CHAPTER 3

Murielle's POV

"What did they do to you?"

Callum's voice came out wrong, cracked open in a way I hadn't heard from him since before Colette arrived. His hand was still around my wrist, and for one strange second neither of us moved, like whatever had just broken in him needed a moment to decide if it was staying broken.

Something in me wanted to answer him. The real answer, not the safe one. I opened my mouth.

"Brother?"

Colette's voice, from the hallway, cut through before I got a single word out. Soft. A little breathless. Timed so well it couldn't be an accident.

His hand dropped from my wrist like I'd burned him. Whatever was starting to crack in his face closed back over, and whatever I was about to say went back down with it.

He was moving toward her before I'd even lowered my arm.

She stood in the doorway in a pale pink robe, honey-blonde hair loose and mussed like she really had just climbed out of bed, pale blue eyes already glistening in the lamplight.

"Why are you out of bed? You'll catch a chill." He said it the way you'd talk to something you paid too much for and now have to be careful with.

"I'm fine." Colette's smile matched her voice, gentle and aimed at him first, me second. "I wanted to welcome Elle home. I'm so happy she's back."

Her eyes filled, right on cue. I'd watched her do this before, at the trial itself, the same practiced catch in her breath landing right as the verdict came down, until every face in that room turned to comfort her instead of asking me a single question. I still couldn't decide if it was worse that she meant it a little, somewhere underneath the performance, or that she didn't mean it at all.

Callum looked at me over her head, and whatever had softened in him earlier was gone.

"Look at her. Thinking of you, even sick as she is, and this is the thanks you give her."

"I'm not cold," Colette said, shrugging out of her own coat before he could stop her. "She looks thinner than I do. She should have it."

"She's fine." Callum was at her side in two steps, closing his hand over the coat before it was fully off her shoulders. "Don't. She's performing. She was the strongest fighter this pack had once, she doesn't need your coat and she doesn't need your pity. Put it back on."

Colette let him win that one without a fight, the way she always did when she'd already gotten what she actually wanted. She turned for the kitchen instead, humming something under her breath, and came back a few minutes later with a cup of tea and a small plate she set down in front of me like she was the one owed an apology.

I felt the room the way I used to feel eyes on me in the training yard before a fight started, Callum watching to see if I'd flinch, Colette watching to see if I'd notice her watching. Nobody in it was looking at me like a sister who'd come home. They were looking at me like a problem that hadn't finished being solved yet.

I froze the second the plate touched the table.

My hand wouldn't move toward it. Three years of a body that remembered exactly what a fast hand cost, knuckles split against a table edge more times than I ever counted, and it didn't care that this table wasn't that one. There'd been a woman two cells down who lost most of a finger reaching for bread half a second too eager, and I'd learned the lesson off her mistake instead of my own, which didn't make my hand any less certain it remembered it firsthand.

Colette stumbled.

I didn't see exactly how. One second she was upright, the next the cup was falling, shattering somewhere near my feet, and Callum lunged, shoving me sideways out of the way of a mess I didn't make.

I went down on the broken glass instead of near it.

It cut clean through the sole of my foot. No pain yet, just a warm wetness spreading, my body still catching up to what had just happened to it.

Nobody was looking at my foot.

"You did that on purpose." Callum's voice was flat, certain before I'd said a single word in my defense. "You've been doing this since the day she got here. Three years hasn't changed a single thing about you."

I didn't argue. The old me, further back than I could easily reach now, would have laughed in his face and told him to look down, actually look, at the blood soaking into the floorboard by my heel. I didn't have her voice anymore. I wasn't sure I ever would again.

Callum's eyes went distant mid-sentence, and I could tell it was a mind-link landing before he even blinked. Whatever the other person was saying made his spine straighten.

When he came back, he looked at Colette first.

"The Alpha King's sensed his mate somewhere in this pack." His voice had changed entirely, all of that easy cruelty replaced with something almost reverent. "He arrives in three days to claim her."