Chapter 5 THE FACE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STAIRS

Delphine's POV

"He's here," I said again, and this time my own voice scared me more than anything Osric could have said back.

My legs moved on their own, pulling free of his grip like his hands were made of nothing at all. I heard him shout my name behind me, heard his boots hit the floor as he chased after me, but the pull in my chest had turned into something I couldn't fight anymore, a rope tied straight around my ribs and yanked hard toward the stairs.

I hit the bottom step, and my vision cleared all at once, like surfacing from underwater. My own eyes felt normal again. My own legs felt like mine. But the pull hadn't stopped. If anything, it had gotten stronger, dragging me toward the study door that stood open at the end of the hall, torchlight spilling out from inside.

Someone was standing in that light.

Not hidden in shadow this time. Not a shape at the edge of darkness. A real person, fully lit, standing perfectly still like he'd been waiting for me to arrive.

"Delphine?"

I stopped so fast I nearly fell.

I knew that voice. I'd heard it a hundred times across a hundred formal dinners, polite and careful and practiced, the voice of a boy who'd been trained his whole life to say the right thing at the right moment. It was not the voice from last night. It was not the stranger who'd vanished through a window and left a glowing mark on my skin.

It was Alaric.

My fiancé stood in the middle of the study as he belonged there, dressed for travel, hair messed from the road, looking at me with an expression somewhere between relief and confusion.

"What are you doing here?" I said, and it came out sharper than I meant, because behind me I could hear Osric skidding to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, and I didn't have the first idea how to explain any of this to either of them.

"I rode ahead of my father's convoy," Alaric said slowly, eyes flicking from me to Osric and back again, clearly trying to read a room he had no context for. "I wanted to see Thornhollow before the formal visit. Make sure it was safe for you." His gaze dropped to my wrist, to the mark still glowing faint gold beneath my sleeve, and his face changed completely. "Delphine. What happened to your arm?"

I opened my mouth to answer, and the pull in my chest surged so hard it knocked the breath straight out of me.

It wasn't pointing at the stranger from last night. It wasn't pointing at Osric, standing tense and silent behind me with his hand already on the knife at his belt. It was pointing directly at Alaric, humming through my whole body like every nerve I had was reaching toward him at once, so overwhelming I had to grab the doorframe just to stay upright.

"Delphine?" Alaric took a step toward me, and the pull surged again, sharper, hotter, undeniable.

The bond. My father's advisors had warned me about a pull so strong it could not be ignored, proof of the one person fate had chosen for me out of everyone in the world.

It was Alaric.

It had been Alaric this whole time.

I should have felt relieved. Every part of my upbringing told me this was good news, the best possible news, proof that the marriage I'd been raised for all my life was written into fate itself and not just written into a treaty. I should have run to him. I should have cried with relief.

Instead I felt sick.

Because Alaric was looking back at me with nothing but confusion and concern, no recognition at all, no pull of his own tugging him toward me the way mine was tugging me toward him. Whatever I was feeling, I was feeling it completely alone.

"You're shaking," he said, closing the last of the distance between us, reaching for my hand before I could stop him. The second his fingers touched mine, the mark on my wrist flared bright gold, bright enough that Osric made a sound behind me like he'd been struck.

Alaric jerked his hand back like he'd been burned. "What was that?" he said, staring at his own fingers like they didn't belong to him anymore.

"You felt that," I whispered. Hope cracked open in my chest for one wild second. "You felt something?"

"I felt heat," he said slowly. "That's all. Just heat." His eyes were still fixed on his hand, confused, but nothing more than confused. No wonder. No recognition. No mirror of whatever had just torn through my entire body like lightning.

The bond only ran one way.

I heard Osric shift behind me, and when I glanced back at him, his face had gone carefully, deliberately blank, the exact opposite of the raw concern he'd shown me minutes ago on the stairs. Something had shut behind his eyes the second he saw that mark flare for Alaric instead of anyone else in the room, and I didn't have time to understand what that meant before the front door of the house slammed open down the hall.

Boots. Many of them. Moving fast.

"Prince Alaric!" a voice called out, urgent, breathless, one of his own guards by the sound of the accent. "Your father's convoy, sir, it never reached the south pass. We found the wagons an hour ago." The guard's voice broke on the next words, as he could barely make himself say them. "Empty, sir. No bodies. No driver. Just the wagons and the horses, standing there like everyone inside just disappeared."

Alaric went white.

I felt the pull in my chest twist into something else entirely, cold and sharp and wrong, and for one terrible heartbeat I understood, with total certainty, that whatever had marked me last night and whatever had just emptied an entire royal convoy in the middle of the road were not two separate mysteries at all.

They were the same one.

And it had only just started.