I didn't know Mara had told him until the plate showed up.
It was Thursday. I'd worked through the dinner rush and was scraping down the grill when Grayson came in through the side door. He didn't sit on his usual stool. He walked past me to the warming station, pulled down a dinner plate—not a bowl this time, a full plate—and started building it himself.
Roasted chicken. Mashed potatoes. A ladle of pan gravy. A slice of the bread I'd baked that morning. He set it on the prep table beside the small bowl I'd already prepared for myself and pulled out the stool for me.
I stood at the sink with my hands under the running water and did not turn around right away.
I knew what this was. I had known the moment I saw the plate.
Mara had told him.
I thought about being angry. I tried, briefly. The anger didn't come. What came instead was something more inconvenient—a small, tight feeling in my throat that I recognized from the morning of the congee, and which I did not want to examine.
I shut off the water. Dried my hands. Sat down.
Grayson didn't look at me. He was cutting bread on the far end of the prep table with a precision that seemed excessive for bread. His jaw was set in a way it hadn't been before. Not angry at me. Angry somewhere else, at something he was holding very carefully so it wouldn't spill into the room.
I picked up my fork.
"You don't have to sit with me," I said.
"I know."
He sat anyway.
I ate. Slowly, because my stomach was not used to portions this size, and because I could feel him counting bites without looking. Halfway through, I set the fork down.
"She shouldn't have told you," I said quietly.
Grayson finished slicing the bread. Set the knife down. Aligned it parallel to the cutting board with one finger.
"She should have told me sooner," he said.
His voice was very level. That was the thing about him. When he was angry, he didn't get louder. He got smaller and more precise, like a blade folding itself down to its most efficient shape.
I picked up the fork again. Kept eating.
He stayed until the plate was empty. Then he stood, took the dish to the sink himself, and left through the side door without saying goodnight.
I watched him cross the yard through the window over the sink. He didn't stop at the tree line. He kept walking, past the boundary lights, into the dark, and somewhere out beyond the ridge I felt—more than heard—the low reverberation of a Lycan shift, the kind of pressure change that made the glass in the window hum for a half second before settling.
He was running.
I stood at the sink with my hands wet and listened until the pressure faded.
Then I finished the dishes.
---
Friday brought the advance party.
They came in three black SUVs at four in the afternoon—Lycan Royal Guard, unmistakable, their auras so uniformly disciplined that the pack-house staff started walking on tiptoe without being told. The King himself wasn't due until Sunday, but the advance party's arrival meant a formal receiving dinner, a formal receiving hall, and a formal Prince Grayson standing at his father's advisors' disposal for the entire evening.
I heard it from the supervisor when I came on for the late shift.
"He won't be down tonight," she said. She wasn't looking at me when she said it. She said it the way a woman announces the weather. "Just so you know."
I didn't answer. I tied my apron on and started prep.
The kitchen felt bigger with him not in it. That was a stupid observation. He'd only been coming for a week. A week was nothing. A week was less than nothing.
I worked through service. Plated for the receiving dinner upstairs—cold appetizers going up on silver trays, the entrées I would never see served. By ten, the kitchen was empty except for me and one dishwasher on the far side of the room with headphones in.
I was thirsty.
There was a water jug at the end of the prep table—the big glass one the staff shared, refilled twice a day from the filtered tap in the pantry. I poured a glass and drank it standing up, the way I always did.
The taste registered on the second swallow.
Metallic. Faintly bitter, underneath the mineral flatness of filtered water. The kind of bitter I knew—the kind I had put into my own body, deliberately, in small careful measured amounts, for three years.
But this was not a small careful measured amount.
The glass slipped out of my hand before my brain caught up with what my tongue already knew. It hit the tile and shattered, and the sound was very loud and also very far away, like it was happening in a different room.
My knees went next.
I grabbed the edge of the prep table. My palm slid off. I went down hard, my shoulder cracking against the corner of the counter on the way, and the fluorescent light overhead splintered into a dozen small white suns.
Footsteps. Two sets. Fast.
I tried to lift my head. Couldn't.
Hands under my arms. Someone dragging. My heels scraping across the tile, then across concrete, then across something colder—the smooth polished floor of a corridor I didn't recognize.
A voice above me, low and rushed. Declan's voice.
"—get her in before someone comes—"
A door. Heavy. Silver at the hinges—I could smell it, that clean scorched wrongness that made my wolf scream inside my ribs.
They dropped me on the floor of the cell.
The door swung shut. The lock turned.
I tried to open my mouth. To reach for a mind-link I did not have. To call for anyone at all.
My throat was already closing.
