Chapter 7

The room Selene had promised me sat at the end of the west hall, and it was, in fairness, everything she’d said it would be, a real fireplace instead of a vent, windows deep enough to sit in, a bed that didn’t creak when I set my bag down on it. Someone had already had it aired and warmed before I arrived, which told me either Selene had planned this days or the Ashwood staff moved faster than any pack I’d worked with before.

I should have felt settled. Instead I stood in the doorway for longer than I meant to, bag still on my shoulder, feeling the strange hollow drop that came after signing a contract this size, the adrenaline of the negotiation gone, nothing yet in its place but the reality of nine months in a house that wasn’t mine, among people who hadn’t decided yet whether they wanted me here.

I made myself move. Unpacking was a ritual I trusted more than most feelings — clothes in the wardrobe, files on the desk, the small collection of things I always brought with me on a residency arranged on the mantel in the order that made the room feel less like someone else’s. A photo of my grandmother, young, laughing at something off camera. A stone Petra had given me before my first contract, worn smooth from five years of being carried in one bag or another. Small things. Enough to remind me, on the nights this got hard, that I had a life outside whatever pack house I was currently occupying.

I told myself I wouldn’t need the reminder much this time. Kieran was easy. Selene was, unexpectedly, kind. The contract was airtight. I’d handled harder rooms than this one, plenty of times, and walked out the other side exactly as intact as I’d walked in.

The pack house had other ideas about how easy this was going to be.

I found that out at dinner, three hours later, in the long communal dining hall where most of the pack’s senior members ate together most evenings. I hadn’t been told attendance was mandatory, exactly, but Gideon had made clear it was expected, at least for the first week, as a courtesy to a pack that wanted to look their new arrangement in the eye before deciding what to make of it.

I chose a seat near the middle of the table, deliberately — not hiding at the end, not claiming space at the head. Neutral ground. I’d learned a long time ago that where you sat on your first night told a room almost as much about you as anything you said.

The conversation around me was warm enough at first, careful in the particular way conversation gets when a stranger has just joined the table and everyone’s still deciding how much of themselves to show. Then the woman two seats down — sharp-eyed, the same one who’d watched me across the courtyard on my first walk-through — leaned toward the man beside her and said, not quite quietly enough, “I still don’t understand why he didn’t just wait. Find someone from a real pack. Someone with people who’d actually claim her, instead of—”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. I felt the shape of the rest of it land anyway, low in my stomach, sharper than I expected it to be.

I kept eating. I kept my face perfectly, professionally still, the same face I’d worn through five years of rooms that hadn’t wanted me in them, and underneath that stillness something hot and unfamiliar sat up and paid attention in a way it usually didn’t. I told myself it was nothing. I’d been called worse, in more direct language, by people with less reason to resent me. This wasn’t new.

It didn’t feel like nothing.

“Ignore Marguerite,” said the pack member across from me — younger, kinder-eyed, introducing herself a beat too late as Dessa. “She’s like that with everyone new. Give her a month.”

“I don’t need a month,” I said, and heard, distantly, how much edge had crept into my own voice. I softened it before it could do any more damage. “I’ve done this before. It’s fine.”

It wasn’t entirely fine, and some small, stubborn part of me resented having to say that it was.

I made it through the rest of dinner on autopilot, answering the handful of polite questions that came my way, deflecting the ones that veered too close to personal, and left the hall the moment it felt reasonable to leave without looking like I was fleeing it. I wasn’t fleeing. I told myself that firmly, walking the long hall back toward my new room, past pack members who watched me go with expressions I didn’t examine too closely.

I wasn’t fleeing. I was simply done for the night.

My room was quiet when I got back to it, fire burned down to embers, and I sat on the edge of the bed longer than I meant to before I let myself do the thing I hadn’t let myself do at the table — feel the whole shape of what Marguerite had said, instead of just the sharp edge of it. Someone with people who’d actually claim her. Like I was a stray. Like the fact that I’d built my entire adult life on my own terms, without a pack, without needing one, made me something lesser instead of something deliberately chosen.

I’d made peace with that choice years ago. I still made peace with it, most days, without effort. Tonight the peace took a little more work than usual, and I let myself be annoyed about that too, at how much more this particular room had cost me in one evening than most rooms cost me in a month.

I called Petra. It was late enough that I half expected voicemail, but she picked up on the second ring, the background noise of the boathouse office behind her.

“How’s the fortress,” she said, by way of hello.

“Cold. Beautiful. Complicated.”

“That’s an upgrade from your usual one-word check-ins.” A pause, and I could hear her set something down, giving me her full attention. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Someone said something at dinner. It’s fine.”

“Runa.”

“It’s fine, Petra. I’ve had worse tables.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Her voice gentled, in the specific way it did when she was done letting me deflect. “You called me at nine at night on your first day. You don’t do that unless something actually got under your skin. So what got under your skin?”

I looked at the photo of my grandmother on the mantel, laughing at whatever had been off camera the day it was taken, and found, for once, that I didn’t have a smooth answer ready.

“They think I’m here because nobody else wants me,” I said finally. “Not in those words. But that’s the shape of it. Like the work I do isn’t a choice I made on purpose, it’s just what’s left over for someone without a pack behind her.”

“That’s not true, and you know it’s not true.”

“I know.” I did know it. Knowing it and feeling the sting of someone else believing otherwise, out loud, at a table I’d have to sit at for the next nine months, were two different things, and I was annoyed at myself for not having realized sooner how much distance actually existed between those two facts.

“You want me to come up there and say something to somebody?” Petra’s voice had gone half-serious, half not, the particular tone she used when she was offering to fight someone on my behalf and meant it about sixty percent of the way. “I will. I’ve got nothing on my calendar.”

That got the first real laugh out of me since I’d sat down at that table. “No. I can handle a woman named Marguerite.”

“I know you can handle her. That’s not the same question as whether you should have to, on night one, alone, in a house full of strangers.”

I didn’t have a good answer for that either, so I let the silence sit for a second instead of filling it with something practiced.

“I’m okay,” I said finally, and meant it more than I had an hour ago. “I just needed to say it out loud to somebody who wasn’t going to make me pretend it didn’t land.”

“Anytime. You know that.”

We talked another few minutes about nothing in particular — the practice, a client I’d need to follow up with by phone next week, Petra’s plans for the weekend — until the ordinary rhythm of it settled something in my chest that dinner had knocked loose. I hung up feeling steadier than I had any right to feel after a night that had, on paper, been a minor thing. One comment. One woman who didn’t know me and had already decided what she thought she knew anyway.

I climbed into a bed that wasn’t mine, in a house that wasn’t mine, and told myself, the way I always told myself on the harder nights, that I’d handled worse rooms than this one and walked out the other side just fine.

I mostly believed it. That was usually enough to get me through until morning.