Chapter 3 — The Feast of Beasts (3)

Girls’ names.

“This is the ledger of the Handlers,” Kael said, and his voice had gone ancient — older than the building, older than the city. “Every one of them who bonded a Wolf King. Every one of them who thought the bond was a gift.”

I walked to the wall. I touched the names. Mara. Elise. Vanya. Anouk. Twenty, thirty, forty names — some I couldn’t read, the letters worn away to nothing.

“What happened to them?” I asked, though I knew.

“They died,” Kael said. “Every one. The bond is a curse, Lila. The stronger the Wolf King, the deeper the bond, the more it takes. The more she gives.” He turned to face me, and his silver eyes were flat — flat the way water goes flat before a storm. “I am the strongest Wolf King this bloodline has ever produced. Do the math.”

The room was cold. The names were cold. And I stood there, in the middle of a graveyard of girls with my hands, and I understood — finally, truly, with the part of me that felt everything — why he had tried to push me away with threats and distance. Why he’d stood at the window with his back to me. Why he’d said it’s a story for a longer night.

He wasn’t hiding from me.

He was trying to protect me from him.

“You’ve never slept,” I said, quietly. “Not in a thousand years. Serena said it. The crow said it. And I can feel it — the exhaustion under all that rage, the part of you that’s been burning for a millennium because you’re afraid to close your eyes.”

He went very still.

“What do you see,” he asked, “when you can’t stop seeing them?”

For a long moment, he said nothing. And then, in a voice that cracked like ice in spring — the first crack I’d heard in him, the first real sound of the man under the monster:

“The last one. Anouk. She had your hands. She had your mouth, your laugh, your stupid refusal to be afraid of anything. She was twenty-one. She looked at me the way you look at me — like I was a problem she could fix, not a monster she should run from.”

His jaw tightened.

“I tried to end the bond. I tried to send her away. She came back anyway — she always came back — and the curse took her the way it takes them all. Slowly. By inches. By every inch of her that I loved.” He looked at the wall of names. “She carved her own name before she died. The last thing she did. And then she told me to stop pretending I was cursed, because I wasn’t cursed — I was bound, and there was a difference, and one day the right hands would come and I’d know it.”

The bond — that stupid, humming, gravitational thing between us — pulled at my chest like a fist.

“I thought she was wrong,” he said. “I thought there were no right hands, only dead ones. And then you put your hand on my throat in the Hollow, and the whole world went quiet, and I knew — I knew — that Anouk wasn’t wrong. She was early.”

I stood there, in front of a wall of dead girls with my hands, and the Wolf King looked at me like I was a sunrise he didn’t deserve.

“So here’s the truth of it,” he said. “You can walk away tonight. I’ll let you — I’ll carve your name off the wall, I’ll burn the ledger, I’ll make the city forget you exist. Or you can stay, and we can find out whether you’re the last name on this wall, or the first one who gets to live.”

The room with no windows was silent.

And I — Lila Cross, bartender, Handler, girl who calmed riots with her fingertips and laughed at monsters who worried about the catering — looked at the thousand-year-old Wolf King and heard myself say:

“You’re my destiny’s chain, Kael. And my doom.” I lifted my chin, because my hands were shaking and I wasn’t going to let him see. “I’ve been my whole life looking for something that felt this real. Turns out it was a monster with a bedtime problem. So yes. I’m staying. And I’m going to be the first name on this wall that gets a life after it.”

The words landed.

Something in him came undone — just barely, just at the edges — and he looked at me with an expression I couldn't name, and I realized he'd never once, in a thousand years, heard anyone say they'd stay.

“Lila,” he said, and my name in his mouth sounded like a prayer and a warning at once.

A knock came at the door of the graveyard.

Kael’s whole body went rigid. The silver in his eyes went black.

“Wolf King,” came the voice through the wood — Corvin, the crow, trembling so hard his words rattled — “there’s a message. From the one in the dark. He says to tell you — he says —”

“What does he say,” Kael said, in a voice that was no longer human.

“He says he knows the Handler’s bloodline. He says he knows exactly what she is. And he says — he says he’s coming to take what belongs to him, and you can either give her up, or watch the city burn for her.”

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.

I looked at the wall of names. I looked at the monster who had just shown me his graveyard, who had told me I could walk away, who had looked at me like I was the first sunrise he'd ever deserved.

And I thought: Every beast can be tamed — only you haunt me.

“Well,” I said, into the ringing silence, because I had exactly one speed and it was reckless. “I guess that’s the catering sorted.”

The Wolf King looked at me — black-eyed, ancient, a thousand years of fury and fear and something that looked terrifyingly like hope — and for the first time since I’d met him, he laughed.

It was ugly and rough and entirely human, and it cracked the curse on his face wide open.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I’m not the one beast you can’t command. You’re the one beast I can’t survive losing.”

And somewhere in the dark, a floor above the old opera house, the one in the dark opened his eyes and began to move.