Chapter Five: Glass Girl

Alpha Victor Blackwood had a way of making rooms feel smaller than they were. Not through size, he wasn’t a physically imposing man, but through the specific quality of his attention. He looked at you the way a surveyor looks at land he is already planning to develop. Assessing. Deciding. The decision made before you even opened your mouth.

I had been summoned to his study at ten in the morning, four days after the gathering, with a note slipped under my bedroom door that said simply: Please attend at your earliest convenience. Which in pack language meant: Come now. Bring nothing. Say less.

I dressed carefully. That was the only act of defiance available to me, so I made it count.

The study smelled like leather and old wood and the faint mineral cold of the stone walls beneath the paneling. Victor sat behind his desk with a folder open in front of him that he didn’t look at once during the entire meeting. Alexander sat to his father’s left, in the chair that meant second-in-command, in the posture that meant he had been told to be present and had decided to perform compliance so thoroughly it became its own kind of resistance.

He didn’t look at me when I walked in.

I sat in the chair across from Victor without being invited to and folded my hands in my lap.

“Serena.” Victor’s voice was the same temperature it always was. Not cold, exactly. Just the absence of warmth. “Thank you for coming.”

“Of course.”

He opened the folder. Closed it again. “I’ll be direct. The gathering has created some instability within the pack’s social structure. Certain perceptions have formed that, whether accurate or not, require management.” He paused. “For the good of the pack.”

For the good of the pack. Four words that had been used to justify every cruelty this family had ever committed.

“I understand,” I said.

“Effective immediately, you’ll be relocated to the lower residential quarter. The east block.” He said it the way people say things they have already decided cannot be argued with, smoothly and without inflection. “Your training privileges are suspended until after the mating ceremony. Pack activities, communal meals, and social gatherings are at your own discretion but I’d encourage you to exercise judgment.”

I translated that last part without difficulty. Stay invisible. Stay quiet. Do not exist in any space where you might remind people that you exist.

“For how long,” I said.

“Until things settle.”

“And when will that be?”

The pause was very short. “After the ceremony.”

Meaning: after Alexander is fully, publicly, permanently bound to my sister. After there is no version of events in which the mate bond between us becomes anyone’s problem. After I have been so thoroughly reassigned to the background of this story that even I start to believe I was never meant to be in the foreground.

I nodded once. “Is that all?”

Victor looked at me with something that was almost curiosity. Like he had expected this to take longer. Like he had prepared for tears or argument or the kind of scene that would give him something to work with, and I had not given him anything.

“That’s all,” he said.

I stood. I smoothed the front of my jacket. I turned toward the door.

I heard it before I reached the handle.

A sound. Sharp and quiet and specific. The sound of wood splintering under pressure.

I turned back without thinking.

Alexander’s hand was on the armrest of his chair. Or what remained of the armrest. His fingers had closed around the carved oak with enough force that a section of it had cracked clean off, and he was holding the broken piece without appearing to notice it, his knuckles white, his jaw set, his eyes fixed on a point on the wall three feet to my left.

Not looking at me.

Refusing to look at me with the specific, strenuous effort of a man who understood that if he looked at me right now he would not be able to stop himself from saying something he couldn’t take back.

The bond hummed between us. That low, insistent frequency that had been living in my chest since the gathering, the one I was learning to breathe around the way you learn to breathe around a bruised rib. Present with every inhale. Impossible to ignore. Impossible to fix.

Victor noticed none of it. Or he noticed and chose not to. With Victor, those two things were functionally the same.

I looked at Alexander for three full seconds. He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe, as far as I could tell. Just held that broken piece of armrest and stared at his fixed point on the wall and did absolutely nothing.

His silence was its own kind of violence. I had been thinking that since the gathering and it kept being true.

I turned back to the door.

“Serena,” he said.

I stopped. My hand on the door frame.

“I’m sorry.” So low I almost missed it. So stripped of everything that usually lived in his voice that it didn’t sound like him at all.

I stood in the doorway for a moment. The map was still folded inside my shirt. E. Nightfang’s slanted handwriting was still somewhere in the back of my mind. The silver light had been in my hands again this morning, longer than ever, and my wolf had watched it with an attention that felt less like fear and more like recognition.

“I know you are,” I said.

I walked out and I didn’t look back and I counted my steps all the way to the end of the corridor because it gave my mind something to hold onto that wasn’t the sound of wood cracking under a man who couldn’t bring himself to do the one thing that would have mattered.

Some apologies arrive too late to be anything except proof of what someone already knew they were doing wrong.

And the worst part, the part that sat in my chest the rest of the day like a stone I couldn’t cough up, was that I believed him.