Between Death and Desire

Three weeks pass, and I learn how to disappear.

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

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

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

My hands go still in the wash water.

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

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

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

Instead I say, "What happened to her?"

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

My stomach drops straight through the floor.

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

"What did you do?" she whispers.

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

"Rue. You are shaking."

"I am fine."

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

He turns.

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

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

"No, my lord."

"Do not lie to me."

"I am not-"

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

My blood goes cold.

"I do not understand," I say.

"Yes, you do."

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

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

I cannot breathe.

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

"My name is Rue," I whisper.

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

"Say it again," he says.

"My name is Rue."

"Look at me and say it again."

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

"My. Name. Is. Rue."

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

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

"My lord?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Because what?"

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

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

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

"Rue."

I stop. I do not turn around.

"Yes, my lord?"

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

Her eyes go wide. "Rue-"

"I know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

I lie awake listening to his footsteps.

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

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