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.
