Which, I supposed, it was.

"Are you going to see him today?" Kara asked.

"I wasn't planning to."

"He'll probably send for you."

"Then I'll deal with that when it happens."

She made a sound that meant she thought I was being avoidant and was choosing not to say so directly, which was about as subtle as Kara ever got.

"What do you want me to say?" I turned from the window. "I don't know what he wants. I don't know what any of this is. Dismissing his mistresses doesn't mean anything except that he dismissed his mistresses."

Lilly held up her notebook: It means something to him.

"You don't know that."

She gave me a look. She had a very particular look for when she thought I was being deliberately obtuse, patient and slightly pitying and utterly certain. I had been on the receiving end of it more times than I could count.

"Fine," I said. "Maybe it means something to him. That doesn't mean I have to do anything about it."

"No one said you did," Kara said. "We're just noting the data."

"The data," I repeated.

"The data." She spread her hands. "Man dismisses every woman in his life the morning after you arrive. That's a data point. Man looks for you for two years also a data point. Man tells you in a car that he's been looking for you and then doesn't tell you your friends are alive even though he clearly knew," she tilted her head, "actually, that one's more complicated."

"Yes," I said. "It is."

Lilly wrote: Why do you think he didn't tell you?

I had been thinking about that since last night. Turning it over the way you turn something sharp over in your hands, looking for the angle that makes it make sense.

"I don't know," I said. "Either he didn't think it mattered, or he did think it mattered and he still didn't say it, which are two very different things."

Which do you think it was? Lilly wrote.

I didn't answer, because I didn't have one that I was prepared to say out loud yet.

I went outside after breakfast.

Not looking for anything in particular. Just moving, the way I always moved when I needed to think purposeful enough to feel productive, aimless enough to let my mind do what it needed to do without interference.

The grounds were larger than I'd understood from the window. The main path from the mansion's entrance split into several smaller ones, winding between gardens and fountains and outbuildings, and further back, beyond a low stone wall, there were what looked like training grounds, stables, a long low building I couldn't identify. It was less an estate and more a small contained territor, everything a pack might need, tucked behind those enormous gates.

I was standing by the fountain, watching the water catch the morning light, when I heard voices.

Xavier's first warm and easy, the particular tone of someone accustomed to talking to children because they genuinely enjoy it, not because they think they should.

Then a child's voice, high and clear: "But why can't you just ask him?"

"Because.." then he paused, "..because some things you can't just ask."

"That's a grown-up answer. Grown-up answers are always like that."

"That's extremely accurate and I'm not sure I appreciate it."

I rounded the corner of the hedge and found them: Xavier sitting on a low stone bench, and beside him a small girl of about six or seven with dark pigtails and a gap-toothed smile and the kind of fearlessness that only existed before the world had had sufficient time to teach you caution. She was kicking her feet against the side of the bench with cheerful indifference to the noise it made.

She saw me first.

"Hello," she said.

I stopped. Xavier looked up, and something in his expression shifted, surprised, then pleased, then carefully neutral in quick succession.

"Hello," I said, to the child.

"I'm Mila," she said. "Who are you?"

"Sofia."

"That's a pretty name." She considered me with the frank, total attention that small children deployed without any awareness of how unsettling it could be. "Are you the one who's going to marry Alpha Draco?"

I glanced at Xavier.

He had the grace to look slightly pained. "News travels fast."

"Apparently." I looked back at Mila. "I don't know yet."

"He doesn't like people very much," she said, conversationally. "I mean, he's nice to me. But I think that's because I'm small. Big people make him..." she searched for the word, " careful."

"Careful," I repeated.

"Like when you're holding something and you don't want to break it." She demonstrated with her hands, that particular tense stillness of someone carrying something fragile. "Like that."

I stared at her.

"Mila," Xavier said, with the patient tone of someone steering a ship that had developed its own opinions about direction, "maybe.."

"I'm just saying." She returned to kicking the bench. "He'd probably be nicer if he wasn't so careful all the time."

Footsteps on the path behind me.

I turned.

Kara had clearly followed me outside and was now approaching with a slightly breathless quality that suggested she had been looking for a while. She stopped when she saw Xavier and composed herself in approximately half a second, which was impressive.

"Good morning," she said, to him.

"Good morning," he said back.

Mila looked between them with undisguised interest. "Are you two.."

"Mila," Xavier said, "do you want to see if Cook has anything for breakfast?"

"I already had breakfast."

"Second breakfast is a completely valid concept."

She appeared to weigh this seriously, then hopped off the bench and headed toward the mansion at a run, glancing back once to give me a wave that I returned before I'd decided to.

Kara sat down next to Xavier.

I remained standing, on the grounds that if I sat down it would look like I was staying, and I wasn't staying, I was going to continue my walk in a moment.

"How's Draco this morning?" Kara asked Xavier.

"Gone," Xavier said.

I looked at him. "What?"

"He left early. Before the rest of the house was up." Xavier's expression was even but watchful. "He does that sometimes. Takes off without telling anyone where."

"When will he be back?"

He glanced at me just briefly, just enough to register that I'd asked. "I don't know. Could be tonight. Could be a few days."

I nodded. The information settled in me in a way I didn't want to examine, which was to say it settled with more weight than the simple logistical fact of it should have warranted.

He had left.

Without saying anything. After last night after I know and I'm telling you anyway and the ghost of something almost like conversation he had simply gotten up before dawn and driven away.

I don't explain myself much. That's what Xavier had said.

"It's fine," I said to no one in particular.

Kara was looking at me.

"It's completely fine," I said again. "It doesn't matter."

"Okay," she said, in the tone that meant she would revisit this later when I was less primed to argue.

I turned and walked back toward the mansion, and I didn't think about the empty dining room or the untouched head of the table or the particular silence of a house that was full of people and somehow still felt like something was missing.

I didn't think about that at all.

He came back three days later.

I knew because the house changed when he returned a subtle shift in the energy of the place, like a room that had been holding its breath finally exhaling. Staff moved with more purpose, and conversations dropped lower. The quality of silence in the hallways became different, more considered.

I was in the library, a room I had found on the second day and immediately established a proprietary relationship with, mostly because it had deep window seats and was far enough from the main rooms that no one came looking for you there when I heard the front doors.

I didn't go downstairs.

I told myself this was because I was reading, which was partly true. The book I had found was old and dense and about the history of pack law, and I was working my way through it with the same focused attention I brought to anything that might eventually be useful to know.

But also: I was not going to be one of those people who went to the window when they heard the doors. I had some dignity left.

I made it approximately four pages before I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

They were unmistakeable that specific, unhurried rhythm that I had catalogued without meaning to on the first night, the footsteps of someone who had never once in their life needed to rush. They came down the hall, passed two doors, and stopped.

My door, the library door was open.

I kept my eyes on the page.

"You found the library," he said, from the doorway.

"Three days ago." I turned a page. "It's a good library."

"I know. I built it."

I looked up at that, because it was not the kind of thing I had expected him to say. He was leaning against the doorframe jacket gone, collar open, with the particular quality of stillness that I was beginning to understand was not blankness but its opposite. A great deal happening beneath a very controlled surface.

He looked tired. Not physically, I wasn't sure physical fatigue was something that applied to him but something else. Something older.

"Did you find what you needed?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

He looked at me.

"Wherever you went," I clarified, returning my attention to the book.

A pause. "Not entirely."

"That's a shame."

Another pause. "Did it bother you? That I left without saying anything."

I turned a page. "Why would it?"

"Sofia."

"I'm reading."

"You've been reading for three days."

"It's a long book."

I heard him move just slightly, a shift of weight in the doorway, and then he said, quietly: "It bothered me. That I didn't tell you I was going."

I stopped pretending to read.

"I'm not.. " he paused, and I had the sense of someone choosing words with more care than was usual for them, " I don't explain myself. I don't have a habit of it. For a long time, there was no one I owed an explanation to."

I looked up at him.

"I'm aware that's not adequate," he said. "I'm telling you anyway."

I'm telling you anyway. The same words as the other night, I want you to know that. I'm telling you anyway. Like telling me things was an act he was learning in real time. Like he was practising it.

"Where did you go?" I asked.

He was quiet for a moment. "To collect something I owed you."

Before I could ask what that meant, footsteps came thundering up the stairs Xavier, slightly breathless, appearing behind Draco in the doorway with his eyes bright.

"She's here," he said. "They just arrived."

Draco looked at me. Something in his expression shifted not the careful stillness but something underneath it, something that was almost, almost..

"Come with me," he said.

She was in a room on the ground floor, one I hadn't been into before, and she was sitting in a chair by the window with her hands folded in her lap and the particular upright patience of someone who had waited a long time for something and was not going to let the last few minutes undo them.

She looked older than I remembered. Of course she did, four years was four years. Her hair had gone fully silver, and there were lines on her face that hadn't been there before, and her hands, when she stood, moved with the careful deliberateness of someone whose joints had begun to register the years.

But her eyes were the same.

Exactly the same, dark and bright and so familiar that something in my chest simply collapsed.

"Grandma," I said. The word came out like something breaking.

She opened her arms, and I walked into them, and for a long moment I was sixteen years old again, standing in her kitchen in the Beta house while she braided my hair and told me that difficult things had a way of eventually being over, and that the trick was simply to still be standing when they were.

She held me tight enough to hurt, which was exactly right.

"My darling girl," she said, into my hair. "My darling, darling girl."

I didn't cry. I was so tired of not crying. But I held on, and she held back, and behind me the doorway was empty because Draco had slipped away without a word, and that was.

That was the thing he had gone to collect.

Not an object, not leverage. Not something useful to him.

Something I owed you.

He had spent three days going wherever she was and bringing her here, and he hadn't told me he was going to do it, and he hadn't stayed to watch me find out, and I stood in that room with my grandmother's arms around me and tried to make sense of a man who kept doing things like that.

Things that didn't fit.

Things that made it significantly harder to keep him at a safe and manageable distance.

My grandmother pulled back and held my face in both hands, her thumbs against my cheekbones, her eyes moving over my face with the searching attention of someone checking for damage and then she smiled slowly. The smile that had always meant I know it was hard but look, you're here.

"He found me two months ago," she said softly. "Told me he'd bring me to you when it was safe. I didn't know whether to believe him."

"Did you?"

She considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "I believed that he meant it," she said. "That's not always the same thing. But yes. I believed him."

I looked at the empty doorway.

"Sofia." Her voice was gentle but exact, the way it always was when she had something to say that she knew I might resist. "Whatever you're telling yourself about that man.."

"Grandma.."

" I'd look a little closer," she finished. "That's all I'll say."

I said nothing.

She patted my face once, the way she always had, and sat back down, and began telling me about the journey, the car, the driver who hadn't spoken a word, the house she'd been kept in that had been perfectly comfortable and slightly eerie, and I sat at her feet like I was a child again, and I listened, and outside the window the grounds stretched on in the afternoon light, and somewhere in this house a man was deliberately not taking credit for the thing he had just done.

I thought about that for the rest of the day.

I thought about it while I ate dinner with my grandmother and Kara and Lilly, all four of us crammed into my grandmother's small sitting room with plates on our laps, Kara making everyone laugh, Lilly writing faster than usual because she had so much to say.

I thought about it when Kara caught my eye across the room and raised her eyebrows in a way that meant well?

I thought about it when I finally went back to my own room, and stood at the window, and looked out at the dark grounds, and somewhere below, a light in a window I hadn't identified yet, burning long after the rest of the house had gone quiet.

Little wolf.

I pressed my hand against the cold glass and thought: I don't know what you are. I don't know what this is. I don't know what you want from me or what I'm supposed to want from you.

But I thought, for the first time, that I might be willing to find out.