Chapter 4

Nora

"Lily." I cut her off before the name could leave her mouth. "Enough."

She looked up at me, confused, but went quiet. She knew that voice.

I couldn't let her say Victor's name.

Victor was an Alpha. His word ran this whole territory, and Kane was young, half-healed, and still a stranger here. If he challenged Victor over a girl he'd met that morning, he would lose — and Victor would make Lily and me pay for it.

I'd gambled once already. Two years ago, I packed a bag in the dark, carried Lily to the pack across the river, and begged them to take us in.

They handed us straight back. Their Alpha shook Victor's hand on the porch and called it a misunderstanding between good families.

Victor spent the month after that teaching me, an inch at a time, exactly what it cost to try. I learned.

"Nora." Kane was still watching me, his jaw set hard. "Who hurt you. I'm not walking out that door until you tell me."

So I lied.

"No one hurt me." I made my voice flat and tired, the way I'd taught myself to. "I'm Victor's daughter. This is the Alpha's house. That's why we live here."

I pulled my collar back up over my shoulder.

"These are training marks. He has me spar with the warriors most days. I bruise easy. It looks worse than it is."

Kane's eyes thinned.

"I saw your back," he said. "Those aren't training marks. No one spars a girl until old scars are layered under fresh bruises. Someone's been hurting you on purpose."

He was too close to the truth. So I did what I always did with the truth. I buried it.

"You don't know anything about it." I held his stare and didn't blink. "It's my business. Not yours. You said your family would worry about you, and they will. So go home, Kane."

"And just leave you here? "

"I'll be fine. If I'm ever in real trouble, I'll come find you." I even made myself smile, small and easy, the practiced kind I gave strangers all day. "I promise."

It was a lie. I had no way to reach him, no idea where his pack was. I only needed him to believe I could.

For a long moment, he just looked at me, weighing it. Then the tension slowly drained from his shoulders.

"Fine," he said. "But I’ll never forget that you saved my life, Nora. If you ever need anything, just come to Darkmoon."

I sat Lily at the table with the last of her pancakes and told her to stay put and finish every bite. She nodded around a mouthful, her earlier fright already fading the way it only could in someone six years old.

Then I led him out the back, away from the windows, down the deer path that twisted through the pines behind the house. I'd walked it a hundred times. I knew every root, every branch, every bend where a patrol might see us.

The morning smelled of wet bark and pine sap. Somewhere off through the trees, warriors were running drills, but I kept us deep in the pines. No one saw us. No one ever used that path but me.

We stopped where the trees thinned out into open road, at the edge of Victor's land.

"Keep the bandages dry," I told him. "If the cuts get wet, they could get infected."

He nodded. He didn't move.

For one foolish second, I let myself look at him in the late morning sun. The torn shirt. The steady pale eyes. The way he watched me like I was a knot he hadn't finished untying.

"Goodbye, Kane."

I lifted my hand in a wave, turned, and walked back into the trees before he could say another word.

…

By noon, I was back at the diner in my faded blue uniform, pouring coffee, carrying plates, and smiling in the right places.

At the end of my shift, I counted my tips twice. Nineteen dollars. Half went into my apron for groceries; the other half I tucked into my sock for the tin under the loose floorboard at home.

I pretended the morning had never happened. I was good at that.

The sky had gone the color of an old bruise by the time I finally walked home.

I eased the front door open and slipped inside, careful not to be heard.

Then I saw him.

Victor stood in the middle of the front room, still in his pressed meeting clothes. His face was dark, set, unreadable.

Lily was beside him. Her small hand was knotted in the hem of her dress, and her eyes were huge and wet, brimming with tears she was fighting not to let fall.

My mouth went dry.

But I had done this a thousand times before. I smoothed my face into something soft. I lowered my voice and made it gentle.

"You're home early," I said. "I haven't even started dinner. Let me get the stove going—"

"Where have you been?"

His voice was perfectly calm. That was always how I knew to be afraid.