Chapter 4 THE MARK THAT SHOULDN'T EXIST

Osric's POV

I was still staring at the mark on her wrist when the shouting from the yard got louder.

Gold light pulsed faintly under her skin, shaped exactly like the royal seal, and every instinct in my body told me this was wrong in a way I didn't have words for yet. Marks like that didn't just appear. They were carved, inherited, sworn into blood through ceremonies older than this house. Nobody touches a person and leaves a royal seal glowing on their skin.

Unless it wasn't a seal at all.

"That's not possible," I said, mostly to myself, because Delphine was still staring at her own wrist as it belonged to someone else.

Torin leaned in the window, blade still out, scanning the dark tree line beyond the wall. "He's gone. Cleared the fence line before the scouts even got a torch lit." He turned back to us, and for the first time all night, I saw something on his face I didn't like at all. Fear. Torin doesn't get scared. "Osric. Nobody moves that fast. Not even us."

I didn't answer him. I was watching Delphine's face instead, watching the way she'd gone very pale and very quiet, holding her own wrist like it might come off if she let go.

"We need to get you somewhere secure," I told her, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to. "Now."

She didn't argue. That scared me more than anything else that happened that night. The girl who'd stood in burning wreckage an hour ago and refused to shake was letting me steer her down the hall by the shoulder without a single word of protest, and that told me exactly how deep this had rattled her.

I put her in the room across from mine, the one with the sturdiest door in the whole house, and told two of my best men to stand guard outside it until sunrise. She didn't ask why. She just nodded, eyes still distant, and let the door close between us.

I didn't sleep. I sat in the war room until the sky started turning gray, going over every piece of it with Torin and Fenwick, who'd finally shown up looking like he'd run half the perimeter himself checking for tracks. There weren't any. Whoever that was, he hadn't left a single footprint, a single broken branch, anything at all to follow.

"A ghost doesn't leave marks on people," Fenwick said quietly. It was the first full sentence he'd spoken since the fire at the gate.

"Then what does?" I said.

Nobody answered, because nobody had one.

By the time the sun came up, I'd convinced myself it was over, whatever it was. A trespasser. A trick of shock and firelight making a girl who'd never seen real danger imagine a mark that wasn't as strange as it looked. I told myself that all through breakfast, all through the reports from the wall, all through the long, exhausting day of pretending Thornhollow ran the same as it did yesterday.

I stopped telling myself that around midnight, when I heard footsteps on the stairs.

Soft. Slow. Coming from the direction of her room.

I was out of my chair before I finished the thought, already moving toward the door, already bracing myself for what I expected to find: the princess, shaken loose by a nightmare, come looking for someone to tell her it was safe now. I'd seen it before with new arrivals, the kind who cracked in the middle of the night after holding themselves together all day in front of everyone else. I readied myself to be short with her. Firm. Whatever kept the distance I needed to keep.

I opened my door just as she reached the top of the stairs.

She didn't stop.

She didn't even look at me.

Her eyes were fixed somewhere past my shoulder, glassy and distant in a way that made the hair on my arms stand straight up, and she walked right past my open door like I wasn't standing in it at all. Like the whole hallway, me included, simply didn't exist to her right now.

"Delphine," I said her name sharp enough that it should have snapped anyone out of a daze. She didn't slow down.

I fell into step beside her, closer now, close enough to see her hand, the one with the mark on it, glowing faintly gold again in the dark, pulsing slow and steady like a heartbeat that wasn't hers.

"Delphine, stop." I put a hand on her shoulder. It was like touching stone. She kept walking, headed straight for the stairs down toward the study, the exact room where all of this had started less than a day ago.

"Someone's calling me," she said. Her voice came out flat, far away, nothing like the sharp, steady girl who'd argued with me in the dirt yesterday. "I have to go."

"Nobody's calling you. There's nobody down there." I gripped her shoulder harder, turned her to face me, and what I saw in her eyes made my stomach drop straight through the floor.

They weren't brown anymore.

They were gold. Solid gold, edge to edge, glowing faintly the same color as the mark on her wrist, and for one terrifying second I didn't recognize her at all.

"Delphine!" I shook her, harder than I meant to, and for just a moment, one single moment, her eyes flickered back to normal, brown and wide and terrified, staring up at me as she'd just woken up mid-fall.

"Osric?" Her voice cracked on my name. "What's happening to me?"

I didn't have an answer. I didn't have anything except my hands on her shoulders and my heart slamming against my ribs and the sick, certain feeling that whatever had touched her last night hadn't left at all.

It had left something behind.

And right as I opened my mouth to tell her we needed Fenwick, needed answers, needed anything, her whole body went rigid in my arms, her head snapping toward the stairs like a puppet pulled by an invisible string.

"He's here," she whispered, voice not quite her own anymore. "He's already inside the walls."