Chapter 10

Asher’s POV

“You said in writing,” Noa said, and dropped four pages on my desk.

It was six in the morning. I hadn’t slept. I had spent the night in my study with every copy of the Charter I could find spread across the floor, and Micah asleep sitting up in the leather chair by the fire, snoring like a bear in a cave.

Noa stood on the other side of the desk in Leah’s borrowed sweater, which was too tight across the shoulders, and a pair of leggings, and the wool socks. Her hair was in a messy knot. There was flour on her cheek already. She had clearly been up longer than I had.

I looked at the pages. They were written in pencil, in a round, neat hand, on paper torn from a recipe pad. The top of the first page said, in capital letters, TERMS.

“I thought I was the one putting things in writing,” I said.

“You were. Then I thought about it, and I decided I’d rather write mine first.” She folded her arms. “Read them.”

Micah woke with a snort. “Is that bread I smell?”

“It’s in the kitchen,” Noa said, without looking at him. “Go away, Micah.”

He looked at her. He looked at me. He got up, stretched until his back cracked, and walked out with the dignity of a man who knows when a room is about to get dangerous.

The door shut.

I picked up the first page.

One. The Luna of Ironwood is a title. It is not a marriage, a mating, or a promise. Nobody may call it one in public without both of us agreeing.

Two. I keep my own rooms. You keep yours.

Three. No touching without asking. That goes both ways.

I glanced up at her. She lifted her chin at me, daring me to say a word. I kept reading.

Four. I run the kitchen. All of it. Nobody tells me how to feed this pack.

Five. You sit still every night for healing. Every night, Asher. No excuses, no meetings, no being brave in hallways.

Six. You tell me the truth. The whole truth, the first time I ask. No deciding things for me because you think I can’t take it.

Seven. If at the end of one year I want to leave, you release me in front of the whole pack, the same way you rejected me. Out loud. So everybody hears.

I read number seven twice.

Then I set the page down very carefully, because my hand wanted to crush it.

“That’s fair,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I meant.

“You keep saying that.”

“Because you keep being fair. It’s annoying.”

Her mouth twitched. She didn’t let it become a smile.

“Do you want to add anything?” she asked. “It’s your pack. You can add one.”

I took a pencil from the cup. I pulled the last page toward me. I thought about writing what I wanted, which was a thing I had no right to want, and I wrote a different line instead.

Eight. The Luna trains with the Alpha every morning at dawn until the full moon. In the old barn. Nobody watches.

I turned the page around. She read it. Her eyebrows went up.

“You want to teach me to fight.”

“I want you to walk out of that ring.”

“In thirty days.”

“Twenty-nine now.”

She stared at the line. Her fingers drummed once on the desk. Then she held out her hand for the pencil, and I gave it to her, and she signed her name at the bottom of the fourth page in big, round letters. Noa Bennett.

She held the pencil out to me.

I signed under her. Asher Stone. My hand was steadier than it had been in the hall, and I was absurdly proud of that.

“Done,” she said.

“Done.”

“Now take your shirt off.”

I choked.

She rolled her eyes so hard I heard it. “Term five. Every night. You skipped last night because you were busy naming me things in front of four hundred people. So we’re doing it now.”

“It’s morning.”

“The silver doesn’t care what time it is.”

I looked at her. She looked back at me, all business, flour on her cheek, her hand already resting on the edge of the desk as if she might come around it and do the buttons herself.

Term three. No touching without asking.

“Ask me,” I said.

Color rose up her throat. “What?”

“Term three. Goes both ways. You wrote it.” I leaned back in the chair. “Ask.”

For a moment she looked like she might throw the pencil at my head. Then she breathed out through her nose.

“Alpha Stone,” she said, with enormous dignity. “May I put my hands on your stupid, poisoned ribs?”

“Yes.”

~

She knelt beside the chair. I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it open on the left side, and she looked at the wound and her face did a small, quick thing that I was learning to read. A tightening at the corners of her eyes. Worry she didn’t want me to see.

“It’s worse,” she said.

“It’s better than it was.”

“It’s worse than it was two nights ago.” She leaned closer. Her breath touched my skin. “He changed your bandage yesterday morning?”

“He did. I let him. Micah said if I refused, Simon would know.”

“Micah’s right.” Her nose wrinkled. “There’s fresh dust on the edge. Not much. A pinch.”

“Can you take it out?”

“I can take most of it.” She pressed her palms flat to my side. “Hold still.”

Heat poured in.

It was the same as in the hallway and different too. In the hallway she had been frightened, and it had come out of her in a flood. Now it came slowly and on purpose, like water from a tap she could open and close. The warmth went into the wound and under the wound and along every black thread that had crawled across my ribs.

She began to hum.

Ari stretched inside me like a dog in a patch of sun. He made a sound I had not heard him make since I was a boy, a low, deep rumble of pure contentment.

Hers, he said.

Not yet, I told him.

Hers, he said again, very calmly, the way you say the sky is blue.

The black veins drew back an inch. Then two. The skin at the edge of the cut turned from gray to a raw, healthy pink. I could breathe deeper than I had in months. I could feel the bottom of my own lungs.

Then her humming caught.

It was a tiny hitch, one missed note. Her hands didn’t move, but her shoulders curled forward, and I heard her breath go in sharp through her teeth.

“Noa.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

“I’m almost done.”

“Stop.”

“Term six,” she said through her teeth. “You tell the truth. Term nine, which I’m adding now. You don’t tell me to stop when I’m in the middle of saving your life.”

“That’s not how terms work.”

“It is now.”

She pushed. I felt it, a last hard wave of heat that went right up into my chest. The hum rose and broke. The light around her hands flared bright gold and then went out like a candle in a draft.

She let go.

She sat back on her heels. Her face was gray. Her lips were pale. She smiled at me, a wobbly, proud, ridiculous smile.

“See?” she said. “Easy.”

Then her eyes rolled up, and she tipped sideways.

I caught her before her head hit the floor. I didn’t even remember moving. One moment I was in the chair and the next I was on my knees on the rug with her whole weight in my arms, and she was heavy and warm and limp, and her head fell against my bare chest.

“Noa. Noa, look at me.”

Her eyelids fluttered. They didn’t open.

“Micah!” I roared.

The door banged open. Micah came through it with half a roll in his mouth, took one look, and dropped the bread.

“What happened?”

“She overdid it. She wouldn’t stop.” I brushed the hair off her face. My hand was shaking again. “Get a healer. Not Simon. Get old Hannah from the village. Get anyone.”

“On it.”

He ran.

I held her. Ari was pacing inside me, back and forth, back and forth, whining in a way that went straight through my teeth. Her breath was steady, at least. Her heart was steady under my palm. I counted the beats because I could not think of anything else to do.

Then the knot in her hair slipped loose.

It fell down over my arm, thick and brown and soft. I went to push it back from her face again.

And I stopped.

A streak ran through it, right at her temple. A single lock, as wide as my finger, from the root to the very end.

It was silver.

Not gray. Not blond in the light. Silver, bright and cold, the same shade as the poison that had been crawling over my ribs ten minutes before.

I looked down at my side. The wound was smaller. The black veins were thinner.

I looked back at her hair.

And I understood what she had not said, what she had perhaps not even known herself. Every inch she took out of me did not simply vanish.

It went into her.