Chapter 5

Audrey

"Is that everything, ma'am?"

The driver is standing at the boot of the car — black, expensive, sent from Ironhold without ceremony the way you'd send a van for furniture — and he is looking at the three terracotta pots I've just handed him with the expression of a man who was briefed on luggage and was not briefed on this.

"Carefully," I tell him. "The tall one is Napoleon. He tips."

He adjusts his grip on Napoleon without comment. I appreciate that.

The rest of my things are already loaded — two bags, a medical kit, my laptop case, and my mother's urn wrapped in the grey cashmere scarf I bought in Edinburgh two winters ago because it was the softest thing I'd ever touched and I decided I was allowed one expensive soft thing. I buckle the urn into the back seat first, then the cacti, arranged across the middle seat in the order they've always lived on my windowsill. Napoleon by the window. Julius in the centre. Cleopatra on the inside, nearest the urn, because she's the smallest and I've always felt she needed the company.

The driver watches this process with great professionalism.

"That's everything," I tell him.

I close the back door.

I stand on the gravel drive for a moment in the early morning — the sky is the specific grey of not-quite-dawn — and I look at the house.

My eyes are drawn to the figure standing at the study window. I stare at him for three seconds then I get in the car.

He's no longer my father, going by the fourth condition I set.

The written release from the financial arrangement, the return of my mother's belongings, the clean severance from Ashveil's business. Those three he had agreed to almost immediately.

The fourth one made him look up.

“I want a formal severance,” I told him. “Pack record. Not just personal. I leave here tonight as Audrey Calloway for the last time. Whatever name I carry in Ironhold is mine. What I was here is finished.”

He had looked at me for a very long time before agreeing.

So he is not my father. He is figure standing at a window, watching the car that is taking the daughter he chose not to protect drive away from the house she was never fully allowed to belong to.

The driver pulls out of the gate, and into the road of my new life.

♦♦♦

The drive to Ironhold is four hours.

I sleep for two of them — not the deep, recovering sleep I need, but the shallow, motion-rocked version that leaves you rested enough to function and still aware, at the edges, of everything you didn't finish processing.

I wake up somewhere past the third hour when the landscape changes — the rolling midland greens giving way to something wilder and northern, where the hills have more opinion and the sky sits closer to the ground.

The sea appears at the edge of my window before the packhouse does.

I see it in flashes between the coastal road's bends — grey-green and wide, the kind of sea that doesn't look decorative, that looks like it means business. Then the road curves one final time and Ironhold's packhouse arrives, and I understand immediately why people talk about it the way they do.

It is enormous. Stone and dark timber, built into a cliff-top ridge like it grew there rather than was placed, with the sea forty feet below and the sky pressing down overhead and the whole thing sitting in the landscape with the specific authority of something that has never once needed to announce itself.

I look at it for a moment through the window.

"We've arrived, ma'am," the driver says.

"I see that," I say.

I get out.

The air is different here. Colder, salted, with a weight to it that you feel in your lungs before you think to notice it. I stand on the gravel approach and I tilt my head back and I look at the building, and the building looks back.

Well, this is it, then.

The front door opens. The woman who comes through it is small — considerably smaller than I expected from a packhouse this size — with white hair worn in a neat coil and dark eyes that move across me in a single, complete sweep that takes approximately four seconds and misses nothing.

She is wearing a dark grey cardigan and sensible shoes.

"Ms. Calloway," she says. Not a question.

"Yes," I say. "Although if we're going to be seeing a lot of each other, Audrey is fine."

Approval, possibly, or its close neighbour moves in her expression. 

"Mrs. Voss," she bows. "Head of household. I'll show you to your rooms." She glances at the driver, who is extracting Napoleon from the back seat with the extreme care of a man who has been told once about the tipping. "I'll have someone bring the rest."

"The cacti come with me," I say.

She looks at the cacti.

She looks at me.

"Of course," she says, without inflection, and turns toward the door.

♦♦♦

The room is large. That is the first thing — the sheer scale of it, with ceilings high enough that the morning light has somewhere to go and windows that face the sea in a way that makes the grey-green water the room's primary feature rather than an afterthought.

The bed is enormous and dark-framed and made up with the precision of someone who takes linen seriously. There is a desk. There is a fireplace. There is a window seat that runs the full length of the sea-facing wall.

I stand in the middle of it for a moment.

"The en suite is through there," Mrs. Voss says. "The alpha's wing is the east corridor. You'll want to know the boundary." A pause, not unkind. "For now."

"Understood," I say.

"The alpha is at work. He'll return this evening." She says this in the specific tone of someone conveying information rather than offering reassurance — straightforward, no cushion. I appreciate it immediately.

"What does he do?" I ask. "Specifically."

"He runs the region," she says. "Specifically." The same tone back, which I think might be her version of a smile. "Is there anything you need before he returns?"

I set Cleopatra on the window seat. Julius goes beside her. Napoleon I place on the desk, where the morning light hits the ridge of his barrel and makes him look architectural.

"Is there a shopping centre nearby?" I ask. "Or a high street. Anything."

"Harwick Town Centre," she says. "Twenty minutes on foot, ten by car. Is there something particular you need? I can have—"

"No, thank you." I turn. "I'd rather go myself. I want to see the town."

She looks at me with those dark, complete eyes. "You've only just arrived."

"I know." I pick up my jacket from the bed. "I find it easier to settle when I know what's around me. I won't be long."

A pause.

"The town is straightforward," she says. "Main high street runs from the harbour up to the central square. You won't get lost."

"I very rarely do," I say.

This time I am almost certain she smiles.

♦♦♦

Harwick is the kind of town that knows what it is and doesn't apologise for it.

It's not polished — not the kind of place with artisan coffee shops and coordinated shopfronts. It is working coastal, functional and lived-in, with a harbour at the bottom of the hill and a high street that runs upward from it in a solid, practical line of shops and restaurants and a covered market that smells like bread and something fried and salt from the water below.

I walk slowly.

This is a proper pack town — Ironhold's pack members move through the streets with a ease that comes from complete belonging, and several of them track me as I pass in the way that packs track unfamiliar wolves — not aggressively, just with the instinctive awareness of something new in known space.

I look back at each one.

I am browsing a shop on the upper high street — a small boutique wedged between a chemist and a bookshop — when I see the dress.

Dark green. A shade that sits between forest and bottle glass. The kind of cut that looks simple until you realise how precisely it's been thought through — the fall of the fabric, the proportions, a neckline that knows exactly where to stop.

I take it off the rail, and the attendant guides me to the changing room.

The fabric is good. Not expensive-label good, but well-made good, which I have always preferred because well-made things outlast branded ones and I have been buying my own clothes since I was fifteen.

This might as well be my first purchase from my overdue salary.

I am about to pay for it when a hand reaches past my shoulder, grabbing for the dress.

Its owner looks about my age — I would put her at twenty-five, twenty-six — fair-skinned and tall and very deliberately put-together. Dark hair, sharp eyes. She is looking at the dress. Not at me.

"I saw that first," she says.

"And I'm paying for it," I say. "Which is different."

Her eyes move across me like she's taking inventory. "I want it."

"So do I," I say. "And I had it first."

"Do you know who I am?" she asks.

"I don't," I say pleasantly. "Should I?"

Something shifts in her expression — not anger, something colder than that. 

"Give me the dress," she says.

"No," I say.

She reaches for it, and I smack her hands away, earning a gasp from her, the shop assistant frozen behind the counter and the other two customers making themselves very still.

It has been a very long twenty-four hours, and I am not in the mood, and I want this dress.

"You bitch!" she screams, swinging her hand to my face.

Big mistake.