**Chapter 5**

"Not you," Vivienne said again, softer this time, like she was talking to a child.

Then her fingers closed on my arm.

She did not pull hard. She did not have to. Vivienne had a way of holding you that made you feel like a dog on a short rope. She walked me out of my room and down the back stairs, the narrow ones the servants used. Her heels clicked on every step. Click. Click. Click. My bare feet made no sound at all.

"Where are we going?" I whispered.

"Somewhere you will be safe."

"You mean somewhere he won't find me."

She did not answer. That was answer enough.

We passed the big kitchen. It was empty, which never happened at this time of the morning. The pots were still on the fire. A knife lay on the cutting board next to half an onion. Everyone had run out to see the Blackfang cars. Through the back door I could hear the noise of the whole pack gathering in the square. Voices. Running feet. A baby crying.

My mother was not there. I looked for her in every corner, but she was gone.

At the far end of the kitchen there was a small wooden door in the floor. It led to the cold cellar, where we kept the potatoes and the onions and the big barrels of salted meat for winter. I had been sent down there a hundred times to fetch things. I hated it. It was dark and damp, and the rats were as big as cats.

Vivienne pulled the door open with one hand. Cold air came up out of the hole, smelling of earth and old onions.

"Get in."

"Please," I said. "Please, I won't say anything. I will stand at the back of the line. I will keep my head down. He won't even look at me."

"He will look at everyone, you foolish girl. That is why he came." Her voice turned hard. "Get in, or I will call your father and tell him exactly what is under your hair. He can drag you out to the square himself. Would you like that? Would you like to stand in front of the whole pack while your father reads out your sentence?"

I looked into her cold green eyes and I knew she meant it.

I climbed down the ladder.

It was so dark at the bottom that I could not see my own hands. Above me, Vivienne's face was a pale shape against the kitchen light.

"If anyone asks, you are sick with fever," she said. "You have been sick since last night. You are too weak to stand. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good girl."

The door slammed shut. I heard something heavy being dragged over it. A barrel, maybe, or the big flour sack. Then her heels clicked away across the kitchen floor, and I was alone in the dark.

For a minute I just stood there, breathing. My heart was racing. Something small ran over my foot, and I bit my lip to keep from screaming.

*Calm down,* I told myself. *You have been down here before. You know this place.*

I did know it. I knew there were shelves on the left wall and barrels on the right. And I knew one more thing, something Vivienne had forgotten, because Vivienne had never been down here in her life.

At the front of the cellar, high up on the wall, there was a small window grate. It was barely the size of a cooking pot, with iron bars across it. It let in a little air so the potatoes would not rot. And it looked straight out at the pack square, right at ground level.

I felt my way along the shelves until I saw it, a small square of grey light high above me. I dragged an empty barrel under it and climbed up. My hands were shaking so badly that I almost fell. Then I pressed my face to the cold iron bars and looked out.

The square was full.

I had never seen so many people in it, not even on Midsummer Day. The whole of Hollowmere Pack was there. Men stood in their best shirts with their arms crossed. Old women whispered behind their hands. Children sat on their fathers' shoulders so they could see. And in the middle of the square, in a long straight line, stood the girls.

There were maybe thirty of them. Every unmated girl over eighteen. I knew them all. There was the baker's daughter, who had pushed me into the river when I was eleven. There were the Hartley twins, who used to bark at me in the hallway at school, because I was the girl with no wolf. And there were Selene's friends, who had followed me home from school with their cruel little laughs, and stopped only when Dorian came to walk beside me.

All of them were in their prettiest dresses. Some of them had flowers in their hair. Some of them were shaking. Some of them were smiling like it was the best day of their lives.

Around them, the Blackfang wolves stood in a big circle.

There must have been forty of them, and most of them were still in their wolf form. They were bigger than our wolves, with black fur and pale yellow eyes. They did not move at all. They sat or stood perfectly still, watching our people the way a cat watches a bird. A few were in human form, men and women dressed in black, with hard faces and no smiles.

One of them stood at the front of the line. He was lean, with sandy hair and kind brown eyes, and he held a sheet of paper in his hand. He was the one who had shouted the order through our house. He looked tired, like he had not slept either.

And next to him…

I stopped breathing.

He was standing with his back half turned to me, talking quietly to the sandy haired man. He was so tall that he stood a full head above everyone around him. His shoulders were broad, and his black shirt pulled tight across them. His hair was black too, cut short at the sides.

I knew the shape of those shoulders. I had held on to them in the dark.

Then he turned around, and for the first time in my life, I saw his face.

It was not a kind face. It was too hard for that. His jaw was sharp, the same jaw I had traced with my fingertips at dawn. His nose was straight. His mouth was a firm, flat line, like he had forgotten how to smile a long time ago. A thin white scar cut through his left eyebrow, as if someone had once tried to take his eye and failed.

And his eyes were gold.

Not brown with gold in them. Gold. Bright and burning, like coins in a fire. They swept across the square, and everyone they touched looked down at their feet.

So this was Alpha Kael Draven. The Butcher of Nine Packs. The man mothers used to frighten their children into bed.

The man who had knelt in the moss and asked me what I wanted.

My body knew him before my mind could catch up. Heat rushed through me so fast that I gripped the iron bars to keep from falling off the barrel. My skin tingled. My face burned. Under my hair, the hidden mark started to beat. Thump, thump, thump. Faster and faster, like it was trying to get out.

*No,* I begged it. *Please be quiet. Please, please be quiet.*

I pressed my hand hard over my neck and held my breath.

"Line is complete, Alpha," said the sandy haired man. "Thirty one women. The Gamma says one more is sick in bed with fever."

Kael's gold eyes moved to my father. My father was standing at the edge of the square with Vivienne beside him. He looked smaller than I had ever seen him. His big chest was puffed out, but his face was grey and sweaty.

"Sick," Kael repeated. His voice was deep and quiet. Not the roar from the forest. But I still felt it right in my bones.

"Yes, Alpha," my father said quickly. "A weak girl. No wolf at all. She is nothing, Alpha. Not worth your time."

My father said it so easily. *She is nothing.* He did not even know I was listening. But I knew he would have said the same thing if I was standing right in front of him.

Kael looked at him for one long moment. My father started to sweat even more.

Then Kael turned away and walked to the first girl in the line.

The whole square went silent.

He stopped in front of the baker's daughter. She was a big, pretty girl with red cheeks, and right now her cheeks were white. Kael bent his head close to her neck. He did not touch her. He only breathed in, slowly, through his nose. Then he straightened up, his face showing nothing, and moved on.

The baker's daughter let out a breath that sounded half like relief and half like disappointment.

He went to the next girl. And the next. And the next.

It was the strangest thing I had ever watched. He went slowly and carefully, the way a man looks for one lost coin in the grass. He bent his head and breathed in, then moved on. Some girls closed their eyes. One of the Hartley twins started to cry. One girl leaned toward him with her chin up and her neck bare, offering it to him, and he passed her by without a second look. The whole crowd laughed at her, and she went red to her ears.

With every girl, my heart beat harder.

I did not know what he was looking for. I did not know what he would do when he did not find it. I thought of my mother's warning. *Never let anyone smell your neck.* I thought of Vivienne's words. *A man like that does not lose what belongs to him.*

And there, deep inside me, was that small, stupid voice again. *He is looking for you. He came all this way for you.*

I shut my eyes and pushed the voice away.

When I opened them again, he had reached the end of the line.

Thirty one girls. Thirty one times he had bent his head. And thirty one times he had found nothing.

Kael stood still at the end of the line. His back was to me. I could not see his face, but I saw his hands. They were curled into fists at his sides.

The sandy haired man came up beside him. "Alpha," he said quietly. I could barely hear him from where I was. "She's not here. Maybe the Beta from Ashfall was right. Maybe she was a traveler. A rogue girl. Maybe she's already over the mountains…"

"She was here," Kael said. His voice was low and rough. "I smelled her on this land. She was here, Rowan."

Rowan. So that was the sandy haired man's name.

"Then where is she?"

Kael didn't answer. He lifted his head and looked slowly around the square, at the houses and the trees and the crowd. His eyes passed over the front of my father's house. Over the kitchen wall. Over the small iron grate down near the ground.

For one second, I was sure he was looking right at me.

I pulled my face back from the bars so fast that I nearly fell off the barrel. I crouched there in the dark with my hand over my mouth, shaking all over.

*Please. Please. Please.*

Then a voice rang out in the square. It was sweet and soft and a little bit shy. I knew that voice better than my own.

"Alpha Kael? Forgive me. I'm late."

I pushed my face back to the grate.

Selene was walking across the square.

She came from the direction of our house, slowly, with her head a little bowed. Her long black hair was loose and shining over her shoulders. She was wearing the white dress my father had shouted for. And over the dress, wrapped around her body and buttoned up to her chin, was my coat.

My old grey coat. The coat I had worn up the stairs to Dorian's room. The coat I had cried into at the Weeping Spring. The coat I had pulled on in the cold dawn after a night in the arms of a stranger.

She had not even washed it. There were still bits of moss stuck to the hem.

The crowd parted to let her through. People whispered. Vivienne stood at my father's side with her chin held high and a small, proud smile on her red lips.

Selene stopped at the very end of the line, right beside Kael. She lifted her eyes to his face, and they were wet with tears, like she could barely stand to look at him. I had seen her practice that look in the mirror a thousand times.

"I'm sorry, Alpha," she whispered. "I was too afraid to come out. After last night…" Her voice broke very nicely. "I didn't think you would ever come looking for me."

Kael did not move.

I watched his back. I watched his shoulders go stiff, like a wolf who has heard something in the trees.

Then he turned his head, very slowly, toward her.

The wind moved across the square. It lifted Selene's hair. It touched the old grey coat and carried its smell straight to him: moss and wet earth, cold spring water, and under all of it, the smell of a night that belonged to me.

A sound came out of Kael's chest. It was low and deep and terrible. It was not the sound of a man. It was the growl of a wolf, and it rolled across the square like thunder. The black wolves around the circle all rose to their feet at once. The children on their fathers' shoulders started to cry. Selene's smile slipped for half a second.

Down in the dark cellar, my hidden mark burned like fire.

Kael stepped toward my sister. Before anyone could blink, his hand shot out and closed on the collar of my coat. He pulled her close, so close their faces were almost touching. His gold eyes were blazing.

"Where," he said, in a voice so quiet and so dangerous that the whole square held its breath, "did you get this?”