Irina’s POV

Run.

That was the only word in my head.

*Run.*

My bag hit my hip with every step. Canvas. Old. The same one I’d dragged from Iron Thorn—it didn’t hold much. A change of clothes. The small amount of cash I’d managed to find in the back of a drawer. Nothing else worth taking.

I hadn’t let myself think too hard about what I was leaving behind.

Thinking was dangerous right now. Thinking meant stopping.

The east corridor was empty. I cut left. Past the laundry room, past the small sitting area where the staff took their breaks, past the door I’d gone through this morning when I found the garden.

Not the garden. Not that direction.

The servants’ exit. That was what I needed. Every big house had one—a door somewhere near the kitchens that the staff used for deliveries, for taking out trash, for the hundred small errands that happened without the main household noticing. I’d seen it once, three weeks ago, when I was still memorizing the layout. Trying to learn the shape of the place I was trapped in.

I hadn’t known I was memorizing escape routes.

Maybe I had.

My shoes were too loud on the tile. I slowed my steps. Forced them quieter. Heel-toe, heel-toe, the way you learned to walk when silence was survival.

The vial was in my pocket.

I could feel it. That small, cold weight. I’d almost left it—almost pushed it under the mattress or thrown it in the garden or—

I hadn’t.

I didn’t know why.

Sofia’s voice kept playing in the back of my skull. *You can go anywhere. Without him, without a mark, without being anyone’s claimed mate—you could disappear.*

I was disappearing.

I was doing the thing she’d said. Just—not the way she’d meant it.

*I couldn’t do it.* That was the thing. The real thing underneath everything else. I’d held that vial for two days. I’d lain in his bed with it three inches from my face and I’d looked at his eyes in the dark—that green, that impossible green—and I’d known. I’d known before he promised me no more wars. Before he said it like it was nothing, like I was someone whose words were worth promising things to.

I couldn’t hurt him.

The realization sat in my chest, heavy and complicated and not entirely welcome.

I couldn’t hurt him. And I couldn’t go back to Maxim. And I couldn’t stay here and let Nicolas hand me over tomorrow like I was a problem he’d solved by passing it along to someone else.

So I was running.

It was the stupidest option. I knew that. I was an omega with no wolf, no pack, no money, in a palace full of alpha king’s guards, in a city I’d never been in before, on a continent where every person who mattered knew his name.

Still running.

The corridor bent. I followed it. Another door, another hallway—narrower, service access, the smell of cleaning products and something that might have been coffee from far away.

I stopped.

Listened.

Silence.

No footsteps behind me. No alarm. No voices raised.

*He hasn’t found out yet.*

The thought landed somewhere between relief and something else. Something I didn’t want to look at directly.

He was still in his meeting. Or his office. Or wherever Nicolas spent his evenings when he wasn’t—

I pushed that thought down.

Kept moving.

I thought about what I’d told myself in the garden. After Katerina walked away. After I’d sat on that bench with my hand pressed over the vial and made myself think it through clearly, without the mate bond clouding everything, without the warmth of him at my back making things feel safe that weren’t.

*He approved the visit.*

That was the fact. That was the thing I kept coming back to. He could have said no. He was the alpha king. He didn’t say no to things. He was the thing that things said no to.

He’d said yes.

He’d approved it without telling me. Without—

I pressed my mouth flat.

*He’s not going to fight for you.*

Katerina’s voice. Quiet. Certain.

My legs moved faster.

I wasn’t angry. That was the strange thing. I should have been. I’d been angry for so long—at Maxim, at my father, at everything that had been done and not done and looked away from—that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to not be angry.

Right now I was just tired.

Tired and moving and very, very focused on the door at the end of this hallway.

It had to be the servants’ exit. It had to be.

Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.

I reached it.

Pushed.

Locked.

I stood there for one second. Two. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

*Okay.*

I turned around. Started back. There was another door—I’d seen it—around the first corner on the left, before the laundry room. Service exit to the side grounds. It might not be monitored. It was too minor. Too unimportant. No one was going to post a guard on the door the gardeners used to take out the rose clippings.

I moved faster now. Not running. Not quite. The sound of my footsteps felt like a countdown.

My heart was slamming.

Not from the pace. I’d walked this kind of distance a hundred times without my heart doing this. It was the other thing—the thing underneath the running, the specific terror of a person who has run before and knows what happens when you get caught.

*You’re okay.*

I thought it at myself, deliberately. Like I was talking to someone else. Someone who needed the words more than I did.

*You’re okay. Just keep moving. You’ve done harder things than this.*

I had. I’d done so much harder than this.

The door on the left appeared. I grabbed the handle.

It opened.

Cold air hit my face.

Not outside. A passage. Narrow, unlit, smelling of old stone and something damp. But there was light at the far end—pale, gray, evening light—and that meant a way out.

I went.

The passage was maybe thirty feet long. My hand trailed the wall. The ceiling was low—I felt the weight of it without touching it, that particular pressure of too much stone in too small a space. My breathing was starting to go wrong. Small, careful sounds in my throat that I pressed down before they could become anything louder.

*Not here. You can fall apart later. Not here.*

The light got closer.

Another door. Heavy. A bar across it on the inside.

I lifted the bar. Set it aside, careful, quiet. No sound.

Pushed the door.

Evening air. Real, cold, outdoor air. The smell of grass and something floral—roses, probably, from the garden on the east side. The sky had gone that particular blue-gray color that meant it was done being a day but not quite ready to be night.

I stepped out.

Gravel under my feet. I winced at the sound. Moved off it fast. Onto the grass. Silent.

The perimeter wall was ahead of me. Maybe a hundred yards.

This was the part I hadn’t fully planned.

I’d get to the wall. I’d figure it out then.

I started moving. Steady. Deliberate. Not running—running attracted attention, even from guards who weren’t looking specifically for you. Just a person moving across the grounds. Just that.

Thirty yards.

Fifty.

The wall was getting closer. Stone. Tall. Not impossible. I’d climbed worse than this—there were the years before everything fell apart, when I was young and hadn’t learned yet to be small, when I could have scaled that wall with a running start and not thought twice about it.

I wasn’t that person anymore.

But I was still here. Still moving. Still, somehow, a person who could put one foot in front of the other even when every part of her was telling her to stop.

That counted for something.

Seventy yards. Eighty.

I could see the top of the wall clearly now. There was something—a maintenance ledge, maybe, a structural piece that jutted out a foot below the top. If I could get to that—

A sound.

I stopped.

Froze.

Voices. Somewhere to my right. Two guards, from the sound of it—low, casual, the voices of men who weren’t expecting anything to be wrong. Their patrol pattern. I’d clocked them yesterday without meaning to. Another thing I’d memorized without deciding to.

I pressed against the wall of a maintenance shed.

Waited.

Their voices moved. Faded. Moved further right, following the line of the outer garden path.

I exhaled.

Pushed off the shed wall. Kept going.

Ninety yards. A hundred.

The wall.

I pressed my palm against the stone. Cold. Rough. Real.

*Okay.*

I looked up. Found the ledge. Measured the distance with my eyes.

My arms were shaking.

From the cold or from the running or from something else entirely—I couldn’t tell anymore where one thing ended and another began. I was just—all of it. A person made entirely of shaking and cold air and the specific desperate hope of someone who has stopped believing hope is reasonable but keeps going anyway.

I found a handhold. Started to climb.

The stone bit into my fingers. My bag shifted and I pressed my elbow into it, stabilizing it. One foot. Another. My palms were going to be wrecked by the time I reached the top.

It didn’t matter.

I reached the ledge.

Pulled myself up. Got one knee on it. Then the other.

The city opened up in front of me.

Just—*there.* Real. Lit up in the early evening, windows glowing yellow and orange, cars moving on distant streets, the particular noise of a place that didn’t know or care that a girl was sitting on a wall trying to remember how to breathe.

My throat worked.

*Somewhere quiet,* Katerina had said. *Somewhere yours.*

A different city. A different name. A small apartment with no one’s arm around my waist.

Maybe.

Maybe that was a thing that could happen.

I swung my leg over.

Felt the drop on the other side. Concrete pavement, maybe twelve feet down. I’d hit hard. My knees would take it. I’d walked on worse than bruised knees.

I was about to push off when I heard it.

Footsteps.

Not the guards. Wrong direction. Coming from the side passage I’d just come through.

Fast.

I pulled back. Miscalculated. My weight shifted wrong.

I half-fell, half-jumped back down to the palace side, hit the grass harder than I meant to, bit back the sound that tried to come out of my mouth.

*Get up. Get up right now.*

I got up.

Bag still on my shoulder. Hands scraped. Both knees singing. I turned—

Ran.

Back the way I’d come, cutting sideways, toward the east wing, toward—I didn’t know. Somewhere. Away from the footsteps. Away from whatever was—

The corner came up fast.

I didn’t slow down.

I went around it at a dead run and slammed into something solid.

The impact knocked the air clean out of me.

My hands went up automatically, grabbing whatever was there, and the world lurched sideways and for a second everything was just impact and breath and the hard reality of having hit something that didn’t move.

Something that caught me.

Hands. Someone’s hands on my arms. Steadying.

I looked up.