Chapter 2 — Found You (3)

I stared at him. He stared back.

And — I cannot explain this, to this day — I laughed.

It came out of me, ugly and loud and wrong, and he looked so startled that I laughed harder, until tears were running down my face and I was doubled over, and the Wolf King of Umbra City stood there looking like he’d been struck by lightning.

“Oh my god,” I wheezed. “You’re terrible at this.”

“At what?”

“At being scary! You kidnapped me, you gave me the thousand-year-bond speech, you slammed the door — and then you’re worried about the catering? The catering?!” I wiped my eyes. “The Wolf King. The terror of the Hollow. Worried about the catering.”

Something in his face moved. Cracked, maybe. He looked away — at the windows, at the city — and I caught the edge of it: a man who had not had anyone laugh at him in a thousand years, and didn’t know what to do with it.

“The caterers are werecrows,” he said, stiffly. “They’re very sensitive.”

I laughed until my stomach hurt. And then I stopped, because I realized the bond was humming — and it wasn’t humming at him. It was humming at me, warm and steady, like a hand on my back.

Like something in me had been holding its breath for a thousand years and had just started breathing again.

“Okay,” I said, finally, because I was tired, because I was hungry, because against every ounce of my survival instinct I was curious — about the feast, about the bond, about the monster who worried about the catering. “Fine. One night. I’ll go to your feast, I’ll be the fascinating new Handler, I’ll let the clan lords fawn over me like I’m a spa day. But I’m billing you for emotional damages, and I want it in writing.”

“Done,” he said, and then — softly, with that cracked-glacier gentleness that made my spine go tight — “and I’ll have the crows fix you a room. The one with the view.”

The elevator doors opened behind him.

And the fox walked in.

She was everything the city whispered about — red hair like a warning, eyes like amber coins, a body poured into a dress that probably had its own real estate. She looked at me. Looked at him. And the smile she gave us was the kind that comes with a price tag.

“Kael, darling,” she said, in a voice like honey over a razor. “I heard you adopted a pet. I had to come see for myself.”

The air in the room went arctic.

“Serena,” he said — and I felt the shift in him, the beast rising, the thousand years of fury waking up and rolling toward her like a tide — “you have exactly one sentence before I remove you.”

“One sentence,” the fox said, her amber eyes sliding to me, and her smile sharpened like a blade. “The last Handler who bonded a Wolf King died screaming, darling. Ask him how.”

Silence.

The bond thrummed under my skin — his rage, roaring, barely contained, and mine, reaching for it before I could stop myself, and I felt the whole terrible equation click into place in my chest.

“She’s lying,” he said, to me, not to her. “She’s always lying.”

“Am I?” Serena turned, and her tail — because of course she had a tail, the showoff — flicked once, dismissively, at the door. “Ask yourself why he’s never once slept, Lila Cross. Ask yourself what happened to the last girl who put her hand on his throat. And then ask yourself why he wants you at his feast, in front of every clan lord in the city.”

The elevator doors closed.

I stood in the penthouse, in the wreckage of a night that had gone sideways a hundred ways, and I looked at the Wolf King — the monster who had knelt for me in the street, who had smiled at my laughter, who had worried about the catering.

“Well,” I said, because I had no other move left. “That was ominous.”

“She’s a fox,” he said flatly. “Ominous is her mating call.”

“And the part about the last Handler dying screaming?”

The silence that followed was the longest of my life.

“It’s a story,” he said finally, “for a longer night than this.”

The door to the room with the view opened on its own. He didn’t look at me. He walked to the windows and stood with his back to the city, silver eyes fixed on nothing, and I understood — with the part of me that felt everything, that had felt his ocean of rage and his thousand years of not-sleeping — that he had just lied to me.

And that I was going to the feast anyway.