Irina’s POV

The lights were out by the time he came.

I heard the door. The quiet click of it. His footsteps crossing the room in the dark—unhurried, like always. Like he had all the time in the world and the world knew better than to rush him.

I lay on my side and stared at the wall.

The vial was under my pillow.

I’d put it there an hour ago. I hadn’t meant to. I’d meant to hide it somewhere smarter—somewhere deeper, somewhere he’d never look—but when I’d gone to move it my hand had just. Stopped.

It was still there.

I could feel the small hard shape of it through the pillow. A constant, quiet pressure against the side of my head.

*One cup of coffee.*

The mattress dipped.

His weight. Familiar already, which was the thing I kept snagging on. How quickly his weight had become something I recognized. Something I knew. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

I didn’t move.

He settled in behind me. I heard him exhale—slow, low, the sound of someone unwinding at the end of a long day. The sheets shifted.

Then his arm came around me.

Heavy. Solid. His hand pressed flat against my stomach and pulled me backward into him.

His breath was warm against the back of my neck. Even. Slow. He wasn’t tense. He was—comfortable. That was the word. He was comfortable with this in a way I couldn’t understand, in a way that made something complicated happen in my chest.

I stared at the wall.

The vial sat under my pillow.

*You wake up every morning in his palace and eat at his table—*

*One cup of coffee. And it would be over.*

*You would be free.*

I exhaled carefully. Tried to make it soundless.

What was freedom? I’d been asking myself that for an hour, lying in the dark, listening to the palace settle around me. What did it actually look like? A different city. A different name. A small apartment somewhere with no one’s arm around my waist and no one’s voice telling me to look at them.

Was that what I wanted?

Was that—

*He’s going to take their heads and hang them from the city walls.*

My jaw tightened.

He’d said it so easily. *Yeah.* Like that was nothing. Like those were just words and not people, not a pack full of people who had been cruel and cowardly but who were still *people*—

My father’s face. Standing in the courtyard of the pack house. Hands at his sides.

I pressed my eyes shut.

He’d failed me. I knew that. I’d made peace with it, or something that looked like peace from far away. He’d stood there and let Maxim do whatever he wanted and told himself stories about it and never once looked at me the way he used to look at me when I was twelve years old and he was still the person I thought he was.

But he was my father.

He was still my father.

And Nicolas was going to—

His arm tightened.

Just slightly. His hand flexed against my stomach.

"You’re stiff," he said.

My heart kicked.

"I’m fine."

"You’re not fine." His voice was rough with something close to sleep. Not angry. Just—observational. "You’ve been stiff since I lay down. What’s going on in your head?"

"Nothing."

A pause.

"Irina."

"I said I’m fine."

His arm shifted. I felt the movement before I understood it—his grip changing, his hand finding my shoulder, and then he pulled.

I gasped.

He rolled me over in one smooth motion. I was suddenly on my back, blinking up at the dark ceiling, and then he was above me, his weight braced on one arm, his face close.

His eyes adjusted to the dark faster than mine.

He was already looking at me.

Green in the daylight. In the dark they were something deeper. Something that caught the faint light from under the curtains and held it.

My heart was hammering.

I couldn’t tell if it was fear. I genuinely could not tell anymore.

"You moved," I said. My voice came out stupid. Obvious.

"I know." His gaze moved across my face. Reading something there I didn’t know I was showing. "What’s wrong?"

I didn’t say anything.

He stayed where he was. Not pressing. Not grabbing. Just—there. Watching me with those green eyes that saw too much.

*You’re his mate. You’re supposed to be there. Nobody watches what you do around him.*

My throat felt tight.

"If you’re going to do something," he said quietly, "just tell me. I don’t like guessing games."

"I’m not going to do anything."

"Then talk."

I exhaled through my nose. Stared past his shoulder at the ceiling.

He didn’t push. He just waited. He was good at that, I’d noticed. The waiting. He could fill a room with silence and make it feel like pressure, like the air was getting slowly thicker, until you opened your mouth just to let some of the tension out.

It worked.

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

He held my gaze. The green of his eyes was very dark in the low light. Not cold. Not warm. Just—steady. Watching.

My heart was beating very hard.

The vial was under my pillow. Three inches from my head. And I was lying here arguing with him about whether the people he was going to kill deserved to die.

Something in my chest felt scraped open.

"I was thinking," I said.

My voice came out strange. Stripped of whatever careful neutrality I’d been trying to hold onto. Just—small, and tired, and honest in a way I hadn’t planned on being.

"I was thinking."

His eyes didn’t move from my face.

"Can we not go to war?"