Chapter Four — What Was in the Coffee Jar

Damien's POV

"She walked to Hollis's alone at dusk again," Cole said. "That's three times since the Circle, Alpha. Ames has it logged."

I had my hand flat on the desk over a drawer I have not opened in nine days, and I left it there.

"Anything else in the log?"

"Bellamy's mouth. He's been saying unclean in the common hall where the Elders can hear him, which means he wants them to."

"And?"

"And there's a Silver Ridge wolf at the crossroads." Cole put the page down where I could reach it. "Three sightings in six days. He isn't hiding, he doesn't come near her cabin, and Ames says he sits on Hollis's porch rail and doesn't look at anything at all."

There is red wax under my thumbnail that I have not been able to get out.

It has been there since the eleventh. I stood on the center stone for eleven minutes with my fists closed and a broken seal in one of them, and the edge of it went through the skin at the base of my thumb, and I ended a woman's life in front of three hundred wolves while bleeding quietly into my own palm.

Not one of them asked what I was holding. That is the part I keep. Three hundred wolves watched me do the worst thing I have ever done and every single one of them was watching her.

Open the drawer, my wolf said.

I opened the drawer.

Sixteen hours before I stood on that stone, Theo's Gammas took a Silver Ridge wolf off the ridge road at three in the morning, four hundred yards from Aria Vance's cabin.

He was not armed. He was not stealing. He had a satchel with a jar of ground coffee in it, and inside the coffee, wrapped in oilcloth, a glass vial with a red wax seal.

I remember the weight of it in my palm. It was nothing. It was the weight of a pen.

"Wolfsbane," Cole said, in the back room with the door shut. "Mara's had a look at it. It isn't a rumor and it isn't a threat, Alpha. It's a working dose."

"For me."

"That's what I thought too." He put both hands on the table. "It isn't."

"Explain."

"There's a quarter of a man's dose in there at most. And it's cut for a smaller body."

I have never in my life wanted so badly to be told I was wrong.

"Ask him again."

"I've asked him four times."

"Ask him a fifth."

Cole went out and came back after a while with his knuckles split, and I will carry that too.

"He says he was told to leave it in her water butt. He says he was not told why, and I believe him, because he's twenty-two and he's been sick twice."

"A name."

"He won't say a name. I don't think he has one to say." Cole's jaw worked. "Whoever sent him didn't wear a crest and didn't give him one."

So there it is. Nine days later and I still do not know who wants Aria Vance dead. I know only what it costs to want her: one vial, one boy, one jar of coffee.

And Wolfsbane is an hour.

One hour, and it does not care how fast anybody runs, and Wren Halloway is four miles from that cabin on a good night and a Silver lancet is the whole of her arsenal.

So I did arithmetic.

Here is what a Mate is, in the accounting of an Alpha's enemies. Not a woman. A door.

Every wolf on this coast who wants the Blood Moon Pack has spent a year looking for the way in, and in August I put my teeth in that woman's throat in front of the whole Pack and showed them exactly where the door was.

If she is my Luna, she is the way to kill me, and they will not stop at one vial.

If she is nothing to me — publicly, formally, in the correct words, in front of three hundred witnesses and an Elder and the Moon Goddess herself — then she is a woman of no strategic value whatsoever. They let her alone. In six months, when it has gone quiet, I move her to the house I have made ready four miles from here, and I fix it.

That was the plan. That is the whole of it. It is not complicated and it is not clever, and I was so certain of it that I did not consult one living soul.

The night before, she came up to the Pack House because she had a splinter in her hand from the fence rail and no reason at all to come and see me about it, and we both knew that.

"You've been strange for a week," she said.

"Have I."

"You look at the door when you talk to me."

"I'm tired."

She was sitting on the edge of this desk. She had her hand out flat and I was taking the splinter out with the point of a knife, and I could smell her all through the room, and her Mark was six weeks old at her neck and still pink along the edge.

"Damien."

"Mm."

"Look at me a second."

"I'm working."

"You're not. That splinter's been out for a minute and a half."

She did not take her hand back. "If something's coming, I'd rather you told me."

I had the whole of it in my mouth. Somebody tried to put Wolfsbane in your water and I am going to have to do something ugly to keep you breathing.

"Nothing's coming," I said.

"Say that again with your eyes up."

"Nothing's coming, Aria."

She looked at me a moment too long and then let it go, because she has always let me have my silences, and I have never once deserved that.

Sixteen hours later I told three hundred wolves that the Moon Goddess had made a mistake.

Cole was still standing in front of the desk.

"Say the rest of it," I said. "You've been holding something since you came in."

"The Silver Ridge man on Hollis's porch."

"What about him?"

"He isn't watching her, Alpha." Cole did not sit down. "Ames timed him. Forty minutes on that rail, and the only time his head moved was at six, and again at half past."

"Say what that is."

"That's my changeover," Cole said.

The room got very cold, and it had nothing to do with the window.

"He was counting my rotation."

"That's Ames's word for it too."

I got up and went to the glass because I could not sit still with that in the room.

Three wolves. That is what I put on that road. One at the culvert, one in the trees, one on the tailgate at the crossroads where she could not miss him, and I told myself it was protection, and it is protection, and it is also the single stupidest thing I have done since I was nineteen years old.

I stood on a stone and swore to three hundred witnesses that Aria Vance was nothing to me.

And then I posted a guard on her like she was the Pack House vault.

You told them, my wolf said. He has not said much to me since the eleventh. You said it with your mouth and then you unsaid it with your men, and Ashford has been reading your men for five days.

"I know."

Then say it in the first person or don't say it at all.

"I made her worthless in public," I said, to the window, "and then I proved in private that she is the most valuable thing I own."

Whoever sent that vial had a reason to want her dead when she was my Luna. They have not stopped. Nothing I did on that stone took a single thing off the board — it only told every enemy I have that the Rejection was a lie, and that a lie has a shape, and the shape of mine is a woman walking to a store alone at dusk.

Cole cleared his throat behind me.

"There's one more page."

"Then put it down."

He put it down. It was a leaf out of Hollis's ledger, torn along the fold, in the old man's careful hand.

Rice. Eggs. Two loaves. Peanut butter. Four cans of the cheap stew, crackers, a bag of apples. Twice a week for three weeks, always cash, always the same list.

"Three times since the Circle," Cole said. "Same list every time. That's a house of four, Alpha, and she lives alone."

I stood with my hand on that page for a long time.

"Somebody's in that cabin with her," I said.

Or, my wolf said, she's feeding something.