8

I slid out from under his arm so slowly that my muscles ached.

Kaelen shifted but did not wake. I stood frozen with my breath held until his chest rose and fell evenly again. In the thin gray light he looked younger. The hard line of his mouth had gone slack, and one hand lay open on the pillow where my head had been, palm up, like someone waiting to be given something. I thought of waking him. I thought of the words I would use. Each sentence I composed sounded worse than the last.

Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm terrified. I have to go.

I gathered my damp dress from the bathroom floor with trembling hands, and there was no time to wash. There was no time to decide how I felt. If Silverwood learned where I was, they would not simply drag me home. They would use me as an excuse to start a war, and the first casualty would be the man sleeping in that bed.

I left his sweater folded at the foot of the mattress. I did not leave a note. I had written three drafts in my head, and every one of them was a lie.

The penthouse was silent. I padded through it barefoot with my shoes in my hand, past the glass wall and its sleeping city, past the couch where the broken mug still sat on the table, past the open dishes of last night's dinner, to the private elevator. I pressed the button. A small light blinked. I waited, counting breaths, and when the doors slid open a voice said, "Leaving so early?"

I nearly screamed.

Gideon sat on a leather bench beside the elevator with a cup of black coffee, as composed as a statue. He was young for a Beta, perhaps Kaelen's age, with sharp brown eyes and a face that gave away nothing at all. He did not look as though he had slept either.

"I didn't mean to..." I swallowed. "I just need to go. Please. He doesn't have to know."

"He will know."

"Gideon, please."

"I didn't say I would tell him." He took a slow sip of coffee. "I said he will know. He's an Alpha. In about ten minutes he'll wake up and smell exactly where you were."

"Then I'll be gone by then."

"Hm." His gaze moved over my face, my wrinkled dress, the tremor in my hands. "He isn't what they say, you know. Not entirely."

"I don't care what they say." My voice cracked. "I belong to a pack that wants me dead, and he belongs to the one they want dead more. Whatever happened last night, it can't be anything. It can't."

Gideon watched me for a long, quiet moment. Then he reached into his jacket and held out a plain white card.

"A number," he said. "No name. If you ever need anything, you call it."

"Why would you help me?"

"I wouldn't." His tone was perfectly flat. "I'm making a note that I never saw you."

I took the card. I turned it over in my fingers. There was nothing on it but seven digits, printed in small black type, and it felt heavier than it should have.

"Gideon?"

"Yes?"

"Tell him..." I stopped. What could I possibly have told him? "Tell him the soup was good."

Something flickered across Gideon's expression. It might have been a smile. It was gone before I could be sure. "I'll make a note of that too."

I stepped into the elevator, and I watched his face until the doors closed over it.

The descent took forever. Sixty floors. I watched the numbers drop one by one and tried to breathe slowly, the way Mara had once taught me when a pack elder shouted too close to my face. The elevator was mirrored on three sides, and I could see myself reflected a hundred times, a pale girl in a ruined dress with my hair in knots and my mother's pendant against my throat. I looked like a ghost. I looked like somebody's mistake.

The lobby was marble and chrome, quiet at six in the morning, with one receptionist yawning behind a polished desk. I was halfway across the floor when I smelled it. Pine. Woodsmoke. Rot underneath.

Silverwood wolves.

Three of them stood near the revolving door in plain dark jackets, hands in their pockets, scanning the street outside with the stiff, watchful look of men who had been told to find something. One of them was Elder Marcus's enforcer. I knew that face from a hundred pack meetings. He had once carried my bucket across the training field when I was twelve, and I had thought he was kind.

My feet stopped moving. For one long, awful moment I stood in the middle of that vast lobby with every instinct I owned screaming at me to run.

The enforcer's head turned.

I did not breathe. I did not blink. I only turned, as slowly as I have ever done anything, and walked in the opposite direction, toward a small sign half hidden behind a potted palm that read Service Entrance. My shoulders felt like they had been painted with a target. Behind me a man's voice said, low and curious, "Do you smell that?"

I pushed through the door.

It led into a corridor lined with steel carts and cardboard crates. A cook in a white apron looked up in surprise as I flew past, and I babbled something about a lost earring. I reached a loading dock, and then an alley, and then a street so cold it burned my lungs, and I ran without looking back until I could no longer tell whose heartbeat I could hear, mine or Wren's.