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.

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.