Chapter Six: Poison in the Well

Sophia came to visit me on a Tuesday, which told me everything. Tuesdays were when my father had his standing lunch with the pack elders. Tuesdays were when Alexander ran extended drills with the border patrol and didn’t return until late afternoon. Tuesdays were, apparently, when my sister felt safest walking into the room of the person she had destroyed.

She knocked first, which surprised me. Sophia had never knocked on my door in twenty-three years of shared existence. She had always just walked in, the twin prerogative, the assumption of access. The knock was new. The knock was performance.

I opened the door.

She was wearing pale blue, which she knew looked good on her, and her hair was down, and she was carrying a small wicker basket with a cloth over the top the way people carry things in stories about kindness.

“I thought I’d check in,” she said. Her voice was warm and careful and precisely calibrated. “You’ve been so quiet since the gathering. I’ve been worried.”

I looked at her for a moment.

Then I opened the door wider and stepped aside.

She moved through my new room, the east block room, smaller and lower-ceilinged than my old one, with the assessing ease of someone cataloging damage. She noted the single window without commenting on it. She set the basket on the table and folded back the cloth to reveal a careful arrangement of things she knew I liked. Good bread. The dark chocolate from the pack shop I had always been partial to. A small jar of honey. And a flask of something that steamed faintly.

“Herbal tea,” she said. “The kitchen had fresh chamomile. It’s supposed to help with sleep.”

My wolf recoiled.

It was not a dramatic thing. No growl, no lurch. Just a quiet, firm pulling-back, like a hand touched to a hot surface before the brain has finished processing the heat. I felt it in my stomach and behind my sternum and somewhere lower, animal and specific and absolutely certain.

I looked at the flask. Steam curled from the lip, gentle and domestic and entirely innocent-looking.

“Thank you,” I said.

Sophia smiled and talked for twenty minutes about the ceremony preparations, about the renovation of the Luna suite, about Alexander’s preference for the east garden for the outdoor reception and whether she agreed with it or not, and I sat in the chair across from her and listened and made appropriate sounds and watched her hands. The way they moved when she talked. The way they didn’t shake. The way she reached over once and adjusted the flask slightly closer to my side of the table without breaking her sentence, smooth as breathing.

She had always been good at this. I was only now understanding how good.

When she stood to leave she pressed my hand and told me she hoped we could get through this with our relationship intact, that what had happened wasn’t what she would have chosen, that she hoped I knew she loved me.

I said I knew.

She left.

I waited until her footsteps faded down the corridor. Then I picked up the flask, walked to the window, and poured the entire contents into the drain pipe below without spilling a drop.

I was still at the window when I heard the courtyard gate.

Marcus Thorn came through it from the direction of the training yards, jacket pushed up at the sleeves, heading for the main building. I knew Marcus the way I knew all of Alexander’s inner circle, peripherally, with the wariness of someone who had learned that proximity to power required careful navigation. He was Alexander’s Beta, his oldest friend, the person who stood one step to his right at every formal occasion and two steps ahead of everyone else in every room. I had never had reason to trust him or distrust him. He was simply part of the architecture of a life that no longer included me.

But he slowed as he crossed the courtyard.

He had seen Sophia come in. Or he had seen her leave, more likely, given the direction he was coming from. And now he was looking at the east block window where I was standing, and then he was looking at the path she had taken back toward the main estate, and something in the angle of his expression was wrong in a way I couldn’t fully read from this distance.

His eyes came back to the window.

He looked at me for a moment. Not hostile. Not warm. Just a long, considered look that lasted two beats longer than a passing glance, and then he walked on.

I watched him go.

My wolf was quiet in the way she got when something mattered and she was waiting to see if I understood it yet.

That evening I told Lily about the tea.

We were sitting on the floor of my east block room with our backs against the bed, which was where all important conversations happened according to a rule we had established at age sixteen and never formally retired. Lily had her knees pulled up and her chin resting on them and she was very still in the way she went still when she was angry and managing it.

“You didn’t drink any,” she said. Not a question.

“No.”

“How did you know?”

I thought about how to explain the wolf recoil, the stomach-pull, the animal certainty that had no rational basis and needed none. “I just knew,” I said.

Lily was quiet for a moment. “I’m going to find out what was in it.”

“Lily—”

“I have access to the kitchen supply logs through my admin rotation.” She looked at me sideways. “That’s not breaking any rules. That’s just reading a document I’m authorized to read.”

I looked at her. She looked back with the particular expression she wore when she had already decided to do something and was only informing me as a courtesy.

“Okay,” I said.

She nodded once, satisfied. Then she leaned her head against my shoulder and neither of us said anything for a while, and outside the east block window the pack grounds settled into evening and somewhere across the courtyard, in a room I hadn’t stood in for a week, the bond sat in my chest and ached with the steady patience of something that had decided to outlast everything else.

Let it, I thought.

I was starting to think I might outlast it first.