chapter 10

Daisy

I didn't let him see me break. I put my cup down. I stood up. I pushed my chair in neatly, the way Helena taught me when I was eight and still eating with my hands.

"Yes, Alpha," I said.

Then I walked out of that dining room with my head high and every eye in the room burning into my back.

I made it up the stairs. I made it down the hallway. I made it all the way to my bedroom door before my knees gave out and I slid down the wall with my hand over my mouth.

'He used us,' Nyx sobbed. 'He used us and threw us away.'

Something to use when I'm bored and throw away when I'm done. He told me exactly who he was two years ago. I just didn't listen.

I was shoving clothes into my bag when the connecting door opened.

Helena stood there clinging to the frame. Her face was grey. Her whole body was trembling. She hadn't walked on her own in months.

"Mama!" I ran to her and caught her before she fell.

"What are you doing? You can't be up!"

"I heard," she said, panting.

"The maids were talking. Is it true? He's sending you away?" I didn't answer. I didn't have to.

Helena's eyes went hard in a way I'd never seen before. She looked past me at the half-packed bag on the bed.

"Get my son," she said.

"Mama, please, just leave it..."

"Get. My. Son."

I didn't have to get him. He must have heard her through the wall, because two minutes later, he was standing in the doorway, his face pale with panic.

"Mom, what are you doing out of bed?"

"Rose stays," Helena said. His jaw locked.

"Mom..."

"I was Luna of this pack for thirty years, Lucien Blackwood. I still have a say over who touches my body." She was shaking so hard I had to hold her up.

"Rose stays, or I stop taking my medicine. All of it. Tonight." The room went dead silent.

"You wouldn't," he said.

"Try me."

They stared at each other for a long time. Mother and son. The same stubborn blue eyes. Lucien looked away first.

"Fine," he said. His voice was like ice cracking. Then he turned to me.

"Stay. Do your job. And stay the hell away from me." He walked out.

Helena sagged against me, all her strength gone at once. I carried her back to bed. She weighed almost nothing.

"Why did you do that?" I whispered, tucking the blanket around her.

"Because I let you leave once." She closed her eyes.

"I won't let it happen twice."

For the next two days, he was a ghost. It was those four months all over again. He walked out of rooms when I walked in. He ate dinner in his office. When we passed in the hallway, he looked straight through me like I was made of glass.

The only difference was that this time, I knew how his hands felt on my skin. And without the pills, my scent was coming back fast.

I could smell it myself now. Rain and something sweet underneath. Damien found me in the laundry room on the second day, scrubbing my arms raw with cold water.

"Here," he said, handing me a bar of dark green soap. "Wolfsbane. It'll dull it. It won't hide it, but it'll help."

"How long?"

"A few days. Maybe a week, if he's not paying attention." He paused.

"He's paying attention, Daisy."

"He's ignoring me."

"No," Damien said quietly.

"He's avoiding you. There's a difference. He hasn't slept since that night. I found him in the gym at four this morning, beating a punching bag until his knuckles split." I scrubbed harder.

"I don't care," I said.

"Yeah," Damien said. "I can tell."

On Friday afternoon, the day before the ceremony, I walked past the sitting room and saw them.

Celeste was perched on the arm of his chair with a velvet box open in her hands. Inside was a ring. A huge silver moonstone surrounded by diamonds. The Luna ring. The one Helena wore for thirty years.

"It's perfect," Celeste cooed.

"Put it on me, babe."

Lucien took the ring out of the box. He held it for a long moment, staring at it. Then he slid it onto her finger.

I didn't make a sound. I didn't need to. His head snapped up and his eyes found me in the doorway instantly, like he'd felt me there.

For one second, his mask slipped. And I saw it. Something raw and desperate and hurting.

Then it was gone, and he looked back at Celeste like I didn't exist.

That night, I broke into his office. I didn't plan it. I was walking back from Helena's evening medicine, and his office door was open a crack, and the room was dark. He was at the gym again. I could hear the punching bag from down the hall.

I told myself I was looking for my pills. I was lying. I wanted answers. I went through his desk drawers one by one. Papers. Pack reports. The treaty with Crescent, signed in thick black ink. A photo of him and his father on a hunting trip.

The bottom drawer was locked. I picked it with a hairpin. Moonstone taught us that in the first month.

Inside was a wooden box. And inside the box were letters. Hundreds of them.

Every single envelope said the same thing in his messy, slanted handwriting.

'Daisy.

My hands started shaking so badly I almost dropped the box.

On top of the pile was something folded into a tiny square. I opened it carefully.

It was my Moonstone acceptance letter. The one he tore apart in this office two years ago. Every piece had been taped back together, so carefully that the tape had gone yellow and soft with age.'

'Daisy,' Nyx whispered. 'Look at the letters.'

I opened the first one. The date was the morning I left.

'Daisy,

I watched you get in that car. I stood at the window and I watched you go and I didn't stop you. You'll never know how hard that was. I had to hold onto the window so I wouldn't run down there and drag you back. I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry.'

I opened another. Six months later.

'I went to Moonstone today. They wouldn't let me see you. I nearly killed the guard at the gate. Damien had to drag me away. Mom won't speak to me. Seraphina thinks I'm losing my mind. Maybe I am.'

Another. A year.

'It's your birthday. The kitchen made your cake. I sat in your room and ate the whole thing by myself, and I was sick after. I think you'd laugh at me.'

The tears were running down my face so fast I couldn't see the words anymore. I wiped them away with my sleeve and opened the very last letter in the pile. The date was three weeks ago. Right before I came home.

'Daisy,

Every night I tell myself I did the right thing. That everything I said to you on that balcony was worth it. That you're alive and safe somewhere, hating me, and that's better than the alternative.

I knew you were standing in that hallway. I heard your heartbeat. I said every word for you to hear. Because if you stayed, he would have found out what you are to me. And he would have killed you.'

I stopped breathing. He knew, he knew I was there that night. He said it all on purpose.

Who? Who would have killed me? Behind me, the office door clicked shut.

I spun around so fast the box slid off the desk and hit the floor. Letters scattered across the carpet like snow.

Lucien was standing in the doorway. Shirtless, sweaty, his knuckles wrapped in bloody tape.

He looked at the letters on the floor. Then he looked at me. There were no pills left in my body. The soap had worn off hours ago. And I was crying, and the whole room was full of my scent. His nostrils flared. His eyes went pitch black. His whole body went deadly still.

"You," he said.