Chapter 12 What the Rain Brought

Chapter 12: Chapter 12 What the Rain Brought

Talia’s POV

I lay in the Alpha’s bed for a long time, waiting for sleep, and sleep never came.

The sheets were soft, softer than anything I had ever slept under, and the pillows smelled of pine and cold air, which was to say they smelled of him. Every time I closed my eyes my body reminded me that this was a stranger’s room in a stranger’s keep, in a valley I had seen for the first time two days ago.

So I got up.

The room felt bigger when I was alone in it, and emptier, and colder—the hearth still held only the wood someone had laid there for a fire no one had lit. I went to the window the way I always went to windows, and I stood there, and I did what fifteen years had taught me to do with any room.

I measured it.

One door. One window, barred close enough to keep a body in as much as out. The black door at the far end of the room, eleven paces from the bed, five from the desk—I had counted before I climbed into bed, and I counted again now. Below the window there was a drop of thirty feet or more.

A room built so no one leaves it. Like every room I had ever been locked in, only prettier, with better sheets.

Knowing a cage does not make it kind, but it stops it from being frightening, and tonight that had to be enough.

The light was failing outside.

The valley darkened under me hollow by hollow, and the mountains that had looked so proud at noon were settling into the dusk like sleeping giants that might wake at any moment. The sky turned orange, then pink, then a bruised purple, and the clouds that had been holding their rain all day finally let go, and droplets began to tap against the glass—softly at first, then harder, as if the storm too had decided to stay.

I watched the giants darken and thought about my mother.

If she could see me now—standing in a stranger’s room, married to a man who would not look at me, wearing my face like a secret—she would tell me to run. Or to fight. Probably both, the way she said everything, like a door being shut.

But I did not know how to do either anymore. Fifteen years teaches you to endure, and endurance is the opposite of running. It is standing still while everything hurts.

A knock came at the door.

My heart jumped before I could stop it. "Yes?"

"Your trunk, my lady." A young woman’s voice, soft.

I opened the door. The servant from the hall stood there with my mother’s old trunk in her arms—young, with kind eyes and a face that did not judge—carrying it gently, the way you carry something you have been told is precious. Something in my chest loosened at the sight.

"Where would you like it?"

I pointed without thinking, and my hand chose the corner by the window. The corner that faced the black door. My body made that decision before my mind did, and I let it stand.

She set the trunk down gently, asked if there was anything else, and when I shook my head she bowed and left, closing the door behind her.

The room went quiet.

And then I felt it.

Warmth. Low and patient, rising off the wood like a pulse. It came from the trunk—from the side of the trunk that faced the black door.

I crossed the room and laid my palm flat on the lid, and the heat answered me at once, steady as a heartbeat heard through a wall. I had felt this before: on the road, whenever my eyes found Kaelen’s back, and once in the corridor of this keep as it was carried past me. The trunk did not warm for me. It warmed for what belonged to him.

And right now it was warming toward the black door.

My mother’s trunk knew something about the Alpha of Shadowfang that no one in this fortress would say out loud, and it had been trying to tell me since Cresswood. I kept my hand there until the heat steadied. Then I lifted it, and stepped back.

Curiosity is the first thing I learned to hide in Cresswood. Curiosity is what gets you locked in the cellar. So I turned my back on the black door and knelt in front of my mother’s trunk instead.

For one dizzy moment I thought I would open it. My hand hovered over the lid, my heart was pounding, my breath was shallow, and the latch was right there, cold under my fingers—

But I did not.

Piper had once asked me why I never opened it, and I had told her the truth: because whatever is in there is all I have left of her, and I am afraid it will not be enough.

I pulled my hand back, stood, and went to the window.

The rain fell harder, streaming down the glass until the mountains were only shadows and the valley only dark, and I wondered whether Piper was watching the same rain tonight. Whether she was thinking of me. She had held my hand when I cried, stolen me food when I was starving, and lied to Vivienne’s face to keep me safe. I owed her everything a person can owe, and I had left her behind at a gate in the dawn.

The guilt sat in my chest like a stone. I hoped she was not crying, because I have always hated it when Piper cries.

My arm throbbed under the bandage where the claws had opened it, a dull ache, as if the night remembered for everyone else.

The door opened.

I turned, and Kaelen walked in.

His hair was damp and his shirt was dark with rain across the shoulders, and he carried papers under one arm. He did not look at me. He crossed to the desk, set them down, and spoke to the wall.

"The rain will not stop until morning."

He had said he would be gone tonight. I let the words hang in the air, unanswered, and he let them hang too, and neither of us picked them up.

"You are still standing by the window," he said.

"I like looking outside."

"There is nothing to see."

"I have never seen rain like this before." I turned back to the glass. "In Cresswood, I did not have a window this big. Just one hardly wide enough to see the moon, and a crack in the ceiling."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he walked to the hearth, struck a light, and touched it to the laid wood, and the flames caught and jumped and filled the room with warm moving light, and all the shadows that had been gathering all evening fell back at once.

"You will have a window here," he said, standing with his back to the fire. "You will have many things you did not have in Cresswood."

"Why?"

He did not answer. He stood looking into the flames as if the answer were somewhere inside them, and I was too tired to ask twice.

The silence stretched between us like a rope pulled tight. I did not know what to say, and he did not seem to want to talk, so I did what I have always done when a room gets too loud with quiet. I counted the cracks in the stone floor. Twelve near the hearth, fourteen near the bed, seven near the door. Numbers do not judge you. Numbers do not stare. I learned that a long time ago, counting the bricks of the storage room to keep from crying.

When I grew tired of the cracks, I went back to the rain.

Some minutes later—or hours; with him in the room I could never tell—Kaelen stood and walked out without a word. The door closed, and my heart slowed, and my shoulders came down, and I let myself believe the night was finally mine.

Then I heard his footsteps again. Close. On the other side of the door. He had not gone far. He had not gone at all.

I did not turn around when it opened, because by now I have memorized his footsteps the way other women memorize voices.

"You should eat," Kaelen said.

I turned. He was holding a tray—bread, cheese, and a bowl of soup still steaming.

"I am not hungry."

"You need to eat."

"I said I am not hungry."

He set the tray on the desk. "Eat. Or do not eat. I do not care."

But he did not leave. He went back to the fire and stood there with his arms loose at his sides, watching the flames as if he had all night, in a room that was his, which somehow made everything stranger.

I looked at the soup.

It was still steaming. The kitchens lie across half a fortress and down two flights of stairs, and no one carries a bowl of soup that distance and keeps it hot. You carry it fast. You carry it straight. You set out before being asked.

The man who did not care had kept my soup hot the whole way, and lit my fire, and come back to a room he had sworn he would not come back to.

He said he would not come back tonight.

And yet here he was—feeding my fire and warming my soup—and I had no idea what to do with a man whose words and whose hands kept telling me two different stories.