Between Death and Desire

Water is the last thing I remember. Cold water, closing over my head, pulling me down while his face got smaller and smaller above the surface.

Then nothing.

Now there's stone under my back, hard and cold, and torchlight flickering somewhere above me, and my chest hurts like I've been breathing wrong for a very long time.

I open my eyes.

The ceiling is wrong. Low, gray, cracked in places. Not the ceiling I remember. Not the sky I remember, either...... The last sky I saw was full of water, silver bubbles rising past my face while my lungs screamed.

I sit up too fast. My head spins. My hands hit the floor to catch myself, and I stare at them.

They're not my hands.

The fingers are thinner. The nails are bitten down to nothing. There's a small white scar across one knuckle that I don't remember ever getting.

"Whose hands are these," I whisper.

Nobody answers. I'm alone in a narrow stone room that smells like straw and tallow candles. A cot sits against one wall, blankets thrown back like someone left in a hurry. My hurry, I guess.

I press my palm flat against my chest. My heart is going too fast. I can feel it ...... Feel it in a body that isn't mine, wearing skin that isn't mine, breathing air that shouldn't be filling these lungs at all.

"I died," I say out loud, just to hear it. "I remember dying."

The door bangs open before I can think about that any further.

A girl steps in, out of breath, dark hair falling out of its braid. She stops the second she sees me sitting up, and her whole face goes pale.

"Rue," she says. "You're awake."

I stare at her. The name doesn't fit in my ears right. It sits there wrong, like a shoe on the wrong foot.

"Who's Rue," I say, before I can stop myself.

Her eyebrows pull together. "You are. Rue - are you all right? You collapsed in the kitchens. Two days ago. We thought-" She stops. Swallows. "We thought you might not wake up at all."

Two days. I've been gone from my own life for five years, and now I've lost two more just lying on a cot in a room I don't recognize, wearing a body I don't recognize, answering to a name that isn't mine.

"I'm fine," I say, because it's easier than the truth, and because some old instinct in me ...... old from a different life .... knows better than to hand strangers the truth for free.

She comes closer, kneels by the cot, studies my face like she's trying to find something wrong with it. "You don't look fine. You look like you've seen a ghost."

I am the ghost, I think. You're just looking at me and don't know it.

"I had a bad dream," I say instead. "That's all."

"You were talking in your sleep." She says it carefully, like she's not sure she should. "You kept saying a name. Kael. Over and over."

My whole body goes still.

Hearing it out loud does something to me I wasn't ready for. It isn't just a name. It's water in my lungs. It's his hands, too far away to reach me. It's five years of being dead and thinking about nothing else.

"I don't know anyone named Kael," I say. My voice comes out flat. Practiced. I don't know where that skill came from in this new, unfamiliar throat, but I'm grateful for it.

The girl watches me a second longer than I like. Then she shrugs, like she's decided not to push. "Well. You should eat something. You've had nothing in two days." She stands, brushes off her knees. "I'm Mira, by the way. In case dying and coming back scrambled that too."

"Mira," I repeat, testing the name the way I tested my own new fingers. Filing it away. "Thank you, Mira."

"For what?"

"For finding me."

She gives me a small, strange smile, like she's not used to being thanked for anything. "Come on. If the kitchen mistress sees you up, she'll put you straight back to work, and you look like a strong wind could knock you over."

I follow her out into a hallway lined with low doors, and I understand, in pieces, what I've woken up into. Omega quarters. The lowest rank in the pack. People who scrub floors and carry water and disappear into the walls so completely that nobody ever really sees them.

Good, some cold part of me thinks. Let them not see me. Let them keep thinking I'm nobody, right up until the moment it matters.

We come out into a courtyard, and the size of the place stops me cold. Stone towers rising up into a gray sky. Wolves moving across the training grounds below, fast and disciplined, sparring in pairs.

This is Nightvale. I know it even though I've never stood in this exact spot before - I know the smell of it, the shape of the mountains behind the walls, the way the whole place seems to hum with old power.

"You've gone white again," Mira says.

"I'm just not used to being out of bed," I lie.

We're halfway across the courtyard when the air changes.

I don't know how else to explain it. One second it's just cold morning air, and the next, every hair on my arms is standing up, and something in my chest - something that isn't quite my heart, something lower and older - twists hard.

I look up.

He's standing on the far side of the training yard, watching a pair of warriors spar. Black hair falling across his forehead. Broad shoulders under a dark coat. He isn't looking at me. He isn't looking at anything but the fight in front of him.

And still, my whole body reacts like he's already touching me.

"Kael Draven," Mira says under her breath, following my stare. "Our Alpha. Try not to look so terrified, Rue, he'll think you did something wrong."

"I'm not terrified," I say, though my voice shakes on the word.

"Could've fooled me."

I can't stop looking at him. Five years of imagining this face - in nightmares, in the last conscious seconds I had underwater - and here it is, real, breathing, twenty feet away from me. Older than I remember.

Tired in a way he never let himself look before. There's a tightness around his eyes that wasn't there the last time I saw him, standing at the edge of the Silver Vein while I went under.

He watched me die, I think. He stood right there and watched.

Then, like he heard the thought, he turns his head.

His eyes find mine across the whole courtyard.

I forget how to breathe.

For one long second, nothing happens. He just looks at me - really looks, the way you look at something you can't quite place, something that's tugging at a memory you can't reach. His jaw tightens. His silver eyes darken, just slightly, and I feel it like a hand closing around my throat.

"Rue," Mira hisses, tugging my sleeve. "Stop staring at the Alpha. Are you trying to get us both in trouble?"

I tear my eyes away and let her pull me toward the kitchens, but I can feel his stare on my back the whole way, like a brand.

"Does he always look at people like that," I ask, once we're inside, once the heavy kitchen door shuts between us and the yard.

"Like what?"

"Like he's trying to remember something."

Mira laughs, but it sounds nervous. "He doesn't look at Omegas at all, usually. We're not exactly worth his attention." She hands me a rag and points at a stack of dishes.

"You must have made an impression collapsing in his kitchens."

I take the rag. My hands are shaking, and I press them flat against the counter until they stop.

He doesn't know, I tell myself. He can't know. Nobody knows.

But some small, treacherous part of me - the part that used to belong to a woman named Elara, the part that drowned five years ago and never quite finished dying - wants him to know. Wants him to cross that courtyard, take my face in his hands, and say my real name out loud, consequences be damned.

I push the thought down hard. Down where the anger lives. Down where I keep the memory of his silence while the water closed over my head.

He didn't save me once, I remind myself. Don't be foolish enough to hope he'll save you now.

I scrub the first dish so hard my knuckles turn white.

Behind me, through the small kitchen window, I can just make out his shape still standing at the edge of the training yard.

Still watching the door I disappeared through.

Still, somehow, looking for me.

Three weeks pass, and I learn how to disappear.

I learn the halls that guards do not watch. I learn which kitchen mistress does not count the bread, and which one counts twice. I learn to keep my eyes down and my voice small, because Rue's body flinches at loud noise and I have decided that is useful now. Better they think I am weak than wonder what I really am.

I also learn, slowly, in pieces, what happened to Elara Veyne.

I hear it first from an old wolf scrubbing pots beside me, talking to no one in particular the way old women do. "Poisoned the heir, she did," the woman mutters, not even looking at me. "Sweet-faced little thing, too. You would never have guessed."

My hands go still in the wash water.

"Who?" I ask, careful to sound bored.

"Before your time, girl. Elara Veyne. Five years back. Council caught her red-handed-poison in the heir's cup, plain as day. Alpha had no choice." She shakes her head. "Shame. Pretty girl."

I did not poison anyone, I want to scream. I never touched that cup.

Instead I say, "What happened to her?"

The old woman just looks at me and does not answer. She goes back to her pots.

I do not need her to answer. I already know how the story ends. I lived it. I died in it.

I carry that lie around with me for three weeks like a stone in my shoe-the story everyone believes, the story that got me killed, sitting right there in the mouths of women who scrub pots beside me and have no idea I am the one they are talking about.

---

The summons comes on a gray afternoon, while I am elbow-deep in dishwater.

A guard fills the kitchen doorway. Every Omega in the room goes quiet at once, the way a flock of birds goes still when a hawk crosses the sky.

"Rue," he says. "Alpha wants you. Now."

My stomach drops straight through the floor.

Nyra-the pale, quiet healer's assistant who has taken to sitting near me at meals, who has soft eyes and softer hands and asks too many careful questions-grabs my wrist under the table where the guard cannot see.

"What did you do?" she whispers.

"Nothing," I say. It is mostly true. Nothing he can prove, anyway.

"Rue. You are shaking."

"I am fine."

She does not believe me. I can see it in her face-that unsettling way she has of looking at people like she is listening for something under their skin. But she lets go of my wrist, and I follow the guard out, because there is not a version of this where I do not.

---

Kael's private chambers sit at the top of the north tower. Two guards stand watch over the oak door like it is made of gold instead of wood. One of them pushes it open without a word.

The room is dark. A fire burns low in the hearth, throwing orange light across stone walls. Maps pinned up. A sword mounted over the mantle. And Kael, standing with his back to me, staring into the flames like they owe him an answer.

"Close the door," he says, without turning around.

I do. My hands are steady. My hands have gotten very good at lying, even when the rest of me has not.

"You wanted to see me, my lord," I say. I make my voice small. I make it shake at the edges, because Rue would be terrified right now, and I need him to see Rue.

He turns.

For a moment, neither of us says anything. His silver eyes move over my face like he is trying to read something written in a language he used to know and has half-forgotten. Up close, the tiredness I saw across the courtyard is worse. There are lines at the corners of his eyes that a man his age should not have yet.

"Do you know why I called you here?" he asks.

"No, my lord."

"Do not lie to me."

"I am not-"

"You are." He crosses the room in three strides, faster than I expect, and stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep looking at him. My heart slams so hard I am sure he can hear it. "I have watched you for three weeks, Rue. Or whatever your name actually is."

My blood goes cold.

"I do not understand," I say.

"Yes, you do."

He reaches out-slow, like he is giving me every chance to step back. Some traitor part of me does not take it. He cups my face in one hand. His palm is warm. Rough with old scars. I remember, suddenly and violently, the shape of that hand reaching for me over black water, five years and one whole death ago.

"Who are you?" he says, and his voice cracks right down the middle of the question. "You smell like her. You move like her. You have her eyes when you think no one is watching. But she is dead. I watched her die. So tell me-before I lose what is left of my mind-who are you?"

I cannot breathe.

The law sits in my chest like a hand around my throat. One year and one day. Say her name before then, and there is nothing left of her to save. No body. No soul. Nothing. Just gone, the way she should have stayed gone.

"My name is Rue," I whisper.

Something in his face breaks. Just slightly. Hope, maybe. Or the death of it. He lets go of my face like it burned him.

"Say it again," he says.

"My name is Rue."

"Look at me and say it again."

I look at him. I make myself hold his eyes, gray going darker by the second. I say it a third time, slow and clear, like a wall I am building brick by brick between us.

"My. Name. Is. Rue."

He stares at me a long time after that. Long enough that the fire pops and neither of us flinches. Long enough that I start to wonder if he can hear the lie underneath the words the way I can feel it sitting in my own chest, ugly and necessary.

"Fine," he says finally. He turns back toward the fire like something in him just gave out. "Then Rue will do."

"My lord?"

"You will move into this wing. Effective tonight." He does not look at me when he says it. "You will attend me personally. Meals, correspondence, whatever I require."

"I already have work in the kitchens, my lord-"

"Not anymore." His voice leaves no room in it. "I want you where I can see you."

"Why?" The word comes out before I can stop it. Sharper than Rue would ever say it. I see him hear the difference. His head turns.

"Because I do not understand what you are," he says, quiet now, almost gentle. It is somehow worse than if he had shouted. "And I intend to find out. And because-" He stops himself.

"Because what?"

He does not answer. He just looks at me the way he looked at me across the courtyard three weeks ago-like a man staring at a ghost he is not sure he is allowed to want back.

"You may go," he says instead. "Someone will bring your things tonight."

I curtsy, because that is what Rue would do. I make it to the door before my legs nearly give out from under me.

"Rue."

I stop. I do not turn around.

"Yes, my lord?"

"Whatever you are hiding." His voice is low behind me, rough at the edges. "I will find it eventually. I always do."

You have no idea, I think, how much I am hiding, or how badly I want you to find it, or how much finding it will cost both of us.

"Yes, my lord," I say instead. I let myself out.

---

Nyra waits outside, pretending to sweep a hallway that is already spotless. She drops the broom the second she sees my face.

"You look like you have seen a ghost," she says.

I almost laugh. It comes out wrong, more like a sob.

"I have to move into his wing," I say. "Tonight."

Her eyes go wide. "Rue-"

"I know."

"That is not-Omegas do not just move into the Alpha's wing. That is-" She stops. Studies me the way she always does, like she is listening for a heartbeat under my skin that does not match the one I am supposed to have. "What did he say to you in there?"

I think about telling her the truth. I think about it hard, standing in that hallway with my whole body still shaking from the warmth of his hand on my face. Nyra is the closest thing I have to a friend in this world I have woken up into a second time. Maybe she would believe me. Maybe those strange, careful eyes of hers would understand things nobody else could.

But I have been dead once already because I trusted the wrong people with the truth.

"Nothing," I say. "He just asked questions."

She does not believe me-I can see it, the way her mouth tightens. But she loops her arm through mine anyway, gentle, like she has decided I need holding together even if I will not tell her why.

"Come on," she says. "Let us get your things before someone else does it for you."

We walk back toward the Omega quarters together. I let her talk about nothing-the weather, a wolf who tripped during morning drills, anything that is not the north tower. But my mind stays two floors up, in a firelit room, on the feeling of his hand against my face and the sound of my own voice lying to him three times in a row.

I know why he watches me now, I think. The real question is how long I can stand being watched before I forget why I am supposed to hate him.

---

By nightfall, my few belongings sit in a small bag by the door of a room in his wing. A room with a real bed instead of a cot. Close enough to his chambers that I can hear him pacing through the wall.

I lie awake listening to his footsteps.

Somewhere under my ribs, in a place that does not belong to Rue at all, something old and dangerous stirs.

It does not stop, no matter how hard I tell it to be still.

The room they give me is small, plain, and close enough to his that I can hear him breathing through the wall at night.

I do not sleep much that first week. I lie on the narrow cot shoved into the corner of an antechamber off his own room. They could not decide if I am a servant or a prisoner, so they settled on both. I listen to him pace on the other side of the stone.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Some nights it does not stop until near dawn.

"Does he ever sleep?" I ask Nyra one morning. She comes to bring me a change of clothes because apparently that is my life now-being dressed like a doll for a man who thinks I am dead.

"Not much," she says. "Not since-" She stops herself. Chews her lip.

"Since what?"

"Nothing. Just-not much." She will not meet my eyes when she says it.

I let it go. I already know the answer. Not since a woman named Elara drowned in the Silver Vein. I do not need Nyra to finish that sentence. I have been finishing it myself for five years.

---

I learn Kael in pieces. The way you learn a language nobody has taught you properly-badly, slowly, by getting things wrong first.

He takes his meals in silence unless he is asking me something. Even then, only short things.

"Are you warm enough," he asks one evening.

"Yes, my lord."

"Did you eat?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Who gave you that bruise on your wrist?"

I look down at the purple mark. A door caught me. I was not paying attention. I was thinking about him.

"A door," I tell him. "It was a door."

He stares at me. His jaw tightens. "The door hit you?"

"It was my fault. I was not looking where I was going."

"Who does that door belong to?"

I blink. "The castle? I do not understand the question."

"I will have it removed."

"The door?"

"Yes."

"My lord, it is a door. They are everywhere. You cannot remove all of them."

He says nothing. Just looks at me with those silver eyes that seem to see everything except the truth I am hiding.

"Fine," he says. "Then be more careful."

It is the strangest thing I have ever heard an Alpha say to an Omega. It almost sounds like concern. It almost sounds like something else.

---

I learn he does not like the sound of water poured too fast.

The first time I notice it, I am filling his cup at dinner. I pour too quick. The water rushes and splashes against the pitcher's edge. He flinches. A full-body flinch, like something struck him. His jaw goes tight. His knuckles go white around his fork.

"My lord?" I say.

"It is nothing." He does not look up. "Pour slower next time."

I do.

After that, I watch him more carefully. I watch how he goes still every time a servant carries a full basin down the hall. I watch how he refuses to stand near the fountain in the east courtyard. He takes the long way around it even when the short way would save him ten minutes.

He remembers, I think. He remembers exactly how I died, and it is eating him alive.

Some cruel, cold part of me-the part that spent five years dead and furious about it-wants to feel satisfied by that. Wants to think, good, let it eat him.

It does not feel like satisfaction. It feels like something cracking open in my chest that I do not have a name for.

---

The night I find the journal, it is an accident.

I am straightening the papers on his desk. He is out on the training grounds, drilling until his knuckles bleed, like always. A leather book slides sideways. Something falls out from between its pages and lands on the floor.

A flower. Small, pale, dried nearly to dust. Its petals gone thin as paper.

A moon-flower. The kind that only blooms at night. The kind that grows behind the castle, over the burial ground.

I know, before I even pick it up, exactly whose grave it came from.

My hands shake as I lift it. It is so fragile it nearly crumbles between my fingers. I open the journal to see where it had been pressed. I know I should not. Every instinct I have says close it, put it back, pretend you never saw it.

I open it anyway.

The page is dated. Five years back. Just a few weeks after my death.

I am sorry, it says, in handwriting too rushed and jagged to belong to a calm man. I am sorry. I am sorry. I do not know how to stop being sorry.

That is all. Over and over, in different ink, like he had come back to the page again and again across nights I cannot count. Just to write the same three words until the page could not hold any more of them.

I hear his boots in the hall. I shove the journal back where I found it, flower and all. My heart slams so hard I am sure he will hear it through the door.

He walks in. Stops. Looks at me standing too close to his desk.

"Something wrong?" he asks.

"No, my lord." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "I was just tidying."

He studies me a beat too long. Like he can smell the lie on me. He probably can. Wolves are like that.

He lets it go. Crosses to the window instead. Stares out at the dark like it has something to say to him.

I go back to the papers with hands that will not quite stop shaking.

He mourned me, I think. He mourned me while everyone else called me a poisoner and a traitor. He never once said it out loud. I do not know what to do with that.

---

That same week, I meet the wolf who has apparently been assigned to watch me.

His name is Riven. Dark hair cut close. Green eyes that look at me like I am a puzzle he has already decided he does not like the shape of.

"You are following me," I say. It is the third time I catch him lurking near the kitchens while I fetch Kael's breakfast.

"I am not following you." He does not even try to sound convincing. "I am patrolling."

"You patrol the kitchen hallway. Every morning. At the exact time I walk through it."

"Coincidence."

"You are a terrible liar."

That gets the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. More like the ghost of one. Gone before it can fully arrive.

"The Alpha wants eyes on you," he says. "I am the eyes."

"Why me?"

"You tell me." His gaze sharpens. "Nobody just collapses in a kitchen and wakes up different. New scent. New way of holding yourself. New way of looking at people like you are deciding whether they are worth the trouble of lying to." He tips his head. "You want to tell me what happened to you, Rue? Or should I keep guessing?"

My pulse spikes. I keep my face still. Five years dead taught me that much at least-how to keep a face still while everything underneath it screams.

"I hit my head," I say. "That is all."

"Sure." He does not believe me. I can tell by the way he says it. Flat. Unimpressed. "Keep telling yourself that."

He walks off before I can answer. I stand in the hallway feeling like he has peeled back a layer of me I thought was better hidden than that.

---

A week passes. Then two.

Every night, I hear him pace. Every morning, I bring his breakfast and he asks me the same questions. Are you warm enough. Did you eat. Who gave you that bruise. It is a ritual now. A habit he cannot break.

One night, he does not pace.

The silence is worse. I lie awake listening to nothing. It feels wrong. Off. Like a song that stopped in the middle of its note.

I get up. I should not. I know I should not. But my feet carry me to the door between our rooms. I press my ear against the wood.

I hear breathing. Slow. Uneven.

Then I hear a name.

Elara.

My heart stops.

Elara, he says again. Louder this time. Almost a gasp.

Then, soft, broken, barely a whisper at all: Please. Please come back. I am sorry. I am so sorry. Please come back.

I lean my forehead against the cold stone. Tears I did not know were waiting spill down my cheeks.

He is dreaming of me. He is begging a ghost to return.

And I am right here. On the other side of a door. Close enough to touch if I was brave enough to open it.

I am not brave enough.

I go back to my cot. I lie down. I do not sleep.

I listen to him whisper my name through the wall, and I hate the Moon for making me want him even now. Even after everything.

Especially after everything.

---

The next morning, I bring his breakfast.

"Did you sleep well, my lord?" I ask.

He looks up from his plate. There are dark circles under his eyes. His hair is messier than usual, like he has been running his hands through it all night.

"No," he says.

"Bad dreams?"

His gaze snaps to my face. Sharp. Assessing.

"Why do you ask?"

I shrug. I try to look casual. Rue would be casual. Rue would not know about his nightmares. Rue would not be listening at doors.

"Everyone has them," I say. "I just thought-"

"You thought what?"

I should stop. I should close my mouth and leave it alone.

I do not.

"I thought you seemed tired," I say. "That is all."

He watches me for a long time. Then he sets down his fork.

"Tell me something," he says.

"Yes, my lord?"

"When you dream-what do you dream about?"

I freeze. Every muscle in my body goes still.

"Why do you want to know?" I ask.

"Because I see you wake up gasping some mornings. I hear you through the wall." His voice drops. "It sounds like you are drowning."

I cannot breathe.

"Rue." He says my name like it hurts him. "What do you dream about?"

I meet his eyes. I let him see something real. Just a piece of it. Just enough.

"Water," I say. "I dream about water. And someone's face above me. Getting smaller. Farther away. And I cannot reach them."

His face goes white.

"Who," he asks. "Who is the face?"

The name sits on my tongue like poison. I want to say it. I want to scream it.

You, I want to say. It is always you.

Instead I say, "I do not know. I can never see it clearly."

A lie. A small one. But it seems to cost more than all the others combined.

Kael looks at me. His eyes are wet. I have never seen an Alpha cry. I did not know they could.

"You dream about water," he says. "You cannot see the face. And you wake up gasping."

"Yes, my lord."

He nods slowly. Then he stands. He walks to the window. He stands with his back to me the way he always does.

"Rue," he says.

"Yes, my lord?"

"I do not know who you are. I do not know why you came here." He pauses. His shoulders rise and fall with a breath that sounds like it hurts. "But I know you are not lying about the dream. I know that much."

I say nothing. I cannot say anything.

"Leave me," he says. "I need to think."

I curtsy. I leave. I walk all the way back to my room before I let the tears fall.

I am not supposed to love him. I am not supposed to want him. I came back for revenge. I came back to watch him burn.

But he dreamed of me.

He begged me to come back.

And I am starting to wonder if I can hate a man who has been drowning in guilt for longer than I was dead.