chapter 4

Daisy

'My future Luna.'

Three words. That's all it took for something inside me to crack wide open.

I should have been relieved. He had someone. He would never look at me again, never touch me again, never find out who I was. That was the whole point.

So why did it feel like he'd just ripped my heart out with his bare hands?

'Because he's ours,' Nyx growled. 'And she's sitting on him.'

'He's not ours. He called us a plaything.'

She didn't answer. She just paced and snarled inside my chest until I felt sick.

Celeste Moreau was the daughter of the Crescent pack Alpha. Rich. Gorgeous. Cruel in a pretty, smiling way that made it hard to prove anything. By the end of my first week, every maid in the house was terrified of her.

By the end of my second week, she had decided I was her new favorite toy.

"Rose," she sang from the sitting room on Thursday afternoon.

"Come here, sweetie."

I walked in with Helena's medicine tray in my hands. Celeste was stretched out on the couch with her feet on the cushions. Lucien sat in the armchair across from her, going through papers. He didn't look up.

"My tea's cold," Celeste said, holding out her cup.

"I'm a healer, not a maid," I said. Her smile didn't move.

"Of course. I'm so sorry."

Then she tipped the cup and poured it down the front of my shirt.

It wasn't cold. It was scalding.

I gasped and stumbled back, the tray crashing to the floor. Pills scattered across the rug. The burn spread across my chest like fire, and I bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood just to keep from screaming.

"Oops," Celeste said. "Clumsy me."

I looked at Lucien.

I don't know why. Old habit, maybe. The little girl inside me who still believed that if someone hurt me, he would come.

He was watching. His jaw was tight, his knuckles white around the papers in his hand. He didn't say a word. Of course he didn't.

"Clean that up," Celeste said, waving at the pills on the floor.

"Those are for his poor mother, aren't they? We wouldn't want her to suffer."

I got down on my knees and picked up every single pill with shaking hands. My eyes burned, but I didn't let one tear fall. Not in front of her. Never in front of him.

When I finally stood up and walked out, I heard Lucien's voice behind me, low and cold.

"Do that again," he said,

"and you'll leave my house in pieces." I stopped in the hallway, my heart pounding.

"Babe, it was an accident," Celeste said.

"I don't care. She's keeping my mother alive. Touch her again and see what happens."

Of course. It wasn't about me. It was about Helena. It was never about me.

In the staff bathroom, I peeled my shirt off and stared at the angry red blister spreading across my chest. I ran cold water over a towel and pressed it against the burn, biting down on my wrist to keep quiet.

When I was nine, I fell off the back fence and split my knee open on a rock. Lucien carried me all the way inside on his back. He cleaned it himself, blowing on it every time I cried, and he put a stupid cartoon bandage on it and told me I was the bravest girl in the whole pack.

That boy would have torn Celeste apart for this. That boy was gone.

I looked at myself in the cracked mirror. A stranger looked back. Strong arms. Hard eyes. No more hollow cheeks. No more little girl hiding bread in her pillowcase.

"You don't need him," I whispered to her.

"You never did."

She didn't look like she believed me. That night, Helena got worse.

Her fever spiked so high she didn't recognize me. She kept calling for me, over and over, while I sat beside her pretending to be someone else.

"Daisy," she cried, tossing on the pillow.

"Daisy, where are you? Don't let him send you away. Don't let him..."

I pressed a cold cloth to her forehead and pushed my healing into her until my hands went numb and my nose started to bleed. Slowly, so slowly, the fever broke.

By two in the morning, she was sleeping. I was shaking so badly I could barely stand.

'Let me out,' Nyx begged. 'Please. Just for an hour. I can't breathe in this house.'

Neither could I. I slipped out through the kitchen and ran for the trees.

The moment I hit the forest, I let her take over. My bones cracked and shifted. My skin split into fur. Pain tore through me and then vanished, and suddenly I was running, four paws pounding the dirt, the cold air rushing through my thick silver coat. For the first time in two weeks, I could breathe.

We ran until the pack house was gone behind us. We ran until the burn on my chest stopped stinging and the ache in my heart went quiet. We stopped at the edge of the river, and Nyx lifted her head to the moon.

Then she froze. Something was out there. A howl cut through the night. Deep, furious, so loud it shook the leaves on the trees.

I knew that howl. I'd heard it a thousand times when I was a little girl, standing on the back porch, watching him run, Lucien.

'Run,' I screamed at Nyx. 'RUN!'

She didn't want to. Every instinct in her body wanted to go toward him, not away. I had to fight her for control, and we took off sideways through the brush.

He was faster. I could hear him crashing through the trees behind us, getting closer and closer. A huge black wolf, twice my size, with eyes glowing gold in the dark. He wasn't hunting. He was chasing like his life depended on it.

How? The blocker hid my scent. He couldn't smell me. But he didn't need to smell me. He could feel me. The bond. He felt it the second I let Nyx out.

I dove into the river. The freezing water knocked the breath out of me, and the current dragged me downstream, under a fallen tree and around a bend. I clawed my way out on the other bank and shifted back so fast I screamed into my own hand.

Naked, soaking wet, and shaking, I crawled under the thick roots of an old oak and pressed myself into the mud. Seconds later, he burst out of the trees across the river.

He stopped on the bank, his huge body heaving. He paced back and forth, snarling at the water. Then his bones cracked, and the black wolf melted away, and Lucien stood there in the moonlight with nothing on but the river spray.

He looked wrecked. His chest rose and fell like he'd been running for hours. His hands were shaking.

He stared into the dark trees on my side of the river. Right at me.

I stopped breathing. I pressed my hand over my mouth so hard my teeth cut my lip.

"I know you're there," he said, his voice raw. "I can feel you." Silence.

Then he said it. One word, broken and desperate, so quiet I almost didn't hear it over the water.

"Daisy?"