Chapter 2: Glass and Thorn
The palace loomed, a beast of dark stone and sharper angles. Barnaby’s new shoes, stiff and polished, pinched his swollen feet. He adjusted the loose fabric of his best tunic—it didn’t drape right anymore, not over the subtle but undeniable curve of his belly. The life inside him stirred, a quiet, fluttering riot. Three kicks from the left, two from the right, and a slow roll right under his ribs. His secret. His catastrophe.
“Stand up straight, Barnaby,” his mother, Agnes, whispered, her own smile fixed and bright as a blade. “Think of the opportunity.”
“Think of the security,” his father, Bartholomew, added, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder. “A union with the Rex line. Our family will be set for generations.”
They’d been ecstatic when the royal summons arrived. A proposed alliance. Marriage. Their little Bunby, catching the eye of the king himself. They saw only prestige. Barnaby felt only the ground crumbling beneath him.
The throne room had been a blur of intimidating splendor. Now, a stern-faced badger shifter in livery led them through a side arch into a different world entirely: the conservatory.
It was a graveyard of beauty. Vines, thick as wrists, shoved through fractured glass panes, strangling the gilded iron frames. Shattered terra cotta pots littered the floor, their exotic contents long since surrendered to a carpet of moss and creeping ivy. The air was heavy with the scent of damp soil, rotting petals, and something else—a clean, wild, musky aroma that made the hair on Barnaby’s arms stand up. It tugged at a memory locked in a moonlit ruin, a memory he’d sworn to forget.
“His Majesty prefers to receive… personal guests here,” the badger intoned, before melting back into the shadows.
And there he was.
Leander Rex stood with his back to them, a silhouette of immense power against the grimy glass. He was taller, broader than Barnaby’s haunted recollections, which had been all fever-heat and frantic touch. Clad in simple black, his tawny hair brushed his collar, and the sheer contained force of him made the sprawling decay around him seem deliberate, a kingdom he allowed to rot.
Agnes cleared her throat. “Your Majesty? May I present my son, Barnaby Bunson.”
Leo turned.
Time didn’t stop. It bent. The face that had been contorted in agony was now a mask of cool, detached authority. The same brutal beauty, but hardened, the gold-flecked eyes assessing, not wild. They swept over Barnaby’s parents with a disinterest that bordered on contempt, then landed on him.
Barnaby’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drum. He doesn’t know you. He was poisoned. Out of his mind. He doesn’t know.
Leo began to circle. His steps were silent on the mossy marble. Barnaby felt like prey, his every instinct screaming to freeze. The king’s nostrils flared slightly, taking in his scent. Barnaby knew what he smelled like now: himself, yes, but overlaid with the unique, subtle signature of the litter—a confusing mélange of rabbit and lion, of alpha and omega scents, all blurred further by the hormonal fog of pregnancy. It wasn’t the clean, fearful rabbit scent Leo would have encountered in the ruins. It was complicated. Wrong.
“Bunson,” Leo said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in the hollow space. “You’re smaller than your portrait suggested.”
“The artist was… optimistic,” Barnaby managed, his voice barely a squeak. He cursed internally.
A faint, humorless twitch at the corner of Leo’s mouth. The circling continued. “My advisors tell me this alliance is… strategically sound. Your family has influence in the Warren Districts.”
“We do, Your Majesty,” Bartholomew jumped in, eager. “We can facilitate smoother trade, assure the smaller clans of your… benevolent interest.”
Leo ignored him, his gaze pinned on Barnaby. “And you, Barnaby Bunson. Do you have an opinion on strategic alliances?”
The question was a trap. Agree, and seem like a political pawn with no mind of his own. Disagree, and insult the king’s premise. The weight of his parents’ expectant stares pressed on one side; the king’s chilling focus pressed on the other.
“I think,” Barnaby said slowly, forcing air into his lungs, “that an alliance only works if both parties know what they’re getting. Honestly.”
Leo stopped his circling, now directly in front of him. “An honest rabbit. Novel.”
The condescension stung, cutting through Barnaby’s fear. He lifted his chin a fraction. “Not novel. Just rare around here, maybe.”
For a second, something flickered in Leo’s eyes. Not recognition. Interest. Sharp and probing. Then it was gone. “You trip over your own feet often, rabbit?”
“I—what?”
“You’re favoring your left. Standing unevenly.”
Panic, cold and sharp. He was compensating for the shift in his center of gravity. “New shoes,” he blurted out, the lie pathetic.
“Hmm.” Leo took a step closer. The wild, clean scent of him intensified, wrapping around Barnaby, stirring a deep, visceral reaction that was equal parts terror and a shocking, unwelcome pull. His body remembered what his mind was screaming to forget.
A root from a particularly aggressive vine snaked across the floor. Leo saw it. Barnaby, distracted by the intensity of his gaze, did not.
His pinched foot caught. He stumbled forward with a gasp, hands flying out.
Leo moved faster than anything that large should. A hand shot out, catching Barnaby’s upper arm in a grip that was iron-steady, burning through the fabric of his tunic. He hauled him upright, stopping Barnaby’s fall until they were chest to chest, faces inches apart.
The world vanished.
There was only the heat of the hand on his arm, the gold of the eyes staring into his, wide with a sudden, seismic shock. Leo’s breath hitched. His pupils dilated. His head dipped, just slightly, an unconscious movement towards Barnaby’s throat, towards the scent gland just below his ear.
Barnaby stopped breathing. He knows. He remembers.
The king’s gaze dropped to Barnaby’s mouth, then back to his eyes. A storm of confusion raged in that gold-flecked gaze—a primal alarm, a dizzying attraction, a violent sense of wrongness. The scent was off. It was clouded, strange, but underneath… underneath it called to something in his blood.
His grip tightened, almost painful. Barnaby could feel the tremor in the king’s hand.
“You…” Leo breathed, the word a low rasp.
Then his eyes shifted over Barnaby’s shoulder, to Agnes and Bartholomew, who were watching in terrified, hopeful silence. The mask slammed back down. The storm was caged. He released Barnaby’s arm as if scorched, taking a deliberate step back. The place where his hand had been felt branded.
“Clumsy,” Leo stated, his voice once more a flat, imperial instrument. He straightened his cuff. “You’ll need to learn to navigate more than roots in this court.”
The moment was broken, but the air was charged with its wreckage. Leo turned to Bartholomew, all business. “The arrangements stand. The ceremony will be in three days. My stewards will liaise with you.”
He didn’t look at Barnaby again. He simply turned and walked away, disappearing into the deeper shadows of the rotting conservatory, leaving Barnaby standing there, his arm throbbing, the phantom heat of the king’s touch seared into his skin, and the secret life inside him kicking frantically, as if in protest or recognition.
Agnes rushed forward, fawning. “Oh, he’s formidable, isn’t he? Did you see how he caught you? So commanding!”
Barnaby looked at the empty space where the king had vanished. His heart was a frantic prisoner in his chest. Leo hadn’t recognized him. Not fully.
But something in the lion had known. Something had stirred. And now they were bound, not by a bite on a scent gland, not by fate’s clear design, but by a political contract and a secret growing larger every day in a too-loos tunic. The gulf between them was now a chasm he was legally obliged to cross, while hiding a litter of kittens—and kits—that would bridge it in the most explosive way possible.