The world outside the estate smelled of wet earth and cold freedom. I tasted it like a promise and like the threat of something I had no right to want.
The all of a sudden from no where, I felt Kael's hand closed around mine in the the thick woods,i was so shock, he had trailed me, his whole existence felt both familiar and foreign — like remembering someone you'd almost lost. He didn't look at me the way the others did, or the way Lucien did; there was a softness in his eyes that felt unfair after the months of cages and commands. He held out a cloak, gray and too big, and I pulled it over my shoulders with hands that shook.
"Quick," he breathed. "They are unto you are a gaining up really fast I'll— I'll distract the guard for as long as I can. And i will be right behind you. Run. Don't stop. Not for breath, not for thought, nothing,just keep on running."
Just then, I wanted to ask him a hundred questions — why, how, whether this was some trick — but the truth was under my tongue, a warm, bitter thing: I wanted to believe him. My mother's journal had named him in the scribbled margins. A name that had seemed like an echo now felt like a door opening.
Kael was able to get to me after successfully distracting the guards, I on the other hand was still shocked at how he manages to pull everything off.
We crawled out of the earth like thieves. The night was a living thing, smelling of pine and old rain. When we broke free into the hollow where the east wall curled toward the woods, Kael crouched against a broken column and listened like a hunter. He cupped the side of his face with one hand, and for a second I saw a man who had learned to love silence because it kept him alive.
"Go," he said, voice ragged. He pushed a small bundle toward me: bread, a water skin, a map with a crooked X. "There's a farmer's road three miles east. You'll find a place I pay when I can't watch myself. Tell them you lost your memory. Say nothing of names. You understand?"
I nodded. The words were too big and clumsy for what I felt — gratitude, fear, a sudden ache that wasn't mine. He reached up and brushed—just once—an errant strand of hair from my forehead. The touch was lightning and home and a blade at once.
"Kael," I said, because the dark needed the sound of his name.
His jaw tightened. "Go, Zaria. Run with your whole life.This the where you have to go on your own,I have to go back so no I'm will suspect a thing"
I ran.
My feet knew the map poorly; the forest was a jagged puzzle under moonlight. Roots snagged my hem, little threats I couldn't afford to answer. Every breath felt stolen as if the night itself might protest my temerity. And yet with every step I felt lighter, like shedding old skin. The mansion shrank behind me until it was only a shadow stitched into the horizon and Kael's voice in the waves of wind pressing the trees.
I thought about Lucien the way you think about a storm — with the precise dread of someone who knows the path of devastation. He had built cages around me made of velvet, making cruelty look like luxury. I had left his house raw and furious, and in the quiet that followed my escape my stomach clenched with the things I'd left unsaid.
The farmer's road was worse than I'd imagined: a ribbon of mud and glass and the smell of animals. My shoes were gone, abandoned under a tree when a hungry root snagged me and I had to crawl the last stretch. My knees screamed, but I kept on going.
The safe place Kael had marked on the map was a warren of low stone buildings with a crooked porch and a lantern that hummed like it was plugged into the last of the world's patience, and with no choice I walked towards it. A woman opened the door before I could knock — brittle hair, eyes too bright for the midnight, and she didn't even ask my name. She ushered me inside as if the act of closing the door was a kind of absolution.
"Kael sends pay," she said without looking at me. Her voice had the no-nonsense timbre of people who keep secrets because they have to. They led me to a narrow bed and wrapped me in rough wool. I wanted to sink into it and never wake, but my bones were wired to one thing: flight.
Night stretched its hours thin. My hands trembled as I chewed stale bread. I thought of the way Kael had looked at me: like someone examining a wound and trying not to think of all the ways it could be reopened. There was something in that look that unbalanced me. My loyalty was a net with holes; Lucien's face haunted the spaces between them. Deep down I loved him with the stubborn, maddening sort of love that made me forget reason at inconvenient moments — and yet I had chosen to run. The contradiction lodged in my throat like a stone.
Later, as the wind thrashed the shutters and the lantern threw shadows like questions across the wall, the woman—Marta—came in with news. Her mouth was a thin slash.
"Hunters came by an hour ago," she said quietly. "They asked for a woman matching your description. I told them I hadn't seen you."
"Did they mention a name?" My voice sounded small.
"No. But they had the scent of the pack." She didn't need to say Lucien. Her fingers tightened around the bowl she carried. "You aren't safe here for long."
The floor seemed to tilt. For a moment I considered slipping away into the night again, letting the road swallow me whole. The idea of outrunning everything and everyone pulsed in me like a fever. But even as hunger and fear clambered up my spine, something else steadied: a memory, a promise on Kael's lips. He had risked too much. Even now, thinking of him, my chest pricked with the worry that if I left, I'd leave him exposed.
It was a stupid and vulnerable thing to think.
Late that night, when the rain turned into a steady, soft patter and sleep hovered at the edges of my vision, the door burst open.
Boots. Men. Motions like knives cutting the dark.
"Get down!" Marta hissed, but it was too late. Shadowed figures spilled into the room, and the air smelled like iron and horses. I saw them first — strangers with faces half-hidden by scarves, too clean for thieves and too organized for vagrants.
I grabbed the nearest thing for defense, arms trembling as the largest of them stepped toward me. He wasn't one of Lucien's. He wore an emblem on his coat I didn't recognize: a wolf but with a cross of something on its flank.
"We're looking for a runaway," the man said. His voice was polite, like the sort of politeness that precedes violence. "She is married to Lucien Black. We have orders to return her unharmed."
My mouth went dry. Married. Lucien. Not husband in the sense of warmth, but husband in the way the word can be a sentence.
"She's amongst us," Marta stammered in fear while she ratted me out almost immediately,not giving kael away because she knew it would get him killed and something in her face gave the men permission.
Permission. The word made bile rise.
They moved like a shadow tide, filling the room. Hands grabbed my wrists and my arms. "There she is", a guard shouted. I kicked and bit and screamed until the inside of my cheeks tasted of copper. I could hear Kael's name on my lips like a prayer and like a curse. If anyone could free me now, it would be him.
And maybe he did. Maybe he came in with the smoke and moonlight and a hundred prayers I didn't hear. Maybe he didn't.
There was the sound of a struggle outside, and for one thin second I believed — a stupid bright hope — until a stronger pair of hands hauled me up. They were not gentle. They were efficient. Professional. The leader's eyes were flat with duty, the kind that saw people as problems to be solved.
"Back to the estate," he said to the men. "Under the Alpha's orders."
The road back felt like a hundred knives under my ribs. Each bump of the carriage, each snap of leather, sharpened the knowledge that I had failed — or perhaps that fate had failed me. I wanted to hate Kael for leaving me in Marta's house. I wanted to scream and demand he explain, to shake him until he told me everything — why he had helped, how he had thought this small rebellion would stand a chance.
When the carriage stopped and the gates of the estate opened, they took me in, the world narrowed to one point of light: the window of Lucien's study. I thought of all the times he had watched me sleep, the way he had pressed promises to my skin like barbs shaped as vows. For a crazy, terrible second, I wanted him to look at me and be anything other than the cold sculpted thing he had become. I wanted him to be the Lucien I can trust and not the beast he truly is.
They marched me up the steps as if I were no more than a pleading shadow. Lucien stood on the landing, and the sight of him made my stomach drop out of my body. He was immaculate, rainwashed, and the storm had carved new angles into his face, yet he was still bruised from the time I had hurt him. For a second I thought he might raise a hand and let loose with punishments that eyes of men had never seen . He stepped forward and lifted his chin like a man who intends to take what is his.
When our eyes met, something happened in him. It wasn't joy. It wasn't triumph the way I'd expected. It was… more complicated, rawer. He reached for me, and the world slowed to the sound of his breath and the click of chain links in my wrists.
"You are mine," he said, but the words were a ripple of something else — possessive, yes, but threaded with something that hurt like a memory. "You will not run again."
I wanted to spit in his face. I wanted to tell him I had seen Kael's eyes, soft as a secret. I wanted to tell him I had felt something other than fear in the back of me. But instead my voice croaked and broke.
"Why?" I managed finally, like a child asking why the sky is cruel.
"For your good as I told you before ," he said, but there was no kindness in it. He stepped closer until I could feel the heat of him, the scent of cedar and old smoke. "And for mine."
As they led me away, my wrists stung with rough rope. In the corridor—a sliver of shadow, almost as if someone had carved a space just for regret—I saw Kael. He stood with his back to the wall, face hidden, hands clenched until the knuckles glowed white.
He didn't come forward. He didn't meet my eyes.
Forgive me, I wanted to tell him. Or perhaps forgive me was what he needed to ask of himself.
Instead he slid, almost inaudibly, a small scrap of paper across the sill. By the time I had the chance to bend and pick it up, the doorkeeper's boot crushed it into the carpet.
It read in hurried scrawl: I tried. I'll keep trying. Hold on. —K.
I pressed the tiny square to my chest like a relic. In the hollow of my ribs, where fear and weird, dark hope warred, I promised I would. Not because of Lucien's soft threats, but because of Kael's impossible, stubborn mercy.
They took me inside. The door shut. The estate breathed behind me and then resumed its careful, patient silence. I had run until my lungs gave up and then been returned to the only man who could hold both the key and the lock of me.
Outside, the rain kept falling like a sky that had not yet forgiven the world.