Chapter 3

"Who hit you?"

The courtyard was grey with early light. Wren had expected to be collected by warriors and marched to the horses with the same disregard with which everything had always happened to her. Instead she stepped outside and found Cain Voss standing very still in the middle of the yard, and Mara three feet in front of him, and the question hanging in the cold air between them like a dropped blade.

Mara hadn't heard her come out. Nobody had. Wren pressed herself against the door frame and watched.

"Alpha Voss." Kaine's voice came from somewhere to the left, strained with diplomatic urgency. "Our head omega was simply — there was a misunderstanding this morning, entirely routine —"

Cain didn't look at Kaine. His silver eyes were on Wren's face and had been since the moment she appeared, and they had identified the bruise on her cheekbone with a speed that told her it was the first thing he'd looked for.

"I'll ask once more," Cain said. The words were perfectly quiet. Somehow that made them worse. "Who hit you?"

Wren calculated. Quickly and cold-bloodedly, the way she calculated everything: what would protect her, what would endanger her. Telling him the truth cost her Mara's future retribution — but she was leaving, so that was someone else's problem. Lying cost her credibility with a man she needed to at least provisionally understand. Silence gave people ideas.

"Mara," she said. "Last night."

Mara's head snapped toward her. Whatever she'd expected — protective silence, the ingrained servile instinct to cover for her abusers — it hadn't been this.

"I was disciplining a servant," Mara said, turning back to Cain with her chin up and her authority deployed like a club. "It's well within my purview as head omega. The girl had been insolent —"

"She's not a servant anymore."

Cain said it the way he said everything: without raising his voice, without theatrics, just words precisely placed, carrying the full weight of someone who had never needed volume to be heard.

Mara's face worked through several expressions too quickly. "She was a servant last night when —"

"She was mine last night."

The word landed hard in the cold air. Wren kept her expression still. Mine. She stored it alongside everything else she was learning about him, sorted it into the correct category: dangerous, watch carefully, do not mistake for protection.

"Alpha Voss." Kaine appeared at Cain's shoulder, sweating in the cold. "I apologise sincerely. Mara will be reprimanded, I assure you, this was entirely —"

Cain moved.

It happened with a speed that Wren, who had learned to track fast violence out of sheer survival necessity, barely followed. One moment he was standing still. The next his hand was around Mara's throat, and Mara's feet were four inches off the ground, and the sound she made was not a scream — it was worse than a scream, an airless throttled thing — and every wolf in the courtyard had gone absolutely rigid.

Wren didn't move. Didn't speak. She watched Mara's face flush and her hands claw at Cain's wrist and find no purchase there, and she felt — this was the strange part, the part she catalogued and hid from herself to examine later — almost nothing. Not satisfaction, which surprised her. Not fear for Mara, which did not.

"Cain." Thorne's voice, steady and unhurried, from somewhere behind the Alpha. "We don't have jurisdiction here. Killing her creates political complications."

A long silence. Long enough for Mara's face to go from red to purple. Long enough for two of Kaine's warriors to take one step forward and then abort it, recognising with animal instinct that the second step would be the last thing they did.

Then Cain released her.

Mara crumpled to the cobblestones, coughing, both hands at her own throat. No one went to her. Cain looked down at her with the expression of a man looking at something he'd already dismissed.

"If I pass through this territory again," he said, "and I find she has laid a hand on anyone under my protection or otherwise, I will take both hands." He stepped back. "So she can't do it again."

He turned. His eyes found Wren's across the yard, and he held her gaze for a moment — she couldn't read what was in it, which frustrated her, because she could usually read people — and then he moved toward the horses.

Thorne appeared at Wren's elbow. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she said automatically.

"That's not actually what I asked."

She looked at him. He had the expression of someone who meant the question, which was foreign enough to take her a second to process. "I'm unhurt," she said, which was more precise. "Mara hit me last night, not this morning."

"I know."

She looked at him sharply. "Did you tell him?"

"He saw it the moment you came through the door." Thorne said it quietly. "He's been doing this long enough to know what a new bruise looks like on someone who's used to hiding them."

Wren absorbed this. She looked back toward where Mara was now being helped to her feet by a pale-faced kitchen omega, still making the sounds of someone whose dignity had been comprehensively destroyed.

On the ground near Mara's feet, a hand reached out and closed around Wren's ankle. Mara's grip was weak and shaking, but her eyes — still watering from the pressure — were steady with the specific hatred of a woman who had lost badly in public.

"You'll pay for this," Mara rasped. Her voice was ruined. "He'll tire of you. They always do, with the ones they take like this. When he throws you out, I'll be waiting."

Wren looked down at her. At the woman who had rationed her food and taken her blankets and made five years of already-unliveable circumstances worse for the sheer pleasure of it. She felt the pull of something — anger, maybe, or the ghost of the grief that anger had slowly replaced — and let it pass through without holding it.

"Maybe," she said. "But at least I won't have to spend another day breathing the same air as you."

She stepped over Mara's hand and walked toward the horses.

❖ ❖ ❖

Cain's black stallion was enormous and tightly wound, shifting its weight with the restless intelligence of an animal that had learned to match its rider's energy. Wren had ridden exactly twice in her life — her mother had kept horses, years ago, before everything — and approached it with the careful respect of someone who understood animals better than people.

"You ride?" Cain said from behind her.

"I have."

She heard him move, and then his hand appeared over her shoulder, closing around the bridle to steady the animal while she found the stirrup. She didn't acknowledge the help. She was halfway up when he said: "Ride with me."

She paused. "I can manage alone."

"You'd slow the column." He was already mounting behind her, the horse barely registering his weight, and she had a half-second to choose: slide off and make an argument of it, or accept the position and gather information. She chose information. She settled into the space in front of him, and his arms came around her to take the reins, and she was — quite completely, quite inescapably — caged.

She took note of it. Filed it. Did not give it more weight than it deserved.

He smelled like pine and cold air and something she couldn't name that made the dormant, half-dead thing she thought of as her wolf stir uneasily. She'd suppressed that part of herself as thoroughly as she'd suppressed her gift — it was easier, safer, to exist as mostly human, to keep the wolf quiet and contained. She stiffened the suppression now and felt the thing settle.

The column moved out. Blood Moon's gates opened. She did not look back.

For a long time neither of them spoke. Wren watched the terrain, memorising landmarks: the split boulder at the fork of the road, the dead tree shaped like a reaching hand, the stream that ran east to west and then turned south. She was building a map in her head, the way she always built maps — not because she knew when she'd need it but because information was the only thing no one had ever been able to take from her.

After perhaps two hours, Cain spoke.

"How long were you there?"

She didn't pretend not to understand. "Five years."

"Since you were sixteen."

"Yes."

A pause. The horses moved. The column stretched ahead and behind, the warriors keeping their distance in a way that felt deliberate.

"How many people knew what you were?"

Wren was quiet for a moment. "Kaine knew I was an Ashford. Whether he believed it still meant anything — I was never sure." She paused. "Mara suspected. She used the word often enough."

"Did anyone try to use the gift?"

"No. I was careful." She paused. "I've been careful since I was sixteen."

Silence. The forest moved past on either side, the light shifting through the canopy.

"You're trying to work out how much I know," he said. Not a question.

Wren didn't answer.

"That's sensible," he said, as though she'd confirmed something. "You should know everything before you decide anything. I'd think less of you if you didn't." Another pause. "Ask me what you want to know."

She turned her head slightly — she couldn't see his face from this angle, only the line of his jaw. "I want to know why you came to Blood Moon specifically. Why you came looking for me."

"That's two questions."

"They have the same answer."

He was quiet long enough that she thought he was going to deflect the way Thorne had deflected. Then: "Someone in my pack is dying. I've spent two years looking for the only thing that might save her. My search ended at Blood Moon." A pause. "At you."

Wren turned the information over carefully. Someone in his pack is dying. She thought of Thorne's careful deflection the night before. She thought of the hope she'd seen in the villagers' faces as the column passed — hope poorly hidden, the hope of people who'd been waiting for something they needed badly enough to forget to conceal the need.

"Who?" she asked.

He didn't answer.

She turned that over too. The most feared Alpha in the region — a man who had just casually throttled someone in a courtyard without raising his voice — wouldn't say her name. That told her something about what this dying person meant to him. Something he didn't want her to see yet.

She was still thinking about that when they made camp at dusk, and it was still in her mind when she lay down in the tent Thorne had quietly set up for her and stared at the dark canvas ceiling.

Somewhere on the edge of the camp, she could hear the lower register of Cain's voice: talking with his warriors, issuing quiet instructions. She'd been learning the warriors' names all day. She'd gotten seven of them. She'd noticed their patterns, their gaps, the moments when the watch was thinnest.

She was still telling herself she was building escape routes when she fell asleep. But what her mind kept returning to, in the slow dissolve between thought and sleep, wasn't the gaps in the watch pattern.

It was the name he wouldn't say.