Chapter 72: Lovey dovey

Azura’s POV

The first thing I noticed was the light.

Not the grey, suffocating light of the Wraithfen that had followed us for days like something that had learned our names. This was warm. Golden. The kind of light that came from candles burning in a room that had never once been touched by wind or worry.

The second thing I noticed was that I could not move.

And I was back in body, but not a single part of me below my eyes. My fingers were there. I could feel them. I could feel the chair beneath me, the cool smooth surface of the armrest under my palm. But when I told my hand to lift, nothing happened. When I told my legs to push back, they stayed exactly where they were.

Only my eyes worked.

So I used them.

The room was enormous. Far bigger than the cabin. Far bigger than anything I had expected to open my eyes to. Long stone walls. High ceiling disappearing into shadow above the candlelight. A table running the length of it, set like something out of a story someone would tell children to make them believe the world was beautiful.

And everyone was sitting at it.

Silas. Axel. Torin. The warriors whose names I had learned on the road. All of them seated, all of them still, all of them awake behind their eyes and absolutely unable to do anything about it.

How are they here? Were they captured too?

I watched Silas try to move his jaw and fail. Watched Axel’s eyes cut sideways with the sharp precision of someone already counting exits and finding none.

Two people were missing. Corvin. And one other warrior whose face I had memorized on the road without ever learning well enough. Gone. Not at this table.

I filed that away and kept looking.

Liona was sitting across from me.

Her eyes found mine the moment mine found hers. Wide open. Terrified in the specific way she got terrified, where she held all of it behind her expression and let it live only in her eyes. She was asking me something without words. Everything at once. What is this? Where are we? Are you okay?

I held her gaze as long as I could. I tried to say I don’t know with just my eyes. I tried to say stay calm.

I don’t know if it worked.

Then I looked to my left.

Rhydor was sitting at the head of the table.

I was in his right hand. Liona at his left. And he was sitting there the way he always sat everywhere, like the chair had been made specifically for him and the room around it was simply an unfortunate background.

His eyes were forward. His expression gave away absolutely nothing. He was not scanning. Not panicking. Just waiting, bored and still, like paralysis was a minor inconvenience he planned to address when it became relevant.

Something about that settled into my chest and stayed there, steadier than it had any right to be.

Then the door opened.

A woman walked in like she owned the floor beneath her feet and had owned it for a very long time.

Not the hunched woman from the cabin. Not the warm brown eyes and the shaking hands and the sad story about a husband and a son. This was something different wearing a similar face. Younger. Somewhere around fifty if fifty looked like a deliberate choice rather than something time had done to a person without asking. Her body moved with the ease of someone who had never once in their life been afraid of a room.

She stopped in the center of the table and looked at all of us.

Slowly. One face at a time. Taking her time the way people do when they already know the outcome of something and are simply enjoying the process of arriving at it.

Then she smiled.

"Finally," she said, and her voice filled the room without effort. "Guests. You have absolutely no idea how boring it gets in a place like this when you are the only one here."

She looked at each of us again. Satisfied. The way someone looks at something they worked very hard to get and have just watched arrive exactly on schedule.

"And all of you so nicely weakened." She tilted her head slightly. "I have been waiting for this."

She clapped her hands once.

The door she had entered through swung open again.

Two men walked in. Built like warriors. Moving with the quiet, mechanical steadiness of people whose minds were somewhere far away from their bodies. Their faces held nothing. No expression, no recognition, no sign that they knew where they were or why.

They carried dishes between them, setting everything on the table with slow precision. Roasted meats. Bread. Things that smelled extraordinary in a way that made no sense in a cursed forest. The table between us became something that looked like a feast, arranged perfectly, sitting there like an insult.

I could not stop looking at them.

Something pulled at me from somewhere deep, somewhere below thought, somewhere that did not use words. I stared at their faces and could not name what I was feeling. Just that pull. Just that wrongness that sat in my chest and would not explain itself.

Across the table, Liona had gone completely still.

Her eyes were fixed on the two men with an expression I had never seen on her face before. Wide open. Something in it that looked like recognition fighting with disbelief. She did not blink.

The two men set the last of the dishes down, walked back to the door, and stood there. Side by side. Waiting for nothing.

The woman began moving around the table.

She took her time. Trailing her fingers lightly along the backs of chairs as she passed. Pausing behind Torin to study him with idle curiosity. Moving on. Stopping briefly behind Silas. His eyes cut sideways to follow her and found nothing useful.

She was not looking for conversation. She was not in a hurry.

She reached Rhydor, and stopped behind him.

Then she bent down slowly and brought her mouth close to his ear. Her voice dropped, but not enough. She wanted to be heard. Every word was placed carefully so that it would carry the length of the table.

"I have been watching you since you entered Wraithfen," she said. Low. Deliberate. "I did not want to do anything without your permission. That felt impolite."

She let that sit for a moment.

"You look absolutely delicious." A pause, small and weighted. "Why don’t we come to an arrangement?"

Rhydor’s eyes stayed forward.

Not a single thing moved in his face. Not his jaw. Not the muscle along his cheek. Just those dark eyes fixed on nothing, bored in the way that had nothing behind it, and somehow everything at the same time.

The woman straightened and looked around the table, and her gaze found me.

She studied my face.

I made it give her nothing.

But she had already seen something. I watched her find it. Watched the corner of her mouth move.

"Oh," she said softly. Something delighted moving behind her eyes. "Are you two lovey doveys?"

Nobody could answer.

She laughed, small and quiet, like we had just done something adorable.

"Even better," she said. "Much more fun this way."

She stepped around to stand beside Rhydor, and she placed her hand on his shoulder, and he moved.

Not his own movement.

I knew what his movement looked like. I had watched him walk through a cursed forest for days. I had watched him fight and carry and sit still in the dark. I knew the way he moved when it was him making the decision.

This was not that.

He rose from the chair like something was pulling the strings, and he lifted her, and he set her on the table, and stood between her legs, with both hands flat on either side of her.

The whole thing happened in the time it takes to breathe in and forget to breathe out.

The woman leaned back on her palms and looked up at him with total comfort.

"No need to rush," she said lightly. Her eyes moved to me while resting her head on his shoulder.

And stayed there. Making sure I was watching.

"Actually, do rush. I have others to get to after you." She glanced toward Silas. Toward Axel. A small gesture with her eyes that said exactly what she meant, and enjoyed saying it.

I looked at the table.

I looked at the grain of the wood and the candlelight moving across it and I told myself to breathe. I told my face to stay where it was. I told my chest to stop doing what it was doing.

My chest did not listen.

Rhydor leaned down toward her and the woman’s hands moved to his chest, sliding upward slowly, and I stopped looking at the table because I could not stop myself. I watched it happen and felt something split quietly open inside me that I did not have a name for and did not want one.

It was not anger. It was worse than anger. Anger has edges. This had none. It was just a wide, hollow ache spreading out from somewhere behind my ribs, quiet and enormous, with nowhere to go.

I blinked. Hard. Once.

His hand moved and found her upper thigh.

And stopped.

Something changed in his face. Slow. Like watching a current shift direction beneath still water. Something rising up through the surface from somewhere underneath. His jaw moved. His eyes changed.

His voice came out rough and entirely his own.

"Do you really think you can control an Alpha that easily?"

The woman’s smile cracked.

Just for a second. Just a fracture in the surface of it.

Then Rhydor moved so fast his hand closed around her throat. Squeezed once. Then he flung her like she was nothing. She hit the far wall and the stone did not hold. It cracked open and she vanished through it, swallowed by whatever was on the other side.

The silence that followed pressed against my ears.

Then something snapped.

All at once, like a single thread cut, and everyone at the table gasped in the same breath. Fingers curled. Shoulders dropped. Chairs scraped back as feet found the floor.

The paralysis broke everywhere at the same moment except at the door, where the two men stood exactly as they had stood before, still and waiting and empty.

I looked at my hands.

Moved my fingers slowly. Pressed my palms flat on the table and pushed myself upright.

Rhydor had already stepped back from the table and was standing straight, his expression resettled into its usual closed-off state, as the last sixty seconds had simply not occurred.

I looked away from him.

My eyes dropped to the table, to the scars in the wood. A tear had escaped without me realizing it. I used the noise around me.

The overlapping voices, the scraping chairs, Axel already moving toward the walls, to lift the back of my hand to the corner of my eye. Quick. One motion. Gone before anyone could see it.

I straightened. Lifted my chin. Moved on.

"How did she find you?" Silas’s voice, cutting through the rest. "Both of you were separated. How did she bring you here?"

"How long were we out?" Torin, already on his feet, rolling his shoulders like he was waking up from a nap. "Because I am genuinely starving and that food looks incredible and I am trying to decide if eating it will kill me."

"Don’t touch the food," Axel said flatly.

"Torin." Rhydor’s voice. One word, and it landed like a door closing. He looked around the table once. "There’s no time. Let’s deal with them first."

He nodded toward the door.

The two men standing there. Still. Faces empty. Waiting for a direction that was not coming from inside themselves.

Hands moved toward weapons around the table. Warriors shifted into readiness.

"Wait."

Liona’s voice was quiet. Careful. But it cut through everything.

Everyone stopped.

She was still looking at the two men. She had been looking at them since they walked in. Her face had gone very still in a way that had nothing to do with the paralysis.

"Liona." Silas, impatient. "We don’t have time."

"It’s not that," she said. Her voice was barely above a whisper. Her eyes did not move from the two figures at the door.

I had been looking at them since they walked in. That pull. That nameless thing sitting in my chest every time I let my eyes find them. I looked at Liona’s face and felt it click open somewhere inside me, slow and enormous.

"Those men," I said.

My voice came out quieter than I meant it to.

Everyone looked at me.

I looked at the two still figures standing at the door. Their blank faces. Their empty eyes. Their hands hang loose at their sides.

"That’s Leo and Ethan."