Chapter two

CHAPTER TWO

HAZEL'S POV

I followed the sound of his voice down the dark hall to the balcony doors.

He was outside behind the curtains. I didn't have a wolf's hearing, but the doors were open a crack, and the night was very still.

The voice on his phone was sweet and sulky, and I knew it at once.

"So when are you going to repudiate her? Don't tell me the mute's grown on you."

"No," Julian said.

I put my hand flat against the wall.

"Then do it! Stand in front of the Council and break it. I've waited six years, Julian. Every she-wolf in the Lowe pack calls me your whore behind my back."

Julian let out a long breath. "I can't repudiate her, Sienna. Not now."

He'd said not now. He hadn't said he didn't want to.

I stepped back, and my heel cracked against the bed frame.

I flinched, and the curtains swept open.

He stood on the other side of the glass in a black robe, and his eyes caught the moonlight and glowed, flat and gold, like an animal's at the edge of a road.

Sienna was still talking. "Your grandfather's been dead three years! How long are you going to keep paying for the Wrens? Why should your whole life..."

He tapped the screen. Her voice stopped.

He came in and closed the door behind him. He didn't need to ask whether I'd heard. He could hear my heart going like a rabbit's.

"How much?"

"Only the last part," I signed.

It was a lie. Most wolves could hear a lie in a heartbeat, but my heart had never behaved like a wolf's heart. That was the one gift my wolflessness had ever given me. I'd been lying to Julian for twenty years, and he'd never once caught me.

I swallowed and signed, "You don't owe me anything. If you want to go before the Council and end it..."

His hand clamped on my shoulder before I could finish. His eyes had gone gold all the way across.

"Go back to sleep," he said. "I'm going out."

"Where?"

"That's none of your business."

He shook me off, and I fell back onto the bed. Two minutes later the front door slammed. Through the window I watched a huge black wolf come out of the trees at the edge of the lawn and run east, toward Lowe territory, without looking back.

I knew why he couldn't end it. Everyone in the pack knew.

When I was five, my brother Noah overheard rogues planning to kill the Blackwood heir. He ran ahead to warn a boy he'd never met. My father, the Wren Alpha, put our whole pack between Julian and the rogues.

Three weeks later, the rogues burned our den to the ground with every Wren inside it.

Noah had hidden me under the stairs during a game. He came back to get me, and he didn't make it out. I was the only one who did.

Old Alpha Arthur Blackwood found me in the ashes. He carried me home and called it a blood-debt, and in pack law, a blood-debt is the heaviest thing a wolf can owe.

When he was dying, Arthur called the Moon Council to his bedside. He made them swear to confirm Julian as Alpha on one condition. Julian would take the last Wren as his Luna, and the Blackwoods would protect me for as long as I lived.

Julian was twenty and furious. He said yes, because he wanted the seat more than he wanted Sienna.

There was a second part to it that nobody said out loud anymore. The Wrens had been small, but they'd been old, and half the packs east of the river owed my father something. The Hales, the Prices, and the Carvers had all sworn to Arthur at my bedside. They called it the Accord of Ash. As long as the last Wren sat beside the Blackwood Alpha, those packs would stand behind him.

Julian never talked about the Accord. He liked to say his seat was his own, that he'd earned it with his teeth. Maybe he believed it. When you're the strongest wolf in the room, it's easy to forget who put you there.

Five years later, he still hadn't marked me.

Without a mark, I wasn't really in the pack at all. I couldn't hear the link. When the pack ran on the full moon, I stayed home with the porch light on. The pups at the pack school called me the stray, and their mothers didn't correct them.

I couldn't sleep in the dark. I hadn't been able to since the fire. I turned on every lamp in the room and took the old shoebox down from the top of the closet.

Inside were a scorched silver spoon, a photo of five children on a dock with the edges burned brown, and a little wooden whistle Noah had carved for me. A Wren whistle. My father had taught all my brothers to call the pack with them, from one ridge to the next.

I'd never learned. I was too young.

I held it in my palm and watched the windows slowly go from black to gray.

At seven, I washed my face and started downstairs to make breakfast. The doorbell rang hard, and kept ringing.

I knew who it was before I reached the hall. I couldn't smell like a wolf, but I didn't need to. Only one person in the pack leaned on a doorbell like that, as if the house still belonged to her. She had been Luna here for thirty years before she had to hand that title to a mute stray, and she had never forgiven either of us for it.

I smoothed my hair, made my face pleasant, and opened the door.

Margaret Blackwood, the former Luna and Julian's mother, looked down her nose at me from the front step.

"Well? Aren't you going to let me in?"