Chapter 1 - The Watching

Brie's POV

Marlena’s knuckles catch me under the ribs before I see her hand move, and I’ve already decided not to make a sound before the air leaves me. That part isn’t bravery. It’s just easier. Sound brings more of them, and four is already enough.

“Look at her,” says Tansy, somewhere above and to the left of me. I’m on the ground, which means everyone is above and to the left of me. “She’s not even crying.”

“She doesn’t feel it right,” Marlena says, like she’s explaining a math problem. “Omegas like her don’t feel anything right.”

That’s not true, but I’ve learned there’s no version of correcting her that doesn’t end with my face in the dirt for longer. So I stay still and let the cold of the packed earth come up through my palms, counting the rocks under my left hand. Four, five, six... counting is a thing I can do with my mind, while my body is busy being on the ground.

Nobody else in the yard has stopped training to watch. That’s the part people get wrong about what happened to me, later, when they ask. They imagine a circle. There was no circle. There were maybe nine other wolves close enough to see exactly what Marlena and Tansy and the other two were doing to me, and every one of them found something extremely interesting to look at in the opposite direction. I don’t blame them anymore. I used to. You stop blaming people for surviving the same pack you’re surviving.

“No wonder the rogue-spawn can’t take a hit,” Tansy says. “Found half-dead on no-moon land. Probably should’ve stayed there.”

That one lands somewhere different than the kick did. I don’t have a memory of the night they found me. I was a few weeks old, swaddled in nothing, on Snowdon land that wasn’t ours during a moon phase that doesn’t shed light on anything, which is apparently a very funny coincidence if you’re Tansy. Moonfall. Found at the moon’s fall. It sounds almost pretty if you don’t know what it actually means, which is: nobody’s, found by accident, kept out of obligation.

I’m working out whether I can get a knee under me without anyone noticing when the yard goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with me.

I know the sound of that quiet. Everyone does. It’s the sound four dozen wolves make when they remember, all at once, exactly where they sit under a wolf who outranks them.

I don’t lift my head right away. There’s a logic to that too. Moving fast draws eyes, and eyes are the last thing I want on me right now, on the ground, with dirt on my mouth. So I wait, and the silence gets a name.

“That’s enough.”

Damien Devonshire’s voice doesn’t get louder when he’s angry. I’ve noticed that about him over the years, the way you notice anything about a person you’ve spent half your life trying not to be noticed by. It gets quieter. Flatter. Like he’s saving the volume for something that’s actually going to need it.

Marlena’s foot, which had been drawing back for another go at me, doesn’t finish the motion. I hear it set back down instead, careful, like the ground might be wired to do something if she puts her weight on it wrong.

“Alpha-heir,” she says. Her voice has gone up half an octave. “We were just—”

“I can see what you were doing.”

He doesn’t ask what started it. He doesn’t ask if I’m hurt. He doesn’t even look at me yet, and somehow that’s the part that tells me how bad this could get for them, he’s not distracted enough by me to bother checking. His eyes are on Marlena, on Tansy, on the two who haven’t said anything and are already backing toward the treeline like distance might retroactively un-involve them.

Tansy’s the one who breaks. “It’s not like she’s... she’s just an omega, she’s not even—”

“Go,” he says. One word. They go. All four of them, fast enough that Marlena trips over her own boots near the gate, and nobody laughs, which tells you everything about how the air in the yard has changed.

That’s when he looks at me.

I get my knee under me before he can decide whether to offer a hand, because I don’t want to find out what I’d do if he did. Pull away and insult him. Take it and hate myself. There’s no version of that moment that ends well for me, so I skip it. I’m on my feet. My ribs are going to be a problem tomorrow, the kind of problem I’ll handle the way I handle all of them, alone, in my own bed, breathing shallow until it stops being the worst thing in the room.

“You’re bleeding,” he says. Like I might not have noticed.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. It’s blood.”

I don’t have an answer for that that doesn’t sound either pathetic or like an argument, so I don’t give him one. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and look at the space slightly to the left of his face, which is as close as I let myself get to looking at him directly anymore, because direct eye contact with Damien Devonshire has never once gone somewhere good for me. He’s been watching me since I was twelve years old, the way a wolf watches the smallest member of a different pack’s hunting line, like he’s deciding when, not if.

He doesn’t say anything else. He just… stays there, a beat too long, watching me gather myself up off the ground like he’s never seen anyone do it before, and I have to physically make myself walk away before the silence turns into something I can’t take back.

It isn’t until I’m three buildings away, ribs screaming with every breath, that the actual fear catches up to me, not the fear of Marlena, who I can predict down to the inch. The fear of a boy who just stood in a training yard and made forty wolves disappear with two words, and then looked at me afterward like I was the only interesting thing left standing in it.

Being invisible has kept me alive for nineteen years.

I have a very bad feeling that’s about to be over.