Aurexian Territory

Dax didn’t speak for the first hour.

He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the open window, the radio playing low, some old rock station fading in and out between the mountains. I watched the pine forest thicken and Nightreach disappear behind us, mile by mile, until I couldn’t have found my way home if I’d tried.

Not that I had a home anymore.

“You can sleep,” he said eventually. “It’s another two hours.”

“I’m fine.”

He glanced at me. Then back at the road. “You said you didn’t sleep last night. You must be tired.”

I didn’t answer. He didn’t push.

That was the whole conversation.

The Aurexian estate came out of the trees all at once.

I’d expected big. I hadn’t expected this. A sprawling house of dark stone and glass on the side of the mountain, three stories tall, lit gold against the gray morning. Stone walls ran off into the forest in both directions. Guards stood at the gate, and every one of them watched the truck roll through.

Watched me.

Nightreach’s packhouse would have fit in the garage.

Dax parked around the back, by a service entrance. Of course. He grabbed my bag from the truck bed before I could reach it and handed it to a woman waiting in the doorway.

“She’s yours, Greta,” he said.

Then he walked away without looking back.

The woman named Greta looked at me. She was short, solid, and somewhere past sixty, with iron-gray hair pinned up tight and flour on her forearms. Her eyes were sharp enough to cut glass.

“So you’re the debt,” she said.

“Flora.”

“Hm.” She looked me up and down. “You eat yet?”

I blinked. “No.”

“Then come eat. You’re no use to me if you fall over.”

The kitchen was enormous, warm, and smelled like bread. Greta put a bowl of stew in front of me and stood over me with her arms crossed until I finished every bite.

Then she handed me a folded stack of clothes.

“Uniform. Change in the back room.”

It was a starched white blouse, buttoned to the collar, and a long skirt in pale, washed-out blue.

I stared at the color.

Blue. Of course it was blue. Twelve hours ago I’d worn blue hoping a boy would choose me. Now I’d wear it scrubbing his enemy’s floors.

The mirror in the back room was small and cracked at one corner. My pale hair fell almost to my waist, so blonde it was nearly white. My whole life, the pack kids had called me Snow. The white-haired girl with no wolf. Wasn’t that funny.

I pinned my hair up tight, buttoned the collar, and looked myself in the eye. Blue-green and tired.

Rise so high they’re forced to watch.

You had to start somewhere. Even on your knees with a scrub brush.

Greta worked me hard and didn’t apologize for it.

Potatoes. Floors. Silver. By the evening my hands were raw and my back ached, and she hadn’t said a single kind word.

She hadn’t said a cruel one either. After Nightreach, that felt almost like the same thing.

The other staff weren’t so careful. Conversations stopped when I walked in. Two maids in the laundry room watched me and whispered, and I caught the words Nightreach and sold and no wolf.

Some things were the same everywhere.

“Ignore them,” Greta said, without looking up from her dough. “They’ll get bored.”

“Will they?”

“No.” She slapped the dough down. “But you’ll stop caring.”

In the afternoon she handed me a basket of fresh linens.

“Third floor. East wing. The Alphas’ rooms.” She pointed a floury finger at me. “Clean. Don’t touch anything that isn’t yours to touch. Don’t open anything closed. And if one of them is in there, you apologize and leave.”

“What if they tell me to stay?”

Greta gave me a long look. “You be smarter than you look and leave anyway.”

The first door on the east wing belonged to Fenris.

I knew it before I saw a single personal thing, because there weren’t any.

The room was huge and cold and flawless. Gray walls. A bed made so tight you could bounce a coin off it. A desk with one pen lying exactly parallel to one notebook. No photos. No books on the nightstand. Nothing on the walls.

It didn’t look like a bedroom. It looked like a room someone had cleaned out after the person who lived there died.

I changed the sheets. I dusted surfaces that had no dust. I didn’t open the desk.

I wanted to. The plan, the vow, all of it needed ammunition. But Greta’s voice was in my head, and it was only my first day.

I’d learn the house first. Then I’d learn them.

The second room was Dax’s.

I opened the door and stopped.

Clothes on the floor. Clothes on the chair. A pair of boots in the middle of the rug like he’d stepped out of them mid-stride. Coffee mugs on the windowsill, at least four. Dirty tools on a towel on the desk, grease stains and all. Books stacked in crooked towers against the wall, spines cracked from being read and reread.

It was a disaster.

And it was the only room in this whole cold, glittering house that felt like someone lived in it.

I picked up the boots. Collected the mugs. Folded his shirts, and they smelled like pine and woodsmoke, and I absolutely tried not to notice that.

On the nightstand, half-buried under a library book, there was a photograph. Old, creased. I didn’t pick it up. I didn’t need to. I could see it from where I stood: three little dark-haired boys sitting on a dock, sunburned and grinning.

It looked exactly like the photo of Orion and me in my duffel bag.

Something tightened in my chest.

I left it exactly where it was.

I was coming back down the east-wing stairs with my empty basket when I heard voices from the study below.

The door was cracked open. I stopped on the landing. I told myself I was only catching my breath.

“…went through Hale’s accounts last night,” Fenris was saying, cold and precise. “Nightreach could have paid. Not easily. But they could have sold the eastern timber rights and covered the debt in full.”

“So why didn’t they?” Rhys, sounding amused.

“Because Hale didn’t want to lose the timber.” A pause. “And because her parents offered the girl before anyone even suggested it.”

My grip went tight on the basket.

“They didn’t have to give her up,” Fenris said. “They wanted to.”

Silence.

Then Rhys’s rough voice, low and hard. “Then send her back. She doesn’t belong here.”

“She doesn’t belong there,” Dex said, and there was no amusement in it now.

“That isn’t our problem.”

“No?” Rhys again. “Then why did your wolf wake you three times last night, brother? Because mine did too.”

The study went silent.

And on the stairs above them, I stood very still in my pale blue skirt, my heart pounding, wondering why all three Aurexian Alphas had been awake last night because of me.