CHAPTER 7

Ivy's POV

I find Maren at dawn.

She's already at her workbench when I walk in, sleeves rolled up and hair pinned back. She looks up and reads my face in about two seconds.

"Sit," she says.

I sit. She puts something hot in front of me without asking and goes back to what she's doing and lets the silence be what it is. She doesn't rush at things; instead, she lets them arrive.

"My father knew," I say, when the warmth has reached my hands, "what I am. He knew before he sent me here."

Maren's hands slow on the workbench, slide slightly.

"How long have you known?" I ask. "About me."

She turns around and leans back against the bench and looks at me with eyes that are somehow both honest and gentle at the same time.

"I suspected the first morning," she says, "when I brought you tea and you hadn't slept and the moon was still two days out and you already had that look."

"What look?"

"Like something inside you was knocking on a door." She pauses. "I've seen it once before. A late bloomer. But that was Pack-born, someone who already had the language for it. You don't have the language."

"No, I don't," I agree.

She comes and sits across from me.

"Ivy. What I think you are, it's not just a late-blooming wolf." She says it slowly. "There are bloodlines, old ones, that carry a specific designation. It's rare. In the Pack it's considered…" she chooses her next word carefully, "significant."

"Say it plainly," I say.

"I think you're an Omega."

The word lands in the room and a short silence follows.

"Okay," I say. Because I need a second before anything else.

"Okay," Maren echoes, gently.

I wrap both hands around the mug. "What does it actually mean? Not the Syndicate version where it gets said in the same tone as defective."

"It means your wolf carries a frequency the Pack responds to instinctively. It means you affect the territory just by being in it." She pauses. "It means you were never broken, Ivy. You were dormant. Waiting for the right conditions."

"And Ashveil is the right conditions."

"Pack territory. Full moon. A hundred wolves around you." She nods. "Yes."

I sit with that.

My father's careful silences. The file I was never shown. The Syndicate medic twice a year writing things in a notebook he always closed when I walked in. The word Omega caught at the edge of conversations that stopped when I entered the room.

He knew exactly what his daughter was and he knew exactly where to send her to wake it up.

I just don't know what he planned to do with her once it did.

***

I avoid Caelum all morning.

Not obviously. I'm just making choices about where I am and when that don't coincide with where he is. It's a skill I've had since I was seventeen, and I deploy it cleanly.

I need to think before I talk to him.

What I saw on his face last night; that unmanaged flicker when he looked up and saw me and Rook at the railing. I've been turning it over since dawn and I can't place it cleanly. It wasn't anger; it was something more complicated and more private, the face of someone who saw something that confirmed a fear they'd been carrying quietly.

I don't know what the fear is yet. But I need to know before I walk toward it.

Rook finds me at noon in the eastern courtyard.

I'm sitting on a low stone wall with a bowl of food I've been moving around for twenty minutes. He sits beside me, close enough that our arms nearly touch, and eats his own food in the easy silence that has always been the most natural thing between us.

A couple of younger Pack members at the far end of the courtyard glance at us and look away. The Pack's wariness around Rook is different from their wariness around me. Mine is curious. His is instinctive, the way you're wary of something you can't quite categorize.

"You should know," Rook says, without looking at me, "that I sent a report to your father this morning."

I go still.

"Routine," he adds. "Arrival confirmation. Territory access. Nothing about last night or what you're going through."

"But you'll have to tell him eventually," I say. "When it progresses."

Rook looks at his food. "I'll have to send reports. What I put in them is a decision I make."

I look at the side of his face, the slight tension around his eyes that I've learned to read as something costing him something. "That puts you in a difficult position."

"I've been in difficult positions."

"Not ones that compromise your standing with the Syndicate."

He looks at me. "My standing with the Syndicate is not the thing I'm most concerned with right now."

The courtyard is very quiet around us.

"Rook…"

"Not here," he says, his voice low.

We finish eating in silence.

But it's a different silence than before. Something has shifted in its texture and we both know it and neither of us says so.

***

I find Caelum at the eastern wood line in the late afternoon.

Not by accident. Maren told me where he'd be and I went there deliberately because I'm done avoiding things.

He hears me coming and turns, and his face does the thing it does when he sees me; that slight opening, warmth he doesn't seem to know how to hide.

"Ivy," he says.

"Caelum." I stop a few feet from him. "Last night. When you saw me and Rook on the walkway."

He looks at me steadily. "You don't have to explain anything to me."

"I'm not explaining. I'm asking." I hold his gaze. "What was that on your face?"

He's quiet for a moment.

"I don't have a right to an opinion about who you stand beside," he says carefully.

"That's not what I asked."

The trees move around us. Somewhere above, a bird calls and goes silent.

"No, it's not," he says.

"I don't know what Rook Vane is to you," he adds, "and it's not my place to know. But when I saw you last night, close like that, it felt like…" he pauses, "like something being taken before I'd had a chance to…"

He stops himself.

"Before you'd had a chance to what?" I say softly.

"Before I'd had a chance to know you," he says, "properly. Without all of this between us."

The wind moves through the pines.

"Then know me," I say.

Something in his face does something I don't have words for yet.

He opens his mouth to respond, and his name cuts through the trees from the direction of the lodge, sharp and urgent, a Pack member's voice with something wrong in it.

Caelum's expression shifts immediately, the Alpha's brother stepping forward. He looks at me quickly.

"Stay here," he says, and moves through the trees fast.

I follow anyway because stay here has never once in my life been an instruction I was good at.

I come through the tree line and stop.

Three Pack sentries in the courtyard. Caelum reaching them. And between them, held by two of the largest wolves I've seen in this territory, is a figure I recognize before I see the face.

Rook.

His hands are raised. Not in surrender, but in the careful position of someone who has done nothing aggressive and wants that clearly understood. His eyes find mine across the courtyard, and they're doing something they almost never do.

Asking me something.

Caelum is talking to the sentries, low and controlled, and I catch three words clearly across the distance between us.

Coded. Syndicate. Transmission.

And the ground underneath everything I thought I understood shifts in a way I feel in my back teeth.