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.

Sofia

I found him in the library the next morning.

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

I approached.

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

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

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

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

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

"She's well?" he asked.

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

"Was it?"

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

"Yes."

"How?"

"However was necessary."

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

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

"Xavier talks too much."

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

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

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

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

He looked at me for a long moment.

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

The library was very quiet.

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

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

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

"I know that too."

"And you still.."

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

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

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

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

"Yes," he said.

"Show me."

The dungeon was not what I expected.

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

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

There were three cells occupied.

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

Greg was in the first cell.

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

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

I felt very little, actually.

Which was its own kind of answer.

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

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

He stopped.

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

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

"No," I said.

Her mouth closed.

Kayla was in the third cell.

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

"Sofia," she whispered.

I looked at her for a long time.

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

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

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

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

"Whatever you want," he said.

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

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

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

None of them felt like this.

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

"I know," Draco said.

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

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

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

"Whenever you want."

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

He nodded.

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

He looked at me for a long moment.

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

The hallway was very still.

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

"It can be both," he said.

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

"I need to think," I said.

"I know."

"I'm going to go think."

"I know that too."

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

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

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

No excuse, no context, just yes.

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

Kara cried when I told her.

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

"Are you alright?" she asked.

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

"But?"

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

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

I looked at her.

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

"When did you get wise?" I asked.

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

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

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

"And what do you want?" Kara asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sofia

My grandmother had opinions about Draco.

This was not surprising. My grandmother had opinions about everything, the correct way to brew tea, the precise moment a fire needed another log, the particular character flaws that could be identified from a person's handshake. She had been forming opinions for seventy-three years and showed no signs of slowing down.

She delivered this one over breakfast, three days after I'd shown her to her room and watched her immediately rearrange the furniture.

"He watches you," she said, without looking up from her tea.

"Good morning to you too."

"I'm serious, Sofia. The way that man watches you..." she set her cup down, " it's not possessive. I want you to know that, because I know that's what you're bracing for. It's not that."

"What is it then?"

She considered this with the seriousness she brought to all important questions. "Careful," she said finally. "Like Mila said. Like he's holding something he doesn't want to break."

I looked at her.

"You spoke to Mila?"

"She found me in the garden yesterday. Delightful child." She picked her cup back up. "Told me everything about everyone in approximately seven minutes. Very efficient."

"She told me Draco doesn't like people," I said. "People make him careful."

"She told me the same thing." My grandmother smiled into her tea. "Smart girl."

I pulled a piece of bread apart and thought about careful. About the way he had stood in the library doorway looking tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. About yes, I should have, said without deflection or justification.

"He asked me to marry him," I said.

"I know. He told me."

I stared at her. "He told you?"

"When he came to collect me." She was entirely too serene about this. "He said he intended to ask you, and that he wanted me to know, and that if I had objections he would hear them."

"And did you? Have objections?"

She looked at me over the rim of her cup with the expression she reserved for questions she considered to have obvious answers. "I had questions. He answered them."

"What questions?"

"Whether he understood what you'd been through." A pause. "Whether he was prepared to be patient."

"And?"

"He said he'd been patient for two years already and he had no intention of stopping." She set her cup down again, neatly, precisely. "I believed him."

I looked out the window. The morning was grey and cool, clouds sitting low over the grounds, and somewhere out there I could hear the distant sound of the training yard the rhythmic, purposeful noise of people who knew exactly what they were doing and why.

"I told him I'd work for him," I said. "As a maid. To repay what he'd done."

My grandmother made a sound.

"What?"

"Nothing," she said, in the voice that meant something.

"Grandmother."

"I just think," she said carefully, "that offering to be his maid was perhaps not your most inspired moment."

"I didn't know what else to offer."

"You could have offered nothing. You don't owe him anything."

"He brought you here. He brought them here. He gave me.." I stopped. "It felt like a debt."

"Some things aren't debts," she said. "Some things are just what people do for the people they.." she paused, and chose her word with the precision of a woman who had been choosing words carefully for seven decades, "value."

I pulled another piece of bread apart.

"He refused the maid thing," I said.

"I know. He told me that too."

"He told you a lot."

"He came to see me every morning," she said. "While you were deciding whether to come downstairs."

I looked at her. "He what?"

"He sat with me for an hour each morning and drank tea and answered my questions." She was unbearably serene. "He's not easy conversation. But he tries in his way."

I thought about that, Draco, in this small sitting room, drinking tea with my grandmother and answering her questions while I was two floors up making increasingly implausible claims about being fine.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.

"Because you needed to find your own way to him." She looked at me levelly. "And because I knew you would. You're stubborn, Sofia, but you've never been stupid."

I found him in the training yard.

I hadn't planned to. I had planned to go back to the library, there were three more books on pack law I hadn't finished but my feet apparently had other ideas, and before I'd made a conscious decision I was standing at the edge of the yard watching Draco spar with a man twice his width and handling it with the particular unhurried efficiency of someone for whom the outcome was never really in question.

He moved differently here than he did in the house.

In the house he was contained all that power folded inward, held carefully in check. Here it was visible. The way he read his opponent two moves ahead. The economy of his motion. The fact that even in a sparring match he was never where you expected him to be, never doing the obvious thing.

He was extraordinary and he clearly knew it, but there was nothing performative about it. He wasn't showing off. He was just moving. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

He saw me at some point but gave no indication of it, which I appreciated.

Xavier appeared at my elbow.

"He's been out here since six," he said, without preamble.

"It's nine."

"Yes."

I looked at him. "Does he do that often?"

"When he has something on his mind." He paused. "He's had something on his mind for about ten days."

I said nothing.

"I'm not being subtle," Xavier said cheerfully.

"I noticed."

"Subtlety is overrated." He leaned against the fence post. "He's going to make you a formal offer today. A real one not the declaration thing, which.." he made a face that eloquently expressed his feelings about the declaration thing, "that was not his best approach. He knows that. Today will be different."

I looked at him. "Did he tell you to tell me that?"

"No. He'd be furious if he knew I was telling you." Xavier's expression was completely unrepentant. "But you deserve to know it's coming so you have time to actually think about it instead of reacting."

I looked back at the training yard. Draco had finished with the first opponent and moved to a second, and the quality of his attention had shifted slightly, still controlled, still precise, but somewhere in the set of his shoulders there was something that was aware of me standing here.

"He's different with you," Xavier said, quieter now. "I don't expect that means much, given that you've known him ten days. But I've known him my entire life, and I'm telling you, he's different."

"Different how?"

"Careful," Xavier said.

That word again.

I watched Draco finish the second spar with a single clean movement that ended the whole thing without anyone getting hurt and stepped back immediately creating space, defaulting to restraint even in the middle of a fight, and I thought about a man who had spent two years looking for someone, who sat with an old woman every morning and drank tea and answered questions, who said I know instead of let me explain.

"Thank you," I said to Xavier. "For the warning."

"Don't tell him I warned you."

"I won't."

He pushed off the fence post and went back toward the house, and I stayed where I was, and after a moment Draco dismissed the rest of the yard and walked toward me, and I stood my ground, and when he stopped a few feet away he was breathing slightly harder than usual and looking at me with an expression that was for once not entirely controlled.

"How long have you been standing there?" he asked.

"Long enough."

He nodded slowly.

"Xavier told me you're going to make me an offer today," I said.

Something moved in his expression. "Of course he did."

"He said it would be different from the declaration."

"It will be." He looked at me steadily. "Do you want to hear it now or later?"

"Now," I said. "Before I have time to build up a defence against it."

The honesty of that surprised him, I saw it, briefly, before he contained it.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "I want you to marry me. Not because you owe me anything you don't. Not because you have no other options, you do, and I'll make sure of that regardless of what you decide. Not because of the mate bond, though that's real and I think you know it."

I held his gaze.

"I want you to marry me," he said, "because I have spent two years looking for you and I do not want to spend any more time waiting to know you. Because you are the only person in recent memory who has looked directly at me without flinching, and I find that.." a pause, just slight, "I find that I need that. More than I expected to need anything."

The training yard was very quiet.

A bird moved through the grey sky overhead.

"And if I say no?" I asked.

"Then you stay here as long as you want, you and your grandmother and your friends, with every protection I can offer, and I'll ask you again in a month." The ghost of something crossed his face. "And the month after that."

"That sounds like a very long game."

"I'm immortal," he said. "I have time."

I stared at him. "You're.."

"Immortal. Yes."

I absorbed this. "I didn't know that."

"There are several things about me you don't know yet."

"Like what?"

He looked at me for a moment. "Say yes and I'll tell you all of them."

I laughed, a real one, short and involuntary and he looked so startled by it, so genuinely caught off guard by the simple fact of me laughing, that something in my chest turned over completely.

"That's not how negotiations work," I said.

"It's the best offer I have."

I looked at him. At the training yard behind him, the grey sky overhead, the mansion in the distance with my grandmother somewhere inside it drinking tea and being unreasonably serene.

"I have conditions," I said.

He went very still.

"My grandmother stays. Kara and Lilly stay, as long as they want to. The other ladies too," I met his eyes. "I am your Luna, not your decoration. I have a real role in this pack, a real voice, and you don't make decisions that affect me without telling me first." I paused. "No more disappearing without a word."

"Agreed," he said without hesitation.

"And you tell me the things you don't explain," I said. "All of it. Whatever you are, whatever this is, I want to know. All of it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"That's a significant ask," he said.

"I know."

"Some of it isn't easy."

"I know that too."

Another long moment. Then: "Agreed."

I nodded.

"So," he said, carefully. "Is that a yes?"

I looked at him.

"It's a yes," I said. "With conditions."

Something crossed his face not triumph, not relief exactly, but something quieter than both. Something that looked, briefly and almost painfully, like the expression of a person who had been holding something very tightly for a very long time and was only now, slowly, beginning to let go.

"With conditions," he said.

"Don't push it."

He smiled, a real one, this time just barely, just enough. "Understood.

I told Kara and Lilly that evening.

Kara's reaction was immediate and physical she grabbed both my hands and made a sound that was technically not a word but communicated everything. Then she composed herself, cleared her throat, and said "I think that's very practical and considered" in a voice that was shaking slightly at the edges.

Lilly wrote: I know. Then, when I raised my eyebrows: I've known since the library. The way you talked about him when you thought you were talking about the book.

"I was talking about the book."

She gave me the look.

"I was mostly talking about the book."

She underlined I know twice.

Kara laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Later, when they'd gone and the house had gone quiet, I stood at my window in the dark and looked out at the grounds and thought about everything that had led here, the auction, the fire, the car, the mansion, the dungeon, the library, the training yard, and the strange, winding logic of it, the way each thing had led to the next with an inevitability I hadn't seen while I was inside it.

The light was on in his window again.

I watched it for a while.

Then I went to bed, and for the first time in four years, I did not spend the last minutes before sleep running through exits and contingencies and the particular calculus of survival, I just slept.