Three Knocks

"You are not allowed to make a habit of that," I said.

Lucien lay against fresh pillows while Ives fastened the last bandage around his side.

"Walking?"

"Nearly dying in public."

"I will endeavor to be more private next time."

I looked at him.

His attempted smile faded.

Ives gathered her things and left us, warning him that humor did not count as rest.

For a while, I listened to his breathing.

The wound had opened along the old hunting injury where the first binding had entered him. Breaking it had freed his wolf but torn tissue that had never healed properly. Ives was confident now that ordinary recovery could finally begin.

Ordinary. I had never loved a word more.

Lucien reached toward me.

I gave him my hand, then found myself crying over it.

"Nora."

"I saw the blood, and I thought I had lost you before I ever had the chance to know what this could become."

He drew my fingers to his mouth.

"I was afraid too."

The admission made me look up.

"In the hall?"

"Before it. When Ives said I could stand, I was afraid I would not reach you. I kept counting the corridor turns."

He swallowed.

"Rusk told me we could carry a chair into the hearing. I refused because I wanted them to see that I could defend you. It was vanity as much as courage. I am sorry you paid for it with that fear."

I leaned forward until my forehead touched his.

"You can defend me sitting down. You can defend me by staying alive long enough to argue with me."

His hand settled against my cheek.

"I will remember."

He did not make an impossible promise never to frighten me again. Somehow, that made me trust the one he offered.

Recovery took weeks.

Lucien disliked every slow step of it. He also took them.

I stayed for the unpleasant mornings, the exhaustion after a short walk, the days when he snapped at a misplaced cushion and apologized before I had to ask.

He stayed for my nightmares.

Sometimes I woke with Derek's hand imagined over my mouth. Lucien learned to say my name before touching me. He lit the lamp, opened the curtains if I asked, and listened while I found the room again.

Once, ashamed of needing reassurance for the same fear twice in a week, I told him to go back to sleep.

He sat beside me until sunrise.

"You are not a task I have already completed," he said.

I loved him so fiercely in that moment that it hurt beneath my ribs.

Outside our rooms, consequences arrived without requiring me to supervise each one.

The physician's records, the secretary's payments, and the broken ring confirmed the plan against Lucien. Severin had intended to govern through a disputed succession, using Derek's ambition until he could discard him as easily as the rest of us.

There had never been a secure place for Derek in that future. He had simply been unable to imagine himself as someone else's tool.

Severin was stripped of his position and confined pending the Crown's final sentence. The physician and secretary faced their own hearings. Alpha Mercer lost his council authority after his financial support for the scheme was established.

Derek confessed to the drugging after the receiving-room cloth and the servant's account were added to my statement. He lost his claim to succeed his father and was sentenced to confinement outside his pack.

I did not attend his departure.

My father wrote twice. The first letter complained about the loss of his appointment. The second asked whether I intended to forgive him.

I answered only to confirm that Owen would remain with me and that our mother's belongings had arrived safely.

Tessa sent nothing. I heard she had returned the silver band to Derek's household in a parcel without a note.

I put my mother's pearls in a drawer until I could wear them without remembering her hands removing them.

There was no single morning when the past stopped hurting. There were simply more mornings when it did not decide what I did next.

The queen came to see me in the garden when the first thaw softened the paths.

She did not bring gifts.

"I have spoken to the women injured during the selection," she said. "Some would not receive me."

I waited.

"They were entitled to refuse that too."

Her fingers tightened around her gloves.

She told me the Crown had canceled the levies, paid for continuing care, and abolished the selection decree. Then she apologized for my own treatment, without calling it an unfortunate misunderstanding.

I accepted the apology. Trust would take longer.

She seemed to understand.

Owen flourished under Rusk's impossible standards. He still forgot his arithmetic, still hid vegetables beneath bread, and now owned boots that fit.

One afternoon, I found him teaching Lucien a card game whose rules appeared to change whenever the prince began winning.

Lucien caught my eye over Owen's head.

"Your brother is extorting an invalid."

"You can walk to the south gallery now," Owen said. "Rusk says you are no longer allowed to use that excuse."

I laughed until both of them smiled at me.

Later, Lucien asked me to walk with him.

We went slowly. He carried his own cane and accepted my arm on the steps without making either of us pretend it was merely gallantry.

In the small winter garden, new leaves had appeared along the bare branches.

He stopped beside a bench.

"I asked you to remain in a marriage neither of us chose," he said. "I have not asked you properly for anything beyond that."

My heart began to beat harder.

He took a small box from his coat.

"I love you, Nora. I love your stubbornness when you think someone is being treated unfairly. I love the way you talk to Owen as if he is already becoming someone worth hearing. I love that you tell my wolf he is shedding light on the carpet."

I laughed through the tears already gathering.

He opened the box. Inside lay a ring with a clear stone and two small leaves worked into the band.

"I want a life with you. Quiet mornings, difficult days, all the things I have been learning to want again. Will you marry me because you want that life too?"

"Yes," I said. "I love you, and yes."

His breath left him shakily.

I kissed him before he could say anything else.

We held our ceremony six weeks later, with Owen beside me and Rusk looking offended by the emotion in his own eyes. I wore my mother's pearls. Lucien wore no weapon.

The mating mark came afterward, in our own rooms, when we were alone and could ask each other without witnesses or expectation.

His mouth rested against my neck. He waited until I drew him closer.

The bond opened like a window in a room I had mistaken for the whole world.

I felt his love, imperfect and living, with fear still threaded through it and joy strong enough to make room for both. He felt mine. Neither of us had to explain why we were crying.

Later, we loved each other slowly, with lamplight warm against the curtains and enough time to learn what made the other smile. He held me afterward as carefully as he had on the first night, when he had asked nothing of me at all.

The following evening, I was reading beside the hearth when someone knocked three times.

I looked up.

Lucien stood beyond the open door holding two cups of tea. His hair was damp from the bath, his shirt untucked. He had left his cane against the wall within reach.

For a heartbeat, I remembered another room and another man I had once waited for.

Then Lucien lifted one cup.

"May I come in?"

The old memory loosened its hold.

I set my book aside and moved over on the sofa.

"Yes," I said. "I have been saving your place."

THE END