7: Old Promises

KADE'S POV

"Were you promised to each other, or something like that?"

I didn't answer right away.

"It's old history," I said finally. "Doesn't matter anymore."

Ivy's face did something complicated — relief, mostly, though she tried to bury it under concern.

"I didn't mean to pry. I just worry about you. You've seemed... off, since the dinner with her family."

Off wasn't the word for it.

I kept replaying the sound of the glass hitting my face, the ice sliding down my collar, and under it, the flat, bored way she'd looked at me while she did it, like I hadn't even earned real anger. Like I was beneath that.

Freya Everhart had spent years trailing after me with an expression I used to find pathetic and now apparently couldn't stand the sight of me at all.

It should have been a relief. She was the one always pushing for the bond, always finding reasons to be wherever I was. I'd spent half my life being polite about something I never wanted, out of pity as much as obligation.

So why did some ugly, small part of me want to know why she'd stopped.

"Kade?"

"It's fine," I said, sharper than I meant to. "Go clean up before next period."

Ivy nodded and hurried off, and I stood there a moment longer than I needed to, turning the whole conversation over.

A different car every day. Flashier than the last.

Ivy's Porsche had looked like a toy parked next to it. I'd heard two juniors arguing over the model before homeroom, something limited, something no one at this school should have been able to afford, let alone a girl everyone had spent years quietly pitying as some poor relation riding on my family's charity.

I'd never once asked what the Everharts were actually worth. I'd never had to. They were simply there, indulgent and endlessly patient, the family my mother leaned on every time ours came up short.

I didn't like how little of that I actually understood.

FREYA'S POV

The first sign that my father had actually pulled the funding came three days later, in the form of my driver’s idle gossip.

"Word is the Redwood pack missed a payment to one of their creditors," he said, adjusting the mirror. "Whole thing's got people talking. Apparently they've been running on borrowed time for a while."

"Is that so?" I kept my voice light and looked out the window instead of at him.

It was starting. Exactly on schedule, exactly the way I remembered it, except this time, no one was quietly covering it up out of loyalty to a dead friend. This time it would be allowed to actually happen.

I felt nothing when I heard it. I'd expected to feel something.

At school, the change in Kade was subtle but real. He'd stopped orbiting Ivy quite so visibly, distracted in a way that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with math he was clearly doing in his head for the first time in his life. His mother had aged five years in a week — I saw her once through the school gates, arguing with someone on the phone hard enough that her knuckles had gone white around it.

Good.

I didn't linger on it. I had my own math to do.

Between classes, I started keeping a small, careful list in my head — not the vague, furious make them pay from the night I woke up in this body, but names, roles. Whoever had access to the border patrol rotations three years from now. Whoever had reason to want my children gone before they were ever born.

It wasn't enough to hate them anymore. I needed to know exactly what they'd done, and exactly how, before I could make any of it stick.

Ronan jogged towards me at the edge of the training field that afternoon, toweling off from a run I'd pushed too hard, the way I'd been pushing every run since I woke up in this body.

"You're going to hurt yourself doing that every day," he said, not quite looking at me directly.

"I'm fine."

"You said that at the pool, too. Right before you almost weren't."

I glanced up at him, surprised he'd noticed at all — the Ronan I remembered from my last life had barely existed to me, a name attached to a face people were cruel to and moved past. This one stood there like he had nowhere else he needed to be, waiting to see if I'd actually answer him honestly.

"I have a lot to make up for," I said instead, which wasn't a lie, even if it wasn't the whole truth either.

Something flickered across his face — recognition, maybe, of a feeling he knew better than he let on.

"The Ranking Trial's being posted tomorrow," he said, after a moment. "Dates and format both. If you're planning on running yourself into the ground, you might as well have a reason."

I looked at him a beat too long.

"I'll be ready," I said.

He nodded once and walked off without saying anything else — which, I was starting to realize, was exactly the kind of thing that made him so different from every other wolf currently circling my life.

I stayed on the field a while longer, catching my breath, one hand pressed against the soft roll of stomach still stubbornly there under my shirt. A hundred and seventy pounds and dropping, but not fast enough to erase what people still saw when they looked at me.

I'd heard the whispers already, right on schedule. Fatso. Look at her waddle through drills. Bet she can't even shift without getting winded first.

Younger pups, barely into their first year at the academy, laughing behind their hands like I couldn't hear them from two feet away. I could. I'd heard every version of it before, in a life where the words had actually managed to break something in me.

They wouldn't get that satisfaction twice.

I remembered exactly how the Ranking Trial had gone the first time. I'd been slower than I should have been, muddled, my whole body dragging like it was moving through water — and I hadn't understood why until years later, when I learned Ivy had slipped something into my water bottle that morning, something to make my limbs heavy and my head foggy right when it mattered most.

I'd barely scraped onto the warrior roster that day, dead last, one placement above being sorted permanently into the omega ranks — spending the rest of my life fetching and cleaning for wolves half as capable as I actually was, while Ivy climbed straight into the Beta track on a bloodline that was never even hers.

I'd been so grateful, back then, just to escape the omega line entirely. Grateful, for scraping the bottom of a barrel someone else had rigged against me.

This time I know what's coming. This time I know exactly whose hands are on the scale.

This time, I won't let her get away with it.