Sofia

The estate appeared out of the dark like something from a dream I hadn't consented to having.

We had been driving for what felt like an hour long enough for the fire to disappear completely from the mirror, long enough for the city lights to thin out and give way to open road, long enough for the silence inside the car to settle into something almost textured. I had stopped trying to fill it. Draco clearly had no interest in conversation, and I had no interest in giving him the satisfaction of knowing how badly I wanted to demand answers.

So I watched the dark roll past the window instead, and I thought about Kara's face when they took her, and I thought about Lilly walking out with her hands folded like she was going to church, and I thought about the fire.

I thought about the fire a lot.

They were already gone before it started. That's what I told myself. That Xavier, the man with the apologetic eyes had done something before he lit the match. That there was a reason Draco had given that specific instruction in that specific tone, unhurried and certain, like a man who had already accounted for every variable.

I told myself that. I almost believed it.

Then the gates appeared enormous iron things flanked by stone pillars, swinging open without anyone touching them as the car approached and whatever I'd been about to think dissolved entirely.

Beyond the gates, a driveway curved through grounds so vast I couldn't see where they ended. Fountains caught the moonlight. Manicured gardens stretched in every direction, broken up by paths and hedgerows and structures I couldn't identify in the dark. And at the centre of it all, set back from everything else like it was keeping its distance on principle.

I had grown up in the Beta's house, which was large by any ordinary standard. I had spent four years in cells and slave quarters where the ceiling was low enough to touch. I was not, in other words, easily impressed by architecture.

But this, it rose against the night sky like something medieval and impossible turrets and towers and a stone facade that seemed to absorb the moonlight rather than reflect it. Every window was lit from within, warm gold bleeding through the glass, and the sheer scale of it pressed against something in my chest that I refused to identify as awe.

I was not going to be impressed by his house. That felt important.

Draco parked, got out, and opened my door before I'd finished deciding whether to open it myself. He offered his hand. I ignored it and stepped out on my own.

He didn't react. Just closed the door behind me and walked toward the entrance, apparently trusting that I would follow.

I followed. Not because I trusted him. Because I had nowhere else to go.

The doors opened before we reached them.

Two women stood in the entrance both in black dresses with white aprons, both with their heads slightly bowed. The one on the left had dark bobbed hair and a smile that reached her eyes. The one on the right was blonde, pretty in a sharp-edged way, and wearing an expression she was working very hard to make look neutral.

It wasn't neutral. I had spent four years reading people's faces for survival. That expression said why is he bringing her here and who does she think she is and several other things she had the good sense not to say out loud.

"Welcome back, Alpha," they said together.

Draco didn't acknowledge it. He was looking at me again that steady, assessing look that I was already beginning to find deeply aggravating, like being studied by something that hadn't decided yet whether you were interesting or inconvenient.

"Gracie," he said, to the dark-haired one. "Make sure she's comfortable. Whatever she needs."

"Of course, Alpha." Gracie's smile was genuine. I filed that away.

"Susan." His attention moved to the blonde. "Show her to her room."

Susan's smile didn't move. Her eyes did a quick, involuntary flick to me, then back to him. "Of course."

Draco looked at me one more time. Something moved in his expression that I couldn't read, and then he turned and walked deeper into the house, and just like that, I was standing in the entrance hall of a stranger's mansion with two women I'd never met and the particular hollow feeling of a person who has run out of things to fight against for the moment.

I looked around.

The entrance hall was well. It was something. A chandelier the size of a small car hung overhead, refracting light into a thousand tiny prisms across the walls. The floors were dark hardwood, covered in rugs that probably cost more than most people's houses. Artwork I didn't recognise but suspected was expensive. Curved staircases on either side, sweeping upward to a landing that overlooked the whole space.

"This way, please," Susan said, in a tone that made please sound like a formality she resented.

I followed her up the stairs.

The room was ridiculous.

I stood in the doorway and took it in the four-poster bed draped in silk the colour of blush roses, the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the moonlit grounds, the chandelier overhead casting everything in soft gold, the walls painted a deep, soothing shade of blue that should have felt cold but somehow didn't.

There was a dressing table with crystal perfume bottles arranged on it. An armchair by the window. A phone on the bedside table. Fresh flowers in a vase I was fairly certain was antique.

It was the most beautiful room I had ever been in.

I hated how much I noticed that.

"This is your room," Susan said, and left before I could respond which was fine, because I hadn't been planning to.

Gracie lingered. "Is there anything you need? Food, or.."

"No." I stepped into the room and turned to face her. "Thank you. You can go."

She hesitated, kindness and professionalism warring visibly on her face. "There's a phone on the table if you need anything. Just dial one."

"I won't need anything."

Another hesitation. Then she nodded, smiled with genuine warmth that I didn't know what to do with, and closed the door softly behind her.

I stood in the centre of the room and listened to the silence.

Then I sat down on the floor not the bed, the floor, because the floor felt honest in a way the silk and the chandelier and the crystal perfume bottles did not and I pulled my knees to my chest, and I let myself feel it.

All of it.

The grief hit first. Kara's brave, crumpling face. Lilly's careful hands. The fire in the mirror, orange and enormous against the black sky, consuming the building where they had been, where we had been, where the only family I had built in four years of captivity had existed until an hour ago.

I had survived so much. I was still surviving. But surviving and being okay were two entirely different things, and I was so tired, so profoundly, bone-deep tired of the distance between them.

I didn't make a sound. I had cried silently for so long that even alone in a room, my grief was quiet. Just the pressure of it, behind my eyes and in my throat and sitting heavy on my sternum.

I don't know how long I'd been sitting there when the knock came.

I didn't answer.

A second knock. Then his voice, low through the door. "Are you alright?"

I said nothing. I pressed my lips together and stared at the far wall and waited for him to leave.

The door opened anyway.

His footsteps crossed the room slowly. I didn't look up. I wasn't going to let him see my face like this blotched and raw and stripped of every defence I had. I raised my hands to wipe my eyes, but they stopped halfway.

He was crouching in front of me.

I looked up before I could stop myself, and found those blue eyes closer than I expected, level with mine, and something in them that I had not anticipated.

Concern, genuine, unperformed concern.

"Are you alright?" he asked again, quieter this time.

"Don't." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Look at me like that. Act like you care." I held his gaze even though everything in me wanted to look away. "You took me from that building against my will. Whatever you told yourself to justify that, it doesn't make you different from any of them."

Something shifted in his expression. Not offense something more complicated.

"Lobita.."

"Don't call me that." The word whatever it meant felt too intimate in his mouth, too certain. Like he had already decided something about me that I hadn't agreed to. "My name is Sofia."

He was quiet for a moment. The candle on the bedside table threw warm light across his face, softening the sharp angles of it, and I wished it wouldn't.

"Sofia," he said. Testing it. Like he was deciding whether to allow it.

"My friends were in that building," I said. "You had your man burn it. That's what I know about you."

He opened his mouth. His phone rang.

He glanced at it. Something crossed his face not irritation, exactly. More like the controlled patience of a man who was used to being interrupted by things that demanded his immediate attention. He stood, answered it in a voice too low for me to catch, said something brief, and then looked back at me.

"This isn't finished," he said.

"You're right," I said. "It isn't."

He left.

I listened to his footsteps retreat down the hall, and then I dropped my head back against the side of the bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out how I was going to survive a man who looked at me like that like I was something he had been searching for, like my defiance was not an obstacle but a confirmation without losing what was left of myself in the process.

I was still working on it when the knock came again.

"I told you I don't want,"

"It's Kara."

A beat of silence.

"And Lilly."

I was on my feet before I'd decided to move.

I don't have words for what it felt like to open that door.

They were both there, Kara with her eyes red-rimmed but her chin up, Lilly with her small notebook clutched to her chest and tears running silently down her face, and for a moment I just stood there, because my mind couldn't reconcile the fire in the mirror with the two people standing in front of me.

Kara grabbed me first. Her arms came around me hard and certain, and she said into my shoulder, "We're okay. We're here, we're okay" the same thing, over and over, and I realised after a moment that she was saying it as much for herself as for me.

Lilly pressed in from the other side, smaller and quieter, her hand finding mine and holding on.

I stood between them and breathed.

When we finally pulled apart, I held them both at arm's length and looked at them cataloguing damage, force of habit and found them shaken but whole. Tired, and rightened. But here.

"Xavier," Kara said, answering the question I hadn't asked yet. "He got us out before before the fire. All of us. The women from the building."

"Draco told him to," I said slowly.

"Apparently." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "His words were take care of that. Xavier told me later."

Take care of that. Standing in the dark outside the auction house, Draco's voice flat and certain, and me hearing it as a sentence and not understanding it was two.

Take care of that. Get them out. All of them.

I thought about the car ride. The fire in the mirror. The way I had sat beside him in furious silence, believing the worst, and he had said nothing to correct me.

He hadn't explained himself. He hadn't defended himself. He had just driven.

I didn't know what to do with that.

"Sofia." Kara was watching my face with the particular attention of someone who had spent four years learning to read it. "What's going on in there?"

"Nothing," I said.

She gave me the look that meant she didn't believe me, but she let it go.

Lilly held up her notebook. In her neat, careful handwriting: Are you alright?

I looked at her. At both of them. At the ridiculous beautiful room with its silk drapes and chandelier, and the window looking out over grounds that went on forever, and the door that led to a hallway that led to a house that belonged to a man I didn't understand and wasn't sure I wanted to.

"I don't know yet," I said honestly.

Lilly wrote: That's okay. Neither do we.

Kara laughed a short, wet sound that was closer to a sob than anything else and pulled us both in again, and I let her, and for a little while the three of us just stood there in the doorway of a stranger's room, alive and bewildered and together.

It wasn't alright. Not yet, but it was something.

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.

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.