Chapter 4

Marcus’s POV

“You let a woman walk out of your pack house with a duffel bag,” said Aaron, “and now you want coffee.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the worst decision you’ve ever made.”

“I’m aware.”

“I’m saying it anyway.”

My cousin Aaron Ng leaned on the edge of my desk with his arms folded and his tie loose. He is thirty, broad and freckled, with the temper of a bulldog and the manners of a goat. He’s also the head of pack security, and the only man alive who can tell me I’m an idiot without being fired.

I sat behind the desk in the Alpha’s office, in the tall chair my father used to sit in, and stared at a cup of untouched kopi. The room smelled of old paper and cedar. Sun poured across the floor. It was ten in the morning, and I had not slept in thirty hours.

“Say it,” Aaron said. “Whatever it is.”

“She wrote I’m here on my palm.”

“What?”

“In the dark. She couldn’t speak. She wrote it on my hand.” I looked at my palm. I could still feel the shape of it. “I said whatever the morning shows, I chose you.”

“You said that to Serena.”

“I said it to the woman I thought was Natalie.”

“You said it to the woman in the veil.” Aaron’s eyes were steady. “You told me on the phone at four a.m. that it was the best conversation of your life. You said she made you laugh. You said Kai was quiet. You said he’d never been quiet.”

I said nothing.

“Natalie Lim’s been in and out of this house for twenty years,” Aaron said. “Did she ever make Kai quiet?”

I thought about the way my wolf flinched every time Natalie walked into a room. The cold, sharp smell of her perfume. The smooth way she said everything. Never a stumble. Never a pause.

Kai had hated her for years. I had thought he was just a bad judge of character.

“That isn’t the point,” I said.

“What’s the point?”

“The point is she lied.”

“She was asked to stand in a line by her sister.”

“She could have said no.”

“Could she?” Aaron raised an eyebrow. “You’ve met that family. Beta Lim’s a rug. The mother’s a general. And the golden girl has the whole pack wrapped around her little finger. When has anyone in that house said no to Natalie?”

The air went out of me.

He was right. God, he was right. I’d been so angry, standing in that hall with the sun in my eyes and the elders murmuring, that I hadn’t thought past the moment she said I’m here. She’d been trying to tell me everything. And I had told her it wasn’t enough.

“I sent her out,” I said.

“You did.”

“I let them say those things.”

“You did.”

“Aaron. She’s sleeping on somebody’s sofa in Woodlands.”

“Then go and fetch her.”

“I can’t. The elders. The rite in three days. If I leave the ridge before then, they’ll call it dereliction.” I dragged a hand down my face. “They’ll appoint Natalie regent.”

“So you’re going to sit here.”

“I’m going to think.”

“Think faster.”

He picked up the coffee, sniffed it, and put it down with a grimace. “That’s cold. I’m going to fetch a proper one. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I’m the Alpha.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He left. The door clicked. I sat alone in the sunlit room with my thoughts, and for a while I did nothing at all.

~

At noon I went upstairs to the Moon Room.

I don’t know why. The elders had already sent in the cleaners. But it was quiet up there, and empty, and the moonlight I remembered had turned to ordinary sun. The cushions were gone. The jug of barley water was gone. I stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the square of light and felt like a man standing in the ruins of a house.

A white shape lay beneath the window.

I crossed the room and knelt.

A sketchbook. Small, spiral-bound, with a battered black cover. It must have slid under the sill while the cleaners swept. Ink stained the corner, and a strip of masking tape held the spine together.

I shouldn’t have opened it.

I opened it.

The first page was a pencil drawing of a teenage boy on a hillside, laughing, with a bag of oranges in his arms. The lines were fine and careful. The date in the corner said eleven years ago. He was seventeen. He was me.

I turned the page.

Me at my father’s funeral, in a black suit, staring at a coffin.

Me on the Ridge training ground, shouting at a class of new recruits.

Me at the council table, with my head in my hands, a stack of papers at my elbow.

Me asleep on a bench at the hawker centre with a plate of half-eaten chicken rice.

There were dozens. Hundreds, maybe. Drawn on the edges of napkins, on bus tickets, on scraps of grid paper, in ballpoint and pencil and once in a soft, red crayon. Every one was signed with a tiny letter S, and every one showed me at a moment I’d thought was private.

Not a single drawing showed me smiling at anyone else.

I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and turned the pages very slowly. My throat felt as if somebody had put a fist in it.

She hadn’t just seen me.

She’d watched. For eleven years. She’d drawn every tired, lonely, ordinary thing I did, as if it were worth keeping.

And I had told her, in a hall full of strangers, that I’m here wasn’t a name.

Kai lifted his head inside me. For the first time in two days, he spoke, in a low, deep, grieving voice.

She loved you, he said. Idiot.

“I know,” I whispered.

I was about to close the book when a loose page slipped out.

It wasn’t in pencil. It was ink, quick and hard and slightly shaky, the way you draw when you’re frightened. A scene at the edge of the pack’s eastern boundary. A tall iron gate in a chain-link fence, a path going into the trees, and two figures at the foot of the fence.

One was a woman with long hair, her back to the viewer, her arms around a man’s neck.

The other was the man.

Tall. Broad. A cap pulled low. And down the left side of his face, from temple to jaw, a long, jagged scar.

I stopped breathing.

Under the drawing, in small neat handwriting, was a date. Three weeks ago. And a single line.

Nat at the east gate. Who is he? Should I tell?

I knew who he was.

I had a photograph of him on my office wall, in the folder marked WANTED. Jason Ho. Rogue leader across the Causeway. The man who had killed two of my scouts in the spring, and cut off the head of a third, and left it on the road outside Woodlands as a message.

I couldn’t hear anything but my own blood.

Natalie Lim had been kissing Jason Ho at my east gate three weeks ago.

And in three days, at the full moon, the elders would put her in a black veil and hand her the keys to the whole pack.

The door banged open behind me.

“Marcus.” Aaron, out of breath, with a paper cup in each hand. “Elder Wee wants you downstairs. Natalie’s here. She’s brought her mother, and they’ve brought a...”

“Aaron.”

He stopped.

“Look at this.”

I held up the page.

He looked. His face went white, then gray. He put down the cups very carefully.

“That’s Ho.”

“Yes.”

“That’s Natalie.”

“Yes.”

“And who drew it?”

I looked down at the small S in the corner. At the shaky lines. At the question that nobody had ever answered.

“The only person in that family who noticed,” I said. “And I sent her away.”