Angel’s POV
"Co on," I said, touching Agnes’s arm. "Let’s get you cleaned up first before breakfast."
Agnes followed quietly, her eyes focused on the door. She did not look at rrick. She did not look at Terrell.
I could only imagine how much embarrassnt she must be feeling right now.
But that didn’t stop from pressing my lips together very firmly.
"I can hear you not laughing," she said, without looking back.
"I’m not doing anything."
***
I got her back to the room and sat her down. Then I went back to the door and flagged the first maid I found in the corridor, asking for hot water and breakfast both, as quickly as could be managed.
When I ca back in, Agnes was sitting on the edge of the bed looking at her hands.
"Food is coming," I said. "Freshen up first. I’ll have hot water sent up..."
"You just left," Agnes said.
"I went to the door."
"You said you’d bring food yourself."
"I said food is coming. I’m having it sent up." I sat beside her. "It’ll be here soon."
Agnes looked at .
"Who’s sending it?" she said.
I considered how to say the next part.
"A maid, of course," I said.
The silence that followed had a very specific quality.
Agnes turned to look at with a slow, careful movent.
"A maid. Probably under the orders of the Alpha," she said.
"Agnes..."
"Terrell is sending up the food."
"He’ll probably just tell the kitchen staff what to..."
"Absolutely not." She stood. "Angel, listen to very carefully. That man has no reason to want alive and several excellent reasons to prefer the opposite, and you want to eat food that passed through his..."
"He’s not going to poison the food, Agnes."
"You don’t know that."
"I know that because the food will be sent up for both of us," I said, with patience I was assembling in real ti. "And I am his Luna and he is not going to poison his own Luna’s breakfast."
"You don’t know how these werewolves think..."
"Agnes." I looked at her steadily. "I’m going to eat the food too. Does that help?"
A pause.
"Fine," she said at last, in the tone of soone making a tactical concession rather than a genuine one. "But I’m watching you take the first bite."
"You’re welco to."
"And if you make any kind of face..."
"Agnes. Go and freshen up."
She held my gaze for three more seconds, then turned toward the bathroom with her flour-dusted hair and her unconquered bearing.
***
Terrell’s POV
After giving the chef a list of what she should prepare for breakfast, I left the kitchen and went in search of my brother.
Who wasn’t hard to find this ti around.
rrick’s door was open, which ant he had heard coming and made a decision about the energy he wanted to bring to this conversation. He was standing in the center of the room in the process of pulling on a clean robe, the flour-ruined one already discarded in a heap. He glanced up when I ca in with the expression of a man who has prepared for this conversation.
I leaned against the doorfra.
Let the silence sit for a mont.
"Well?" I said.
"Good morning to you too," rrick said pleasantly.
"The storeroom."
"Just a locked door. A chanical failure. Could have happened to anyone."
"rrick."
He finished with the robe and turned to face properly. "I went down for food. I did not go down to be locked in a storeroom for more than three hours with a difficult woman. These were not calculated plans."
"What happened while you were in there?"
A pause. "Nothing."
"Nothing."
"I sat on the floor. She found bread. We did not engage in aningful conversation." He picked up the discarded robe and regarded the flour damage. "At one point there was an incident with a sack of flour that I have chosen not to examine too closely in terms of how it reflects on either of us."
"I noticed."
"I prefer not to discuss it."
"Did you make any progress?" I asked. "With her."
rrick set the robe down and looked at .
"I told her my na," he said. "She stopped trying to kick . I consider that a reasonable first exchange."
"That’s it."
"Terrell. I was locked in a storeroom. I was sitting on a stone floor. I was covered in flour. You want to explain under what conditions I was supposed to be simultaneously building trust with a fiery human?"
I looked at him.
"That woman," he said, "does not trust quickly. She doesn’t trust at all, as far as I can tell. What she does is assess. She watches everything and she files it away and she will decide in her own ti and on her own terms what to do with it." He crossed his arms. "You can’t accelerate that. Pushing it makes it worse."
"I’m not asking you to push it," I said. "I’m asking you to try."
"I am trying. I’m trying on a tiline that will actually work." He held my gaze. "This isn’t just for , you know. Angel matters to both of us. Whatever that woman decides about us affects what Angel decides. Which ans we need her to arrive at the right conclusion, and that ans giving her space to arrive rather than herding her."
The room was quiet for a mont.
He was right. He was frequently right about these things, which was one of the more useful things about having a twin and one of the more inconvenient ones.
"She needs to co around," I said.
"She will." He looked at steadily. "Let handle it."
I pushed off the doorfra.
"Then handle it," I said.
***
rrick’s POV
I slept until noon.
Deeply, without any care in the world. When I woke, the light was coming in at the angle that said afternoon, and I lay there for a mont, trying to orient myself with the world.
Then I called for food - a proper well-cooked al - and ate it in my room with the appreciation of a man restoring himself to operational capacity. Then I sat back in my chair and looked at the ceiling and thought.
The storeroom had not been a total failure. Not exactly.
Terrell would have called it one - no visible progress, no dramatic turning of the tide, no mont where the sister had looked at and decided to revise her position on everything. By those trics, nothing had happened.
But I had been watching her. The way she moved through the space. The way she had taken stock of the flour incident. The way she had eaten - with real hunger but without desperation, with the contained dignity of soone who had survived enough to know that survival had its own rhythm.
She was not a woman who could be chard.
She was a woman who could, possibly, be t. On her own ground. On her own terms. By soone who didn’t flinch when she pushed.
I knocked twice on the door fra.
A maid ca in through the door.
"Do you know the Luna’s sister?" I asked.
She blinked. Folded her hands. Looked sowhere slightly to the left of my face with the expression of soone calculating how much they should admit to knowing.
"It’s alright," I said. "I know the gossip travels faster than the people in this castle do. You know who she is."
A pause. Then a small nod.
"Good. I need you to find out where she is right now." I held her gaze. "Quietly. No announcent, no fuss, no one else needs to know you’re looking. Find her and co straight back."
She nodded, and she was gone.
I looked out the window while I waited - the afternoon spread out over Black Wolf’s grounds, the training yard visible below, the horses moving in the outer paddock beyond the wall.
The knock ca back sooner than I’d expected.
"The stables, my lord," the maid said, from behind the cracked door. "She’s in the stables."
I looked at the stables.
Then I looked at the paddock.
Then at the horses.
"Thank you," I said. "That’ll be all."
She left.
I stood and went to the wardrobe and retrieved my riding clothes - the good ones, the broken-in leather and the dark coat, the ones I wore when I rode for the pleasure of it rather than the necessity. I had not done that in a while. Too long, probably. There was always sothing pressing, always a reason to postpone the things that were done purely for the sake of doing them.
Today seed like a reasonable day to change that.
I dressed without hurry.
Checked the window one more ti, then I went downstairs.
Not because Terrell had told to. Not because it was strategy. But because a woman who had survived everything she had survived and had still shown up in a storeroom in the middle of the night looking for sothing to eat - moving quietly through a castle full of people who frightened her, entirely alone, refusing to ask for help - was in the stables.
And I happened to feel like riding.
That was all.
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