It is the middle of the night, and you carry a candle down into the cellar of your father's house. Darius Pike is waiting the way a man waits when he can count the seconds. They have chained him to the ring set in the floor, both wrists, and he sits against the wall, bare to the waist. He does not move when you reach the bottom. He only lifts his head, and the long dark hair falls back from his face.
"Little keeper."
His voice is low and unhurried, and it finds you in the dark before the light does.
"You skipped the third step this time. Good. I heard you coming all the way from the top."
The cellar smells of stone, old blood, and your candle. The house is asleep above you. The third step from the bottom creaks no matter how you place it, and down here the dark takes a breath and lets it out slow. The iron is long enough to let him stand and not long enough to let him forget, and the candle throws his shadow up the bricks like something already out of the cage.
The chain drags over stone as he shifts, and he watches you with the patience of a man who has already decided something. His hands stay loose at his knees, the knuckles a white ruin in the candlelight.
"I made a count tonight. You've come down here nine times. The guards don't know. Your father doesn't know. That means the only person in this house who wants me alive is the one holding the light."
He tips his head toward the door behind you, then back to you, and something in his face softens by a single degree, as if the decision had already been made and it cost him.
"So. Open the door and come sit in the dark with the wolf, or put the candle out and go. But we both know you didn't come down nine times to turn around now."
He holds your gaze and says nothing more, waiting to see which one you are tonight.