The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride

I made a decision before dawn. Stupid. Probably. Almost certainly.

But I had spent nineteen years making the safe choice, the small choice, the choice that kept me alive but not living and look where that had deposited me.

On my knees in a stranger's great hall.

In a dead woman's wedding dress.

In a house that was quietly, methodically trying to unmake me.

So I was done with safe choices. I dressed in the dark and walked to the north wing.

The corridor was different up here. The same stone, the same torches but the torches burned lower, as though the air itself was heavier and the flames were working harder. The temperature dropped three degrees past the stairwell. I walked slowly, one hand trailing the wall, counting doors. All closed. All silent.

Until the last one.

Not silent. Through the heavy wood I could hear breathing - labored, deliberate, the breathing of a man forcing his own body through something it was resisting.

And underneath it, so low I almost missed it, a sound like cracking ice. Spreading. Relentless.

The curse markings.

Spreading in the dark while the rest of the house slept. I raised my hand to knock.

"Don't."I spun around out of freight.

Kael was behind me. He had appeared from nowhere with the absolute silence of a man

who had spent years moving through spaces without being detected.

His arms were crossed. His face was doing its usual thing; revealing nothing, withholding everything.

"How long have you been there?" I said.

"Long enough," he said. He looked at the door, then at me. "Go back to your room."

"He's in pain," I said.

Kael's facial expression changed. Not surprise. Like he had been expecting this.

I realized. He had been expecting me to end up in this corridor. Maybe not tonight, maybe

not this soon, but eventually.

"He is always in pain," Kael whispered. "That is not new. What is new is that you are standing outside his door at three in the morning, which is new, and which will get you killed if you open it."

"It won't," I replied lightly.

"You don't know that."

"Neither do you," I said. "But you're not sure I'm wrong. That's why you followed me

instead of dragging me back."

A long silence.The breathing behind the door changed - slower now, the labored quality easing by degrees.

As though proximity alone was doing something.

As though the space between me and whatever was behind that door was already too small to be neutral.

Kael heard it too. I watched it register in his face - a fractional adjustment, a man revising

a conclusion he had held for a long time.

"You are not what I expected," he said quietly.

"Nobody expects me," I said. "That's always been my best quality."

He looked at me for a moment that stretched slightly too long. Then he stepped aside -

not inviting me forward, not approving, just removing himself from the path.

I knocked.

Silence inside. Completely and suddenly, - the breathing stopped, the cracking sound

stopped, everything stopped.

Then his voice, rough with pain and something darker underneath it:

"Get away from the door!"

"I'm not leaving," I replied. Through the wood. Steady. "I'm not here to fix anything. I'm just here. That's all."

I then sat down on the floor with my back against the wall beside his door.

Kael stared at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. Maybe that was what Ironveil did; strip away the careful sane choices until what was left was something rawer and more honest.

I sat there for an hour.

By the time I walked back to my room the burning on my neck had been relieved to a low warmth, like embers instead of open flame.

And from behind his door - silence.

The real kind.

The kind of silence that meant sleep.

I didn't know if it mattered.

I told myself it didn't.

I was already lying...