Cole was waiting outside the kitchen door when I came out to empty the grease trap.
He didn't knock. Didn't clear his throat. Just stood there in the hallway with his arms crossed and his face arranged into the particular blankness of someone who delivers orders for a living and has stopped noticing whether people want to receive them.
"Prince Grayson requests your presence," he said. "Guest sitting room. Now."
I looked at him for a moment. His aura was Lycan—dense and controlled, the kind that pressed against the edges of a room without announcing itself. Not aggressive. Just permanent, like load-bearing stone.
I glanced down at the dish towel in my hands. Still damp. I folded it once, set it on the counter behind me, and followed him.
Not because I had to. I knew, technically, that an Omega could decline a summons from a guest. Technically. But I also knew what declining would mean—a conversation with the pack steward, questions I couldn't answer, a close look at paperwork that didn't quite hold up. I had been here three weeks. I had not yet made myself invisible enough to survive scrutiny.
So I walked.
The guest sitting room was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that smelled of cedar and old wool. Cole opened the door and stepped aside. I walked in holding nothing, which suddenly felt like a mistake—I should have brought something, a tray, a reason to be there that wasn't just myself.
Grayson was standing at the window.
He turned the moment I crossed the threshold. And then he went completely still.
Not the stillness of surprise. Something deeper than that. The stillness of a man who has been holding his breath for a very long time and has just, without warning, found the air.
I stopped three feet inside the door.
Neither of us spoke. He just looked at me, and I looked back, and the silence stretched out long enough that I became aware of my own heartbeat.
"Your name," he said finally. His voice was low. Careful, in a way that didn't match the size of him.
"Sav."
"Your full name."
"Just Sav."
He absorbed that without pushing. His eyes moved over my face—not the way men usually looked at women, cataloguing and assessing. More like he was trying to place something. Like he'd seen a photograph once and was now standing in front of the actual building.
"Were you near the eastern Ironvale border," he said, "seventeen years ago? During a rogue raid."
The question hit me like cold water thrown flat against my chest.
I was seven seventeen years ago. I had no memory of a rogue raid. I had almost no memories of being seven at all—just fragments, mostly kitchen smells and my mother's voice and the particular quality of afternoon light through a window I couldn't place.
But something happened when he asked. Something in my chest. My wolf—who had been quiet since the ceremony, since the altar, since the moment I pressed my bloodied thumb to that parchment—stirred. Not the furious, grief-blind thrashing from before. Something warmer. Something almost like recognition.
I did not let it show.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
His jaw tightened slightly. He believed me, I thought. He just didn't like it.
"You cooked the meal tonight."
"Yes."
"The rosemary." He said it like it meant something specific. "Where did you learn that combination?"
"My mother taught me."
The word mother landed in the room with more weight than I intended. I felt it. He felt it too—I could see it in the small shift of his expression, the way something behind his eyes went careful and quiet.
I took a step back toward the door. "If that's all—"
"It's not."
"I have an early start," I said. "The kitchen opens at five."
He didn't move to stop me. But his eyes held mine for one more second, and in that second there was something I recognized without wanting to—the look of a person who has found something they thought was gone and is terrified of moving too fast.
I knew that look. I had worn it for three years.
I left before he could say anything else.
Back in 3-E, I sat on the edge of my cot and pressed both hands flat against my sternum. My wolf was still there, warm and restless, pressing back.
I didn't understand it. I didn't understand any of it—the question about the border, the way he'd looked at me, the way my own body had responded to a stranger's voice like it remembered something my mind didn't.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere in this building, a Lycan Prince was asking questions I couldn't answer.
And somewhere in my chest, something I'd spent three years trying to kill was quietly, stubbornly, refusing to stay dead.
