Murder

Her father died with a silver table knife in his neck, and the last thing he saw was her.

One moment Scarlett Albagard was pushing food around her plate, doing what she always did at these dinners: keeping her head down while Lord Fallon, Alpha of the Oshea pack, and his wife Ramona fought over her son Leander again. The same argument, the same raised voices, the same chirping from Leander that made her father’s jaw tighten. She had learned long ago to stay quiet and mind her food.

Then Leander stood up.

There was no warning. His face twisted into something she had never seen on it, and he drove the blade into the back of their father’s neck.

“Father!”

Her chair crashed behind her. Goblets shattered, platters skidded off the table, and she didn’t care. She ran. Fallon staggered forward, a wet, choking sound escaping him as blood poured down his tunic, and Scarlett caught him as his knees gave out. He was a big man, broad as a door, and she couldn’t hold him. She lowered him to the cold stone floor, and the blood came with them, warm and slick against her palms, soaking through her gown until the silk clung to her skin.

“Stay with me. Please, stay with me.” She ripped the knife free, and the sound it made would follow her into her dreams. She pressed both hands over the wound. It was no use. Blood welled up between her fingers and kept coming, as if her father had been carrying an ocean inside him all these years.

His eyes found hers. They had always been fierce, those eyes, the color of a winter storm. Now they were soft and frightened and searching.

“Scar... lett.”

A last cough sprayed red across her cheek. His breath rattled once in his chest.

Then his eyes emptied.

“No.” She shook her head. “No, no, no.” She pulled him against her, buried her face in his blood-matted hair, and rocked him like a child while her tears ran into his beard. A raw, ragged sound tore out of her, and it took her a moment to realize it was her own voice.

The hall had gone silent. No one moved. No one came to help.

When she finally raised her head, Leander was looking straight at her. Just looking. He hadn’t run or reached for her or even blinked. His hands were clean.

“Why?” Her voice cracked in half. “What did you do? What demon got into you?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t even look afraid. Behind him, Ramona’s scream cut across the hall, high and sharp and perfectly timed.

“Guards! Treason!”

The doors burst open. Skye, Oshea’s Beta and captain of the guard, strode in with steel at his back and shadows in his storm-gray eyes, and a rush of relief hit Scarlett so hard it almost made her sob. Skye. The one person in this pack who had never lied to her. The one person who had held her hand in the moonlit gardens and sworn he would always choose her.

He would fix this. He had to.

Ramona rose from her seat, one hand pressed to her breast, the other pointing straight at Scarlett. “She killed him! Scarlett stabbed her own father! Alpha Fallon is dead by her hand!”

The words made no sense. Scarlett stared at her stepmother, then down at herself: the blood on her arms, the blood on her gown, the knife still lying beside her knee where she had dropped it. Her father’s body was still warm in her lap. She saw exactly how it looked, and her stomach dropped through the floor.

Across the table, Leander settled back into his high-backed chair. He crossed one leg over the other. A faint smile curved his mouth, like a man who had been waiting all evening for the best part of a play.

“I didn’t do it.” She turned to Skye, her honey-brown eyes wide and pleading. “Skye, look at me. You know me. You know me.”

Her stepsister Marissa, who had sat silent as a shadow all night, stepped forward. Her gown whispered across the floor. She reached Skye’s side, rose on her toes, and kissed his cheek, slowly, so that Scarlett could see every second of it. Then she slid her arm through his.

Skye did not pull away.

All the warmth drained out of Scarlett’s body at once. “Skye?”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. The man who had whispered promises against her skin kept his gaze fixed on the far wall, his jaw locked tight, and when he spoke, there was nothing left in his voice. It was as hollow as the crypts beneath the keep.

“Take her.”

The words hit harder than the slap that was coming. Scarlett heard something break inside her, quietly, like a rib giving way.

The guards seized her arms and hauled her up so roughly that her father’s blood slopped across the floor. Her legs barely held. “Please,” she whispered, to no one, to all of them. “Please, I didn’t...”

“Wait.”

Ramona stepped forward in her velvet gown, trailing it behind her like a shroud. Tears slid down her cheeks in perfect lines. The guards parted for her. The hall held its breath.

Then she slapped Scarlett so hard that white light burst across her vision and her head whipped sideways.

Ramona leaned in close, and her whisper was pitched to carry. “You will rot in the dark for this, you filthy traitor. I will make every hour of your miserable life a torment for taking my beloved from me.”

But beneath the tears, her eyes were smiling.

That was when Scarlett understood. This was not a murder that had gone wrong, or a moment of madness. This had been planned. The knife, the timing, the guards already waiting outside the door. Someone had set the table for this, and she was the meal.

The guards dragged her toward the doors. She did not fight them. She turned her head and looked at Skye one last time, searching for something, anything: a flicker in his eyes, a tremor in his hand. Marissa was whispering into his ear, her lips brushing his skin, and he did not react at all.

Her bare feet left red prints across the stone floor. Behind her, she could hear Ramona sobbing, loud and theatrical, and the murmur of the pack beginning to turn, as pack members do, toward whichever story was told first.

Scarlett did not scream again. She stopped begging. She stopped looking for mercy in faces that had none to give.

Instead, she memorized them. Every face in that hall. Every voice. Every silent witness who had watched her father’s blood cool on the floor and said nothing.

Every one of them would answer for this.