Chapter 4

POV: Vera

I kept waiting for him to take it back.

All morning, while I cracked eggs and sliced bread and scraped dried blood from under my fingernails, I expected Caius to walk into the kitchen and tell me he'd changed his mind. That he'd been delirious. Or polite. Or just outmaneuvered by a four-year-old who didn't understand what "mate" meant. I'd slept maybe three hours. My eyes felt like they'd been packed with sand.

He didn't.

Caius sat at the table eating one-handed, his other arm braced against the bandages on his ribs. Cleo sat across from him, swinging her feet off the chair, telling him about every bug she'd found in the backyard. She'd named each one. Caius listened without interrupting, which put him ahead of most adults I knew. Every so often he asked a question, and Cleo lit up like he'd handed her a gift.

I set a glass of water in front of him and caught myself staring at the way his shoulders filled out the borrowed shirt. I looked somewhere else.

"Caius." I leaned against the counter. "I need to say something."

He looked up. Gold eyes, steady and flat.

"A mate bond is the most important thing a wolf can have. And you agreed to this because my four-year-old sister ambushed you while you were barely conscious." I stayed where I was and kept my voice steady. "I don't want you to feel like I'm using the fact that I saved your life to pressure you into anything."

He set down his fork and said nothing, staring at me.

I went on. "I'm not the kind of person who—"

"Vera." Quiet, but it stopped me clean. "I have my reasons for staying here. You're not a burden, and I'm not doing this out of obligation. Believe that if nothing else."

Something in his voice, not warmth exactly, but something level and certain, and the tightness in my chest let go. I hadn't realized how tightly I'd been holding it until it was gone.

I nodded. "Okay."

"Okay," Cleo repeated, grinning, and went back to describing a beetle she'd named General Whiskers.

After breakfast, I stood in the hallway and ran my hand along the wall.

There was a crack in the plaster near the doorframe. Dad had put his fist through it the night Mom came home with a split lip and a torn jacket. She'd walked through the door with a bag of groceries and blood on her collar, and he'd held her for twenty minutes before either of them said a word.

This house had their whole life in its walls. The loose handle on the bathroom door Dad always said he'd fix on Saturday. The water stain on the kitchen ceiling from the hole in the roof Dad patched when I was twelve. Cleo's height marks on the inside of her closet, three years of pencil lines, the last one drawn by our mother's hand two weeks before she died. The kitchen chair with the wobbly leg that Mom refused to let Dad fix because she said it kept her honest.

I pulled my fingers off the wall.

I wasn't losing this house.

I opened the pantry. Two cans of soup, half a bag of rice, a box of salt. Caius was badly hurt. Until he healed, I was the only able-bodied person under this roof. I needed medical supplies, and we were nearly out of food. I'd been stretching what we had for days, and now I had an injured man to feed on top of everything else. Forty silver would fix all of it. I didn't have forty silver. I didn't have four.

I tucked Cleo in on the couch with her favorite blanket. "I'm going to the market. Stay inside and let Caius rest."

"Can I show him my drawings?"

"When he wakes up from his nap."

"He's not napping." Cleo pointed past me. "He's watching us." She said it the way she'd announce a bird on the windowsill.

I turned. Caius stood at the end of the hallway, leaning against the wall, one hand pressed to his ribs. He looked like he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't.

"Go back to bed," I said.

His jaw tightened. But he turned and walked back down the hall without a word, moving stiffly, one hand trailing the wall. He didn't argue. I filed that away. Whoever he was, wherever he'd come from, he knew when to pick his battles.

I watched him go. Something tugged behind my ribs that I didn't want to think about.

I had a house to keep and a list to get through. The morning air bit cold. Frost clung to the grass, catching the early light. I'd made it three steps down the front path when I heard my name.

"Vera!"

Ruth Maddox stood at the edge of her garden, pruning shears in one hand, a chipped mug of tea in the other. She was short and round, somewhere past sixty, with silver-streaked hair pinned in a messy knot and dirt permanently under her fingernails. She'd lived next door since before I was born. After my parents died, she brought a casserole to our door every night for a month and never once asked to be thanked. Her husband, a quiet man with a bad knee, had fixed our gate the week after the funeral without saying a word to either of us.

"How are you holding up, sweetheart?" She set down the shears and came to the fence.

"Better, actually." I leaned against the post. "I found a mate."

Her eyebrows climbed her forehead. "You what?"

"Yesterday."

She stared at me. Then she laughed — short, warm, disbelieving. "That might be the fastest courtship in pack history." Her face softened. "Is he good?" She asked it the way she'd ask whether a roof would hold through winter.

"He's decent." It was the most honest answer I had after twelve hours.

Ruth squeezed my arm across the fence. "Well, good. I was going to tell you — the lycan royal's beta is coming to inspect the pack today. Word is the alpha might ease up on evictions while the royal eye is on us. But if you've already got a mate, even better."

"Can you keep an ear out for Cleo while I run to the—"

"Vera Crane."

The voice came from behind me. Low. Official.

I turned.

Three wolves stood in our yard. Two wore the gray armbands of the alpha's household guard. The third was taller, broader, with a patrol-rank patch on his chest and arms folded across it. Gareth Holt. One of the alpha's enforcers. Heavy jaw, cropped brown hair, and a face built for exactly one thing. He had been at the great hall when the alpha gave me my week. He'd smiled.

"Alpha sent us to inventory the property and confirm your departure." He looked past me toward the house. "Today's the last day. You know the terms."

Ruth's hand tightened on the fence post behind me.

"I'm not leaving." I stepped away from the fence. "I have a mate. Under pack law, a bonded wolf can't be evicted."

Gareth's eyes narrowed. "A mate."

"That's what I said."

The guard on his left, shaved head and a scar through one eyebrow, let out a short laugh. "Where's your mark, then?"

"We haven't marked yet."

"So you don't have a mate." Gareth stepped forward. "Nobody in this pack is claiming an omega who can't shift, Crane. You really expect us to believe you found someone willing in one day?"

He turned toward the front door. "We're going inside."

I stepped into his path. "No. You're not."

His jaw worked. The two guards flanked him, and I felt their wolves pressing outward, the kind of pressure that's supposed to make an omega fold and step aside. I'd felt it my whole life, from every wolf who outranked me. It was supposed to feel like a wall. To me it had only ever felt like a stiff breeze.

I didn't step aside.

"Move," Gareth said.

"This is my house."

Something ugly crossed his face. His hand shot out and grabbed my arm above the elbow, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. Ruth made a sharp sound behind me.

A second hand caught Gareth's wrist.

Caius stood in the doorway. Pale. One hand on the frame. His gold eyes were flat and cold and fixed on Gareth's face.

"Who dares touch her?"