Chapter 2. The King Smells Blood

Josie's POV

"How do you know my name?"

He didn't answer. He came up the stairs and turned sideways to get past me on that narrow step, so careful not to touch me that it was almost insulting. Then the alley door opened and shut, and the cold came down the stairs after him.

I stood in my own cellar with a rolling pin like an idiot.

That was when I remembered.

It came the way a smell brings back a room you haven't stood in for years. Lowmoor Lodge, six years ago, the Summit. I'd been twenty-three. Bea had arranged it; the lodge cook owed her a favor, and Bea said I needed to see a kitchen bigger than ours before I got set in my ways.

On the ninth night I was alone in the bake kitchen at four in the morning, scaling butter, when a man came in from the service hall and sat down on my flour sacks without asking. Gray sweatshirt, hood up, a beard back then. He looked like he hadn't slept since spring.

I should have thrown him out. Instead I cut him a slice of plum cake because he was staring at it, and then another, and by five he'd eaten the whole thing and was apologizing with his mouth full.

I complained to him, too, because he was nobody and it was four in the morning. I told him the royal table had sent my soup back twice for salt, and if the Crown Prince had a problem with my seasoning, he could come down and say it to my face.

The stranger on my flour sacks had laughed so hard he had to put the cake down.

"I'm sure he'd love to," he'd said. "I hear he's a coward."

Before he left, he asked my name. I told him. He said it back slowly, like a word he was planning to learn.

In the morning he was gone, and so was the whole royal party, a day early. I'd thought about him on bad nights for years, if I'm honest. The one good stranger.

I put the rolling pin down on a barrel.

He'd known my name in the cellar because I'd given it to him myself. He'd known what I was to him at Lowmoor, with plum cake on his fingers. And he'd gone home the next morning and stayed there for six years.

At seven in the morning, the Crown Prince took my kitchen back from Gil Pruitt with an index card.

I'd been demoted to potatoes by then. Rourke's people had come in at five with their own knives and a Bluetooth speaker, and Rourke had called me "sweetheart" twice and put the fish on the warm shelf. So at six, out of spite, I'd baked a plum cake in the corner oven.

Then the royal steward walked in, the narrow man with the notebook, and read the card out loud in front of everybody.

"His Royal Highness requests that every meal served to the royal party be prepared by Miss Josie Morrow. And by no one else."

Rourke laughed. "With respect, I've got a team of nine—"

"His Highness was quite specific," the steward said, and turned the card around. "He wrote it twice."

He had. The same line again, in heavier ink, underlined.

Pruitt had to take my keys out of his own pocket and walk them across the kitchen and put them in my hand, with the whole line watching. I said, "Thank you, Gil," and held his eye a little too long.

"His Highness takes breakfast in the east guesthouse at eight," the steward said. "He mentioned that he isn't particular."

I made eggs with chives, biscuits, country ham, black coffee. Then I stood over the tray for a full minute, and put a slice of the plum cake on it too.

He opened the door himself. Shirtsleeves, unshaven. He looked at me, then at the tray, and when he saw the cake his face came open like a hand.

"You remembered," he said.

"Last night. In the cellar." I put the tray down on the table by the window before I could throw it. "When were you planning to tell me?"

"I wasn't."

At least he didn't lie.

"You knew at Lowmoor," I said.

"When you came out of the walk-in with flour on your neck."

"And you left. You took your whole family home a day early, and then you stayed gone for six years." I heard my voice go up and didn't care. "I'd like to know why."

He was quiet long enough that I heard the coffee ticking as it cooled.

"Because I was told what would happen to you if I didn't."

That wasn't what I'd expected. I'd expected wolfless. I'd expected you're a cook and I'm a prince. I'd had a whole speech ready for those.

"Told by who?"

He shook his head.

"Fine," I said. "Keep it."

I went to the door. He stepped back to let me through, careful again, not one inch of him touching me.

"Josie." It came out rough. "Stay out of my father's way while we're here. Please."

"It's my house," I said. "Your father's the one in my way."

By midnight the ceremony was done, Danny was Alpha, and I was alone in my kitchen, which is the whole point of midnight. Brioche proofing for the royal breakfast. Apples for a tart. The mandoline on the board.

Calvin, Bea's son, had dropped the last cream order at the guesthouse at ten, told me the footmen were betting on whether I'd poisoned the prince or proposed to him, and asked if I needed anything before he went home. I said no. I always say no after midnight. Everybody in this house knows that.

The swinging door opened.

"I'm sorry," said the king. "I saw the light."

He was in a gray cardigan buttoned wrong, and house slippers. He looked like any big tired grandfather who couldn't sleep in a strange bed. I almost laughed. I almost said, sir, the kitchen's closed.

"Is there such a thing as chamomile in this house?"

I put the kettle on. He lowered himself onto Bea's stool as if it had been put there for him and watched me work, closely, for too long.

"Walt Morrow found you," he said. "In the woods."

"Yes, sir."

"Where, exactly?"

"A hollow oak at the west line. Near the Unclaimed border." I set the mug in front of him. "I was five or six, they think. I don't remember anything from before."

"Nothing at all?"

"Not a thing."

"And your wolf never came." He wrapped both hands around the mug and didn't drink. "Not once. Not even a stirring."

I went back to my apples, because the way he said it had made the hair on my arms stand up. Not cruel. Curious. Like a man turning over a stone to see what lives under it.

I didn't hear him get up. A big man in slippers, and then he was at my elbow, close, looking at my face as if he were reading small print on it.

I flinched. The apple skidded on the mandoline, and the blade opened the heel of my hand like a letter.

It didn't hurt at first. They never do. I watched the blood come, very red on the white board, and thought, well, that's the tart ruined.

Then I looked up, and the king had gone completely still.

His nostrils flared. All the color left his face, the way it leaves a man's face when a truck goes by an inch from his nose. He looked at my blood on the board, then at me, and took one slow step back.

"Corran," he said, not loudly.

The door opened. A royal guard came in, then another. I hadn't known they were out there.

"Miss Morrow will come to the royal wing tonight," the king said. "There's a matter of the crown to discuss with her."

"Sir, it's a cut." I had the dish towel off my shoulder and wrapped round my hand, and my voice came out higher than I wanted. "I'll bandage it. I'm fine."

The king didn't even look at the towel.

"Now, Miss Morrow."