POV: Vedran
The wolf came up at three in the morning.
A deep, rolling weight that started at the base of my spine and pushed upward through my chest like something trying to surface from underwater. My hands fisted in the sheets. My teeth locked together.
It held for several minutes. Then it receded.
Then it came again.
The waves ran until dawn. Each one stronger than the last, each one pressing closer to something I couldn't name and didn't want to.
By the time the light came through the window I was soaked through, my pulse uneven, my breathing shallow enough that I had to concentrate to keep it from becoming visible.
Ithara arrived at her usual time. Folio open. Pen ready. She pulled the chair to the bedside and looked at me.
"Morning assessment," she said. "How was the night?"
"Stable," I said.
The word came out smooth. Controlled. I had spent years delivering information that wasn't true in a voice that sounded like it was. This was no different.
Ithara wrote something on her folio. Then she set the pen down.
"I'm going to ask you again," she said. Her voice was level, but her eyes had sharpened — the clinical focus of a woman who had been reading bodies longer than I had been lying to people. "And when I do, I want you to consider that I have been monitoring your vitals remotely since midnight, and that the readings I have in front of me do not match the word stable."
The room was quiet.
"How was the night, Vedran?"
I held her gaze for three seconds. The mask I'd worn for decades wanted to stay in place — the reflex to manage, to control the narrative, to decide what people deserved to know about what was happening inside me.
"Bad," I said. "The wolf came up in waves. Pressure, not breakout. Started around three. Didn't stop until dawn."
Ithara picked her pen back up and wrote. Fast. Precise. Her expression didn't change, but her hand moved with the urgency of someone recalculating a timeline.
"The readings confirm that," she said. "Your cardiac rhythm destabilized twice between three and five. If you had told me stable and I had adjusted treatment based on that assessment, I would have underestimated the degradation rate by a meaningful margin."
She looked up from the folio.
"Lying to me does not cost you anything, Vedran," Ithara said. "It costs Sylra options. Every inaccurate number I record narrows the window she has to act. You are not protecting yourself by managing what I see. You are removing tools from the woman who is trying to save your life."
The words hit the way good intelligence hits — clean, precise, leaving no room for reinterpretation.
"Understood," I said.
"I need more than understood." Ithara's pen stayed still. "I need you to tell me what actually happens in this room when no one is here. Not the version. The truth."
"The truth is that the pressure is getting worse," I said. "The intervals between waves are shortening. And the wolf feels different than it did a week ago — not weaker. More erratic. Less like something degrading and more like something losing coherence."
Ithara wrote every word. When she finished, she closed the folio and stood.
"I'll adjust the protocol," she said. "And Vedran — do not lie to me again."
She left. I lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling and felt the particular shame of a man who had spent his life managing information being told that his management was costing the person he loved most.
The day passed slowly. The waves came twice more. Shorter. Less intense. I counted the intervals and catalogued the sensations because that was what I knew how to do — turn experience into data, even when the experience was my own body failing.
Sylra came in the evening.
She looked tired. The council was wearing on her — I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the tension along her jaw. She sat in the chair that had become hers and started to speak.
"Don't," I said and she stopped.
"Don't tell me about the council," I said. "Don't tell me about Torvaine or Sera's mapping or whatever Harren's replacement said today."
She tilted her head. Watching me. Trying to read what I was asking for.
"Tell me something you love," I said. "Something personal. Something that has nothing to do with any of this."
She was quiet for a moment. I watched her cycle through the surprise, then the uncertainty, then something softer — the realization that I was asking her to give me a part of herself that the palace never touched.
"Rain," she said finally. "I love rain. Not storms — just rain. The steady kind that lasts all day."
She leaned back in the chair.
"When I was in Blackmaw, before everything, there was a window in the room where I slept that didn't close all the way," she said. "When it rained, the sound came through the gap. It was the only thing in that place that felt like it wasn't controlled by someone."
I closed my eyes. Her voice settled over me like something warm and specific.
"I used to lie there and listen to it and pretend the rain went on forever," she said. "That there was no territory outside the window. No pack politics. No expectations. Just water falling on stone, going wherever it wanted." She paused.
"I still do that," she said. "When it rains at the palace, I open the window in my study and sit near it and just listen. Nobody knows I do it. It's the one thing that's only mine."
The room was quiet with her breathing. The distant sound of the palace settling into its evening rhythms.
I opened my eyes. She was watching me with an expression I had never seen on her before — unguarded. Not the queen. Not the strategist. The woman who had once lain in a room in Blackmaw and let the rain be her only freedom.
I reached across the space between the bed and the chair and took her hand.
Not because something was wrong. Not because the wolf was surging. Not because a crisis had broken the distance between us and forced the contact. Because I wanted to.
Her fingers tightened around mine. She didn't speak. Neither did I. We sat like that for a while — my hand holding hers, the evening light going gold and then grey through the window.
"I spent months making sure you would never feel me as a burden," I said. "Every piece of information I managed, every number I filtered, every time I told Ithara I was stable when I wasn't — it was because I couldn't stand the idea of being something you had to carry."
She turned her hand in mine so our palms were flat together.
"I understand now that was its own kind of distance," I said. "That managing what you saw was not protecting you. It was keeping you outside."
Her eyes held mine. Steady. Patient. The same way she held everything — with the full weight of her attention.
"Are you done with that?" she asked.
My throat tightened. The honest answer was complicated. The honest answer was that decades of reflex don't dissolve in a single conversation.
"I'm trying to be," I said.
She didn't let go of my hand.