Chapter 2

My father hit me so hard my vision flickered.

I was still on the floor. My ear rang. There was blood in my mouth.

"Who did it?" He hauled me up by the front of my gown. "Who put a pup in you?"

I opened my mouth. Then I shut it.

The name was right there. I'd said it once already, in the square, and the whole pack had laughed.

Say Kade Voss out loud and my father wouldn't hear a father's name. He'd hear a wolfless girl reaching for one.

"Answer me."

He slapped the other side of my face. "You crawled into some boy's bed and now you stand there silent. Do you know what this does to your sister?"

One of my hands had come up somewhere in the middle of it. Not to my face. Lower. Flat across my stomach, over a thing too small to feel.

He backhanded me so my head cracked back. He was hitting the silence now.

"The kitchen maid went into town for her on Tuesday." Celeste, from the doorway, in the voice she saved for guests. "She came back up the lane with her apron folded over something."

I'd asked her to buy it. She'd put it into my hands in that apron and asked me nothing.

"Answer me, or that kitchen maid goes to the yard. Thirty lashes, counted out loud. It stops when you talk," my father said.

The hand on my stomach closed. "It's Kade Voss."

Then a laugh came out of him, almost gentle. "Kade Voss. The man your sister is marrying. You put on a show in that square, and now you lie. You're not naming a father. You're trying to take her place."

"Believe me or don't, Father. I haven't lied to you."

At the doorway, Celeste had both hands at her throat.

"Papa." She only went small like that when she wanted something. "May I speak to you alone?"

He let go of my gown and waved at the guard. "Put her back. Lock it this time."

I let the guards' footsteps die, then put my ear to the wall — the cracked plaster left of the wardrobe. I'd found it years ago.

"—can't let him find out." Celeste, silk against wood. "If Kade learns there's a pup, if she ever says it's his, he won't marry into this family. I won't be luna."

My father said something I couldn't hear.

"Then don't leave her where she can say it. If Kade finds out, I'm nothing. Papa, I want her dead."

"Get rid of the pup, then." My father, flat through the plaster. "There's a tea for it. She drinks it, she loses the child, and there's nothing left for Kade to find."

"And if he finds out anyway?" Celeste had not raised her voice through any of it. "She only has to say it once, to anyone. I'm not safe until she can't say it at all."

He took a while to answer. "She's mine. I've fed her eighteen years." A pause. "I'll do a great many things to that girl. I won't put her in the ground under my own roof."

Eighteen years, and it was the first time I'd heard him take my side of anything — and it took one breath to see he wasn't defending me. He was defending his house.

"Have you forgotten?" Celeste said it gently, which was worse. "She killed your fated mate."

Nobody said anything for three breaths.

"My mother let you keep that woman under this roof — a rogue with no name — and carried her meals down that hall herself. Your mate could have been here tonight. She isn't. That girl tore her open on the way out."

She let it sit. "A murderer who was never supposed to be born. And she's asleep upstairs, working out how to take your other daughter's life too."

He'd had a fated mate and a wife at the same time and given up neither. When my mother died the story simplified itself: a mistress, and a mistress's daughter.

My head went empty. I stepped back off the wall.

I didn't hear what he answered. Only the length of it, and then his boots crossing to the door.

"Before dawn," my father said. "Her and the pup both. Not in this house."

My father had just agreed to have me killed. His only objection was the address.

Eighteen years of scraps and locked doors, and some part of me had still been waiting for him to want me. It had been waiting for nothing.

It came up my throat all at once. I put both hands over my mouth and held it there.

Not here. Not where they could hear me.

It went out of my eyes instead, down over my knuckles, and I didn't make a sound.

Then I took my hands away.

Crying was for later. Nobody was coming. If I was still in this house at dawn, I would die in it.

Then I saw the window standing open.

I raised the sash. The night air came in cold and full of pine.

I swung my legs over the sill, dropped to the kitchen roof, went off it into the wet bushes, lost one slipper in the mud, and didn't stop.

A door slammed open behind me. A man shouted. Then a howl.

More of them. My father's trackers, and they had my scent.

My legs stopped taking instruction. This is where I die, I thought, in a gown with one slipper.

Then something tore open in my chest.

It dropped me mid-stride. Not a wound — a pulling apart, the way a seam goes when the thread is cut and the two halves are still moving away from each other. Something rooted in me was being taken out with the roots still attached.

Kade.

Then I started hearing him.

He was nowhere near me. He was somewhere past the howls and the dark, and his voice arrived in my ear as if his mouth were an inch from it, saying the formal words. I, Kade Voss, reject you as my mate—

He didn't know about the pup. He wasn't ending it because of the pup. He was ending it because he'd finished with me.

Then my knees folded, and I went down the slope with my gown catching on roots and dirt in my mouth and the sky turning over and over.

And I knew, the way you know a thing in your body before anyone teaches it to you, that if I didn't accept it I would die on this hillside.

I said yes.

I said it out loud so the thread would stop pulling. The same word I'd given him on the back porch, and this time it meant I agree to be thrown away.

The ground caught me at the bottom.

The pulling stopped. The thread didn't. It went slack and stayed, fixed under my ribs, going nowhere.

I lay there with my cheek in the leaf mold. I thought I wasn't crying, though my face was wet.

A voice came out of the dark.

"Found you."