Chapter 3 The Boy Who Asks Everything

Rowan's POV

I did not sleep.

Not even close.

I lay in that bed for six hours with the photograph on my chest and my phone in my hand, calling my mother's number every forty minutes. It rang. It rang. It rang. Voicemail every time. Her voice, bright and warm, asked me to leave a message.

I left four. The last one I kept short because my voice was starting to do something I did not want recorded.

By five-thirty, I gave up on sleep and stared at the ceiling instead. By six, I was in the kitchen because lying still had become physically impossible, and I needed to do something with my hands, or I was going to fall apart completely, and I was not going to fall apart in a house full of werewolves who were already looking for proof that I did not belong here.

I was hunting through the third cabinet for coffee when the voice hit me from the doorway.

"You smell like outside."

I spun around so fast I nearly knocked the cabinet door into my own face.

A small boy stood in the doorway in pajamas covered in rockets. Maybe ten years old. Messy dark hair, serious eyes, and the kind of expression that said he had walked in here completely on purpose and had things to say.

I stared at him.

He climbed onto a counter stool like he had done it a thousand times and looked at me with total calm. "I'm Stellan. I live in the west room. You're the human they brought for Caspian."

The way he said it. Not cruel. Just factual. Like he was reporting the weather.

"Rowan," I said. "And that is a deeply strange way to introduce yourself."

"Is it wrong?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. "No."

He nodded like I had confirmed something. "Do you know how to make pancakes?"

"What?"

"Pancakes. The cook doesn't come until eight, and I'm hungry now, and Caspian burns everything." He tilted his head. "Do you think black holes are lonely? I've been thinking about it, and I can't decide. They pull everything in, but nothing stays. That seems lonely to me."

I looked at this child for a long moment.

Something in my chest, the tight, knotted thing that had been sitting there since eleven forty-seven last night, loosened by exactly one degree.

"Yes," I said. "I think they probably are."

He smiled. It was enormous. "I knew you'd get it. Caspian says I think too much."

"Caspian sounds exhausting."

Stellan laughed out loud. Genuine, delighted, completely unguarded. The kind of laugh that belongs to someone who has not learned yet to make themselves smaller in rooms where they might not be welcome.

I found the coffee. I also found the pancake mix.

I was halfway through the batter when I felt it.

That specific pressure. The kind that means someone is standing behind you, and they are not small.

I turned around.

Caspian was in the doorway.

He was still in last night's clothes. Dark circles under his eyes, jaw tight, hair like he had been running his hands through it for hours. He looked, for exactly one second, like a person who had been awake all night, finding out something that broke something else inside him.

Then he saw me.

Then he saw Stellan on the stool.

He went completely still.

Stellan spun around. "She thinks black holes are lonely, too. And she makes pancakes." He said it like these were equal achievements.

Caspian's eyes moved from his brother to me. I looked back at him over Stellan's head and said nothing. He said nothing. The silence stretched long enough that it stopped being empty and started being something else entirely. Something I did not have a name for and was not going to look at directly.

"Are you having a staring contest?" Stellan asked.

Caspian turned and walked out.

Stellan watched the empty doorway. Then turned back to me. "He does that. Don't take it personally. He does it to everyone."

"I won't," I said.

I turned back to the stove and stood there for a moment with the spatula in my hand, waiting for the feeling in my ribcage to sort itself out.

It did not sort itself out.

We ate pancakes. Stellan talked for forty minutes without stopping. About space, about a science project his teacher said was too complicated, about how the estate was always too quiet, about how Caspian used to laugh more before.

"Before what?" I asked.

Stellan looked at his plate. "Before our dad started making him do everything alone."

I did not push. He was ten, and it was not my story to pull out of him.

But I thought about it all through class. Throughout lunch, I ate alone because every table I approached went quiet. All through the walk back to the estate, when Vesper Crane fell into step beside me without warning and said, very pleasantly, like she was discussing the weather, "You should know that whatever you think is starting between you and Caspian, it won't."

I kept walking. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do." She smiled. "And so does he. But there are things about why you're really here that neither of you knows yet. When you find out, whatever almost-feeling you two are building in that kitchen will be the first thing to go."

She turned off the path before I could respond.

I stood there and felt the cold move through me.

Because she said it like someone who already knew the ending.

That night, my phone rang.

Unknown number. I answered it before the first ring finished because I had been waiting for any call all day.

Silence. Then breathing. Then a voice I did not recognize. Female. Low. Urgent.

"Don't trust the contract," she said. "Don't trust what they told your father. And whatever you do, do not let them find out you have that photograph."

My blood turned to ice. "Who is this?"

"Someone who has been watching this family for a long time." A pause. "Your mother did not disappear by accident, Rowan. She was taken. And the people who took her are the same people who put your name on that contract."

The line went dead.

I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in both hands, and the photograph face-up on the pillow beside me, and the full, terrible weight of it hit me all at once.

I was not brought here to break a curse.

I was brought here as something else entirely.

And my mother was the price someone already paid to make sure I showed up.