The Lycan's Stolen Bride

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Callie lay on her narrow cot long after the house had gone silent, staring up at the cracked ceiling, unable to settle her mind enough for sleep to take her.

She kept seeing his face. Gray with pain, jaw locked tight, that faint sheen of sweat catching the candlelight even while he sat perfectly still trying not to show how much it cost him just to remain upright. She had seen plenty of suffering in her two years at the camp, more than she cared to remember, but there was something about the quiet way he carried his pain that stuck with her, refusing to let her rest.

It is not your problem, she told herself firmly, turning onto her side, pulling the thin blanket higher over her shoulder. You have your own plans. A few more days, maybe a week, and you will be gone from this house for good. You cannot afford to draw attention to yourself now, not for a stranger, not for anyone.

She closed her eyes and tried to think of something else, the money sitting frozen in her account, the small bundle of things she needed to gather quietly before she left, the careful list of steps she had already begun building in her mind for her escape.

But his face kept surfacing anyway, gray and drawn, and beneath it, quieter, the memory of the kitchen maids whispering about dark magic and failed healers and a family more concerned with appearances than an actual person suffering under their own roof.

Focus on the details. Notice everything, even the things that seem useless.

She sat up in the dark, frustrated with herself, and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

She was not doing this to be kind. She told herself that clearly, needing the reminder even as she swung her legs over the side of the cot and reached for the plain shawl draped over the nearby chair. She was doing this because leaving a job half-noticed nagged at her in a way she could not shake, because some old habit from her mentors refused to let a problem sit unresolved once she had already turned it over so many times in her mind.

That was all. Nothing more than that.

She wrapped the shawl loosely around her shoulders and slipped out of the storage room, easing the door shut behind her without a sound.

The servant's hallway was dark and empty at this hour, most of the staff long since retired to their own rooms for what little rest they were allowed before another long day. Callie moved through it the way her second mentor had once trained her, back in the hidden corners of the camp where no guard ever caught them, weight balanced light on the balls of her feet, breath even and slow, each step placed with deliberate care before she shifted her weight forward.

Quiet is not the absence of sound, her mentor used to say. Quiet is control. Anyone can tiptoe. Only a trained body moves without announcing itself at all.

She had thought that training would only ever matter for defending herself, for the day she might need to fight her way free of danger. She had not expected to use it for something like this, slipping silently through a sleeping house toward a room she had no real business entering.

She reached the main staircase and paused at the base of it, listening carefully for any sound above, any creak of floorboards, any voice still awake somewhere in the house. Nothing. The whole estate had settled into the particular stillness that came only deep in the night, when even the most restless members of a household finally gave in to sleep.

She climbed the stairs slowly, careful of the third step from the top, the one she remembered creaking loudly even as a child, and made her way down the guest wing hallway toward the room she had watched him disappear into earlier that evening.

The hallway here was nicer than the servant's quarters, thick carpet muffling her already careful footsteps, small wall sconces burning low and casting long shadows against the polished walls. She counted the doors as she passed them, remembering exactly which one the maid had guided him toward.

She reached his door and paused, hand hovering just above the handle, her heart beating a little faster than she wanted to admit.

This was foolish. She knew that. If anyone found her here, in a guest's room in the dead of night, there would be no explanation good enough to save her from whatever punishment the family decided to hand down. Trespassing. Suspicion. Rowena would find some way to twist it into something far worse than the truth, and the truth itself was strange enough without her sister's help.

But she thought of his face again, the gray exhaustion, the tight clench of his jaw, and her hand closed over the handle before she could talk herself out of it.