Chapter Three: Branded

By breakfast, I had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced by people who weren’t there.

I heard it before I saw it. Two pack women talking outside the communal hall, voices low and pleasant the way voices get when the gossip is particularly good. I caught my name and slowed without meaning to, pressing close to the wall of the corridor with my tray in my hands and my stomach already tightening.

“…cornered him in the hallway, apparently. Right after the announcement.”

“No.”

“That’s what Dena said. She was practically throwing herself at him. In front of everyone.”

“She’s always been obsessed with Sophia’s life. Remember when they were teenagers and she—”

I didn’t wait to hear what I’d done as a teenager. I pushed through the side door into the cold morning air and stood on the path with my untouched tray and breathed carefully through my nose until the urge to go back in there and say something passed.

It passed. Barely.

The communal breakfast hall held about sixty people on a normal morning. Today it felt like every single one of them had been briefed.

I felt it the moment I walked in through the main doors. That specific shift in a room, the way conversations don’t stop but go slightly quieter, slightly more angled. The way eyes move toward you and then deliberately away, which is so much worse than staring. I kept my chin level and my pace even and I found a spot at the end of one of the long tables and sat down.

The woman across from me picked up her tray and moved.

Not rudely. Not dramatically. She just picked it up and found somewhere else to be, and no one at the table acknowledged that it had happened, which made it worse somehow, the way everyone’s careful silence around it became its own kind of statement.

I stared at my food. I was not hungry. I ate anyway because I was not going to let them see me leave.

Luna Cassandra Blackwood arrived at the front of the hall at quarter past eight. She never raised her voice. She never needed to. She was one of those women who commanded rooms simply by occupying them, silver-haired and straight-backed and dressed like every morning was a formal occasion. She waited for the hall to settle, smiled warmly at the room, and began speaking about the mating ceremony preparations. The allied pack delegations arriving in three weeks. The catering. The floral arrangements. The importance of presenting a united and welcoming front.

And then, without ever saying my name, she said my name.

“Any behavior that causes distress to our future Luna during her pregnancy,” she said, her eyes moving slowly and pleasantly across the room, “will be treated as a matter of pack discipline. We protect our own. I trust everyone understands what that means.”

Every eye in the room slid to me.

Every single one.

I put my fork down very gently so it wouldn’t make a sound. I kept my face neutral. I was getting good at neutral. I was twenty-three years old and I had apparently just become the cautionary tale at my own pack breakfast, and the woman delivering the warning hadn’t even had the decency to look directly at me while she did it.

Coward, I thought. You elegant, calculated coward.

I was still sitting there, alone at the end of the table, when something set a tray down beside me.

I looked up.

Lily Rowan stood next to me with her breakfast and an expression of complete, deliberate calm. She sat. She unfolded her napkin. She picked up her fork and took a bite of her eggs like nothing in the world was more ordinary than this.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t explain herself or announce her loyalty or make a speech. She just sat beside me, in the room where everyone was watching, and ate her breakfast.

I looked back down at my plate.

The tightness in my chest that had been sitting there since last night shifted, just slightly, into something that wasn’t quite relief but was in the same family. I didn’t trust myself to say anything. So I just picked my fork back up.

We sat together in silence while the room buzzed around us, and I filed Lily Rowan away in the part of myself that would remember this forever. The people who find you in the middle of the worst morning of your life and sit down without being asked. You don’t forget those people. You can’t.

I went back to my room after breakfast and sat at my desk with my hands flat on the surface and I thought clearly, for the first time since the gathering, about what was actually happening.

They were building a story. A clean, simple, already-circulating story in which I was the obsessive sister, the jealous twin, the woman who couldn’t accept that the Alpha had made his choice. The story didn’t need to be true. It only needed to be repeated often enough that by the time the mating ceremony happened, no one would look twice at whatever came next.

I pressed my palms harder against the desk.

The silver light rose immediately, brighter than it had been the night before, dancing patterns across the wood grain that had no business being beautiful given the circumstances.

Something is coming, my wolf said. Not a warning. A statement of fact.

I looked at my own hands, lit from within by something I didn’t understand yet, and thought: yes. Something is.

And I think it might be me.