CHAPTER 3

Amara

For a moment nobody moved, and the only sound in the house was the fire I'd built hours ago, ticking down to ash in the next room.

Then the first one laughed... short, pleased... and pulled out the stool across from me and dropped onto it like he'd been waiting all night for me to ask.

"Well," he said, stretching his legs out under the table like he owned it. "This is the best kidnapping I've been on in years."

The second one didn't sit. He stood by the door with his hands loose and his eyes on me, and I understood that this was the real test. Not the words. Whether he would do a thing a small Omega girl had told him to do, in her own kitchen, in the dark, with no weapon in her hand and no one in the world at her back.

I looked at him. He looked at me. Neither of us said anything, and I let the quiet stretch out long. He had the patience of a stone. So did I. But I'd had three lifetimes to practice, and he hadn't, and after a while something in his shoulders shifted.

He sat.

It was a small thing. It shouldn't have meant anything. It meant everything. In nineteen years in this house.

"Good," I said. I kept my voice flat so neither of them would hear what that had cost me. "Now listen, because I'll only lay this out once."

I put my hands flat on the table.

"There's a man coming for me. His name is Corvus. If you take me out of this house tonight, you don't just take me. You take him too. You should understand that before you make a choice you can't take back."

The first one leaned an elbow on the wood. "We know Corvus."

"You know of him. That's not the same thing." I looked between the two of them. "He has people in every pack territory from here to the eastern border. More men than you. More coin than you. More reasons than you'll ever have. And the reason he wants me won't shrink because you got to me first." I held it a breath. "It'll grow."

"You sound very sure of that," the first one said.

"I am."

"People are sure of a lot of things that aren't true."

"Not me," I said. "I don't have the luxury. Being wrong has always cost me more than it costs other people."

That landed somewhere. I watched it land. His easy face went still for half a second, the way still water goes when something moves underneath it.

"So I'm not a job," I went on. "I'm not a fun night out, or a story you'll tell later. I'm a problem with a price on the end of it, and the price has a name, and the name is Corvus. If you can't carry that, leave now, and we'll both pretend this never happened."

Something passed between the two of them then... quick, brother to brother, gone before I could catch the meaning of it. But I caught that it was there. They knew something about that name they had no plans to hand me for free. Fine. Neither did I. We could keep our secrets in the same wagon for a while.

The first one turned back to me, and the joke had drained out of his face, and what was left was sharper and more careful and a great deal harder to manage.

"How does a girl in a cold house at the edge of nowhere know all that?" he said.

"Because I've spent my whole life paying attention." I held his eyes. "Have you?"

He didn't answer. He just looked at me, and behind his eyes something moved that I didn't have a name for yet.

I stood up. The stool scraped on the stone, loud in the quiet, and I didn't care. If I was going to do this... and I'd already decided I was, the second I heard that back door open and knew the house wasn't safe for one more hour... then I would do it on terms of my own choosing, for once in three lives.

"If I come with you," I said, "there are rules."

"She has rules." The first one looked at his brother like it was the best news he'd had all year. "Go on. Let's have them."

"You don't touch me without asking. Either of you. Ever."

"Done." No pause at all. He didn't even glance at his brother first, which told me he was the kind of man who decided fast and meant it, or the kind who'd say anything to get what he wanted. I hadn't worked out which yet.

"You don't decide things about my safety over my head. I know things that will keep you breathing. Use them, or lose me."

"Done."

"And the day this stops being worth it to me..."

"Then we talk," he said, before I'd finished it. "We don't cage you. We don't drag you. That's not what this is, and it's not what we are."

I looked at him a long time, hunting for the lie under the words, the way I've hunted under every kind thing anyone has ever offered me. People are generous right up until the bill comes due, and the bill always comes due. I had never once failed to find it.

I looked, and I looked, and I couldn't find it. That frightened me more than finding it would have.

So I turned to the second one. The quiet one, who'd watched the whole thing with that still, forward way of looking that I was starting to feel like a hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades. He held my eyes. And when he spoke he said it low and plain, which is the only reason I half believed it.

"We're not him."

I didn't ask who he meant. I didn't have to.

I still didn't believe it. Not all the way. But I wanted to, and the wanting was the new thing, and new things have always scared me worse than old dangers ever could. Old dangers I knew the shape of. This I didn't.

I picked up my bag. It had been in my hand since the moment the door opened... I'd packed it three days ago, and the truth was I'd been ready to run from this house long before either of these men had a face to put to the running.

"Then let's go," I said. "Before the one who's really coming for me decides not to wait out the week."

I crossed to the back door and stepped through it first, ahead of them both, out into the cold and the dark. The night air bit at my face. Somewhere past the fields the tree line stood black against a blacker sky, and I walked toward it without slowing, out of the only life this body had ever known and into whatever waited on the far side of it.

I didn't look back at the house.

There was nothing in it that had ever once looked back at me.