LOGIN(Angelique)Zack wakes us at six by starfishing into the middle of the bed and announcing, "It's THE DAY."He's five.He's ours.And in about four hours he's going to eat his body weight in diner pancakes, because today we're driving down to the old town, and I'm not scared of a single mile of it.No herbs in his juice.He’s discovered he loves apple juice when it doesn’t taste like dirt and feet.My son smells like Beck and dirt and grass and boy, all the way down the highway, with the windows open, because he can.Mrs. Acheson's trailer looks exactly the same and so does she.She takes one look at the enormous black SUV, then at Rene unfolding out of it, then at me, and lights a menthol with the unhurried air of a woman confirming a theory."So that's the fella," she says."Knew you weren't hiding from nothing worth less than that."Her letter found us in the spring.Three lines, no return address needed apparently, ending with ‘whatever you ran from, I hope it either died or smarte
(Parker)I stuffed Donovan's letter in my jacket pocket before coming out for the last night of the crowning feast and Tova finds it in two minutes."Hold still."She's supposedly fixing my collar.Her hand dips, comes out with the envelope, and she steps back out of arm's reach to read it, because she is a thief with excellent instincts."That's private.""Nothing's private, I occasionally help with the laundry."Her eyes move down the page."Karth wants you back. Alpha seat. Donovan says," she squints,"Eleven years is a long time to keep a man's chair from wobbling, come home before I start liking it.'"She lowers the letter."He's funny. Why do you have funny friends and no personality?""I have a personality.""You have a gruff tone and a hard stare."She hands the letter back."So. When do you leave?"And there it is.The question I've been carrying around like a stone since getting that letter.Eleven years I knew what every morning was for.Follow up on all leads and wait for
(Rene)The hall's held a near crowning and a trial and a killing, and today it holds three hundred wolves who came back to watch me get it right.Same altar.Same cloth.Same crown, which is lighter than it looks.I learned that the last time, holding it over the wrong head.Alpha Doyle's in the third row again.Arms uncrossed, this time.He caught me in the corridor an hour ago, gripped my hand hard enough to grind bone, and said, "Took you long enough to believe what the whole east wing could smell."One line, and he'd clearly been polishing it for weeks.I let him have the last word without argument.The front row is filled to capacity.Cole, looking far happier than he did the last time.Tova, arm out of the bandage, in an actual dress, under protest.Brynn, who tried to argue against it, but Angelique insisted she was family and belong there.It cost her something to do and cost the room something to see, but I believe in the end it will make things better for everyone.Parker is
(Angelique)"Stop stalling," Rene says."I'm stretching.""You've stretched for ten minutes. You're stalling."We're at the tree line in the dark, and I'm in his shirt and nothing else, and my heart is thundering like I'm eighteen and about to jump off the quarry rock.Five years of herbs and then weeks of being afraid to try, telling myself there was no safe place for it, no time, telling myself anything except the truth, which is that she hates me and I know it and I've been putting off the conversation.My wolf has rarely spoken to me in the last five years. Most of the sentences when she did contained the word traitor."What if she won't come?" I ask. "What if it’s been so long, I can’t change anymore.""Then we walk back and try tomorrow, and the day after, for as long as it takes."He pulls the shirt over my head, folds it over a branch, matter-of-fact, like he's not stripping me in the woods."But she'll come. She's been pacing since we walked out here. I can feel her through y
(Brynn)Nobody sends for me anymore.That's the first thing about being free.Twenty-one years of sent for, countless hours spent in her sitting room, running her errands, learning her scripts, and now whole mornings go by where no one requires me at all.I sit in my room like a phone with no signal, and apparently this is what I fought for.My mother's buried.My father's been buried ten years, and I spent every one of them believing a rogue did it.His love for me was the purest thing I’d known in my life and he was taken when I was so young.Last week I sat in a hall and learned she held the knife herself.She murdered my father.Then she raised me to poison his other daughter.That's my inheritance.I renounced the rest on paper.By noon I can't stand my own company anymore, so I walk aimlessly.Nobody stops me.Nobody follows me anymore either.Freedom's mostly a list of things that stopped it seems.Out the side window, on the drive, I see Tova, one-armed, trying to wrestle a fe
(Rene)Knox reads the ruling at nine and it takes him under a minute."For colluding with Maliyah Pruitt. For the murder of Beta Theodore Pruitt. For ten years of concealment. For a killing done in Warden's custody, before this council's eyes."He doesn't raise his voice."Death. And by the law of this pack, the sentence belongs to the Alpha's hand. Dusk today."The hall empties quietly.Nobody looks at me on the way out.Cole stays."I can find precedent for a proxy," he says. "Old cases. Nobody would blame you-""No.""Rene-""He’s my father. He doesn't get a stranger."Cole nods once and goes to build a dusk I don't want to arrive.The cell is clean and my father is sitting on the cot like a man waiting for a train.He looks old.He's looked old for years and I called it grief and age, and now I know it was neither, it was a woman avenging his refusal to crown her.And he brought it on himself. I don't know where to put that so I push it aside."You came," he says. "Good. Sit down,
(Angelique)Twenty minutes to dismantle a life.It's not as hard as it should be.That's the part that hollows me out, how little there is.Zack's clothes.The shoebox of his drawings.One good blanket.My documents, the fake ones and the realer ones, taped inside a vent I pried open with a butter
(Rene)I told my men one hour.I told myself I'd wait it out at the hotel like an Alpha with a shred of self-control.Instead I'm leaning on the door of a trailer that smells like mildew, cheap soap, and her, and self-control can go to hell.Her scent is everywhere out here.Worn into the doorframe
(Angelique)Gold.His eyes have gone gold.Wolf-gold, the color the eye turns when the animal comes up to the surface to look out.The exact thing I've spent years making sure mine never do where a human can see.So either Parker isn't human.Or I've finally lost it."Quiet," he says, before I can
(Angelique)The bell over the door is still swinging when my knees give out.I catch the edge of the booth before I hit the floor.There's broken glass and debris everywhere.The pitcher, two plates, the tray. Damaged stock comes out of my wages. That's the thought my brain hands me.Not he's here.







