Chapter Three

Hadley

I managed almost three hours.

Or I passed out. There was probably a medical distinction between the two and I didn’t care enough to work out which one applied to me. When I woke, the sunlight had crept halfway across the bedroom floor and the headache had faded from *someone is removing my brain through my eye sockets* down to a dull throb I could ignore as long as I didn’t turn my head too fast.

I stayed in bed anyway.

Not because I was tired.

I just didn’t want to go downstairs.

Which was ridiculous, and I knew it was ridiculous while I was doing it. This was my house. I had spent my entire life wandering it barefoot, stealing food out of the kitchens, irritating people who technically outranked me badly enough that they could have had me removed from a room if Uncle Alaric hadn’t always found it funny. One bad morning shouldn’t have changed the shape of a building.

Except every time I thought about going down, I heard him again.

Don’t fucking touch me.

I rolled onto my stomach and put my face in the pillow. “Stop it.”

The pillow, proving itself more useful than most people I knew, said nothing back.

Someone knocked a few minutes later. I considered pretending to be asleep, but whoever it was knew me well enough not to wait for an answer, because the door opened before I’d decided.

Avery slipped in and shut it behind her.

“You’re alive.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Elara sent me to check.”

I lifted my head off the pillow. “Traitor.”

“She threatened to come herself.”

“You made the right call.”

“I know.”

She crossed the room and sat on the edge of my bed with one leg tucked under her, and the nightstand drawer was eighteen inches from her knee.

Ask her.

It sat right there in my mouth. Were you in my room last night? Because there’s a note in that drawer in your handwriting and I don’t remember a single second of you writing it.

“Ave—”

“Okay, but you have to tell me honestly.” She turned toward me, pushing her hair back off one shoulder. “Does it look insane?”

And the moment closed over like water.

Up close the change was more obvious than it had been downstairs. Two pale sections framing her face against all that black — almost white, not quite my colour, catching the afternoon light every time she moved her head.

“It doesn’t look insane.”

“You paused.”

“I’m hungover. Everything I do has a pause in it.”

She laughed. “Fair.”

“When did you even do it? Your hair was black last night.”

“After I got home.”

I opened my mouth to say something and nothing came out, because something had gone wrong somewhere in that sentence and I couldn’t find where.

It was like reaching for a step in the dark and having your foot land flat on a floor that should have been lower.

“You bleached your hair after the party?”

She shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep.”

I tried to place her leaving. The party was there in pieces — dancing, the strawberry out of my drink after she’d finished her own, champagne coming out of her nose over something Maddox said, her threatening to murder every one of us if it was ever mentioned again.

I couldn’t remember her saying goodnight.

But then I couldn’t remember leaving either. Killian’s room. Clothes on the floor. Dressing as quietly as I could and easing that door shut. After that, nothing that led anywhere.

The ache behind my eyes came up sharp when I pushed at it, so I stopped pushing.

“Well. I like it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She smiled. “Good.”

She got up and drifted across the room while I pushed myself upright against the pillows, and I noticed properly for the first time what else had changed.

Avery had always been pretty. She had never once cared about clothes unless we were being made to go somewhere that demanded it. Jeans. Boots. Whatever jumper she found first on the floor. She owned skirts the way everyone owns skirts, and I could have counted on one hand the number of times I’d seen her put one on voluntarily.

Today: a long brown skirt. A soft cream blouse with lace at the neckline, sleeves gathered loose at the wrists. A narrow belt. Sandals instead of the boots.

It suited her.

That was probably why it looked so strange.

She’d been in this room a thousand times. She knew which floorboard by the window creaked and which drawer had to be kicked shut, so I didn’t think anything of it when she stopped at my wardrobe and opened both doors.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking.”

“That’s generally what people do with their eyes.”

“You’re so funny.”

“I know.”

She started moving hangers along the rail. Slowly. After a minute I realised she wasn’t looking for anything. She pulled a cream dress forward, ran her thumb along the lace at the sleeve, pushed it back. Stopped at a lavender skirt, checked the embroidery, checked the label, let it fall closed.

“What are you actually after?”

“I don’t know.”

“Helpful.”

“You have so many skirts.”

“I stole your share.”

She moved on and stopped at one of my shorter ones. Cream, faded flowers, gone soft from years of wearing.

“You still wear this?”

“Yes.”

“It’s tiny.”

“It’s a skirt.”

“Barely.”

I laughed. “Since when do you care?”

“I don’t.” She let it fall back, but her fingers stayed on the hanger. “I just don’t know if I’d wear stuff like this around Killian now.”

For a second I thought I’d misheard her.

“Good thing you don’t have to.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “You know what I mean.”

“I genuinely don’t.”

A small sigh. Smiling, like I was being difficult on purpose. “He’s my mate now. Some of your clothes are a little —”

She stopped.

“A little what.”

“Nothing.”

“No. Go on.”

Her eyes went to the skirt. “Revealing.”

I looked down at myself, which was bare legs and an oversized hoodie, and felt something I didn’t have a name for move through my chest.

“Ave. Killian has seen me in a bikini. Every summer of my life.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

Her mouth opened. Whatever had been ready in it didn’t survive the question. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Good, because I’m not replacing my wardrobe because you found your mate.”

“I wasn’t asking you to.”

“You were thinking about it fairly hard.”

She laughed and knocked the wardrobe door with her hip. “Wear whatever you want, Hads.”

“I was planning to.”

“I know.”

Something in the way she said it didn’t sit flat. Not enough that I could have explained it to anyone, and before I’d decided whether I was inventing things she’d turned back to the rail and stopped dead.

“Oh, absolutely not.”

“What now.”

She pulled out a black hoodie.

Killian’s.

I’d taken it the week before he left for the Academy because it was enormous and warm and it smelled like him, though I had never admitted that last part out loud to a living person. He’d demanded it back twice from three hundred miles away. I’d ignored him twice. At three years I considered ownership legally transferred.

She held it up between two fingers. “This has to go.”

“Excuse me?”

“Killian’s hoodie.”

“And?”

“And he’s my mate now.” Straight face, until it wasn’t. “You can’t keep stealing his clothes.”

“I stole that three years ago. There’s a statute of limitations.”

“No.”

“I think at this point it’s mine.”

“That is not how stealing works.”

“It should be.”

She folded it over her arm. “You’ve got Maddox’s hoodies.”

“Because Maddox understands generosity.”

“Maddox has forgotten you have them.”

“Also generosity.”

“Then wear his.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Are you banning me from Killian’s clothes?”

“I’m his mate. Pretty sure I’m allowed.”

And I laughed, because she was laughing, and underneath the laugh something in me went quiet and small and didn’t join in. She was right. That was the thing. She was completely right and there was nothing to argue with. I had no claim on his clothes. I’d never had one. It had just never occurred to anybody to say so out loud before.

I reached for it anyway. “Give it back.”

She stepped out of range. “No.”

“I’ve had that longer than you’ve had him.”

It was out before I heard myself say it.

Her smile faltered. Half a second.

“Oh, for Goddess’ sake.” I laughed and reached again. “I’m talking about the hoodie.”

“I know.”

“Then give it back.”

“No. It’s Maddox’s now.”

“You’re drunk on power already.”

“Absolutely.”

She folded it more neatly than it deserved and set it over the back of my desk chair, clearly intending to take it properly later, and I was weighing up whether tackling the future Luna Queen over stolen property counted as treason when the movement shifted her blouse and something at her throat caught the light.

A necklace.

I hadn’t noticed it at breakfast, and I notice things — it’s the one thing I’m actually good at, seeing what’s in front of me. A fine silver chain going down under her collar, a small oval pendant sitting flat against her skin.

Not flashy. If anything it looked older than everything else she owned. The silver had gone dark at the edges the way silver does when nobody’s cleaned it in a long time.

“Is that new?”

She looked down. “What?”

“Your necklace.”

Her fingers found it fast. “Oh — this old thing. It was my grandmother’s.”

“I’ve never seen it on you.”

“I don’t wear it much.”

I leaned in to look properly, because there was something worked into the face of it, and I have spent four years being taught to read a shape before I know what it is.

Lines. Fine ones, close together, cut rather than pressed. A crescent, and then something crossing it that shouldn’t have been crossing it — I know the moon sigils. Everyone knows the moon sigils; they’re over every door in this building and cut into the stone beside my bedroom window and worn smooth on the crest behind Uncle Alaric’s chair.

This was one of those and then it wasn’t. Like a word spelled almost right.

“Where’s it from?”

“I don’t know. It’s ancient. She had loads of stuff like that.”

I reached out and turned it over with one finger to see the back.

It was cold.

Not cool. Platinumis cool. This was cold in the way a doorhandle is cold in a room nobody’s heated, and it had been lying flat against her skin for at least six hours.

I let go of it faster than I meant to.

“It’s pretty,” I said.

“Thanks.”

She let it drop against her chest and came to sit beside me again, and I put my hand back in my lap and didn’t think about it any further, because there were larger things happening than jewellery.

She went quiet for a few seconds. Then let out a breath.

“I’m sorry.”

“For stealing my hoodie?”

“His hoodie.”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

“Hads. I’m serious.”

Her smile had gone.

And I knew immediately what she meant.

I looked down at my hands. “Ave —”

“He shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”

“It’s fine.”

“It isn’t.”

“It’s probably Ghost.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Jaxson said it could be.”

“*Could be,*” she repeated.

I picked at a loose thread on the cuff of Maddox’s hoodie. She shifted closer until our shoulders touched.

“I don’t want this to change anything between us.”

“It won’t.”

“You say that now.”

I turned to look at her properly, and for the first time since the dining room she didn’t look excited at all. She looked frightened.

And I felt like an idiot for spending the last four hours upstairs feeling sorry for myself.

Because it isn’t just a boyfriend. That’s the part I don’t think she’d worked out yet, and I have known it my whole life the way you know where the stairs are. The heir’s mate gets presented. There’ll be a formal reception with the Council, and a blood record, and about four hundred people from packs she has never heard of arriving to look at her. And at some point before the year is out she will stand barefoot at the Moon Altar in the old part of the grounds while half the kingdom watches her do a rite that hasn’t changed in eleven hundred years, and she will have to know every word of it, and she’ll have three months to learn them.

Yesterday she was Avery, who just Avery.

“They’re going to make me stand at the Altar,” she said.

“Probably in the spring. Aunt Elara will drill you until you want to die. She did it to me for a Council dinner once and I only had to sit down and eat.”

She didn’t laugh.

“Everyone’s going to look at me differently now.”

“Of course they are.” I bumped my shoulder into hers. “You’re going to be Luna. People are going to stare at you in shops. Maddox is going to have to bow to you and it’s going to be the best day of my entire life.”

She smiled at that. It didn’t get all the way up.

“Yeah.”

“That’s what you meant, right?”

“Yeah,” she said again. “That’s what I meant.”

She looked at the wardrobe rather than at me while she said it, and I decided she was overwhelmed, because she was, and because I could not think of a single other thing it could be.

I took her hand. “Nothing is changing between us.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“What if he doesn’t want me around you?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

She hesitated. “He didn’t exactly seem thrilled about you this morning.”

That went somewhere tender and stayed there.

Her fingers tightened around mine almost before it landed. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No. You’re right.”

“I don’t want him treating you like that because of me.”

“He won’t.”

“Hads.”

“He won’t.” Firmer the second time, and mostly for me.

Killian had known me nearly my whole life. One strange morning couldn’t undo that. Nothing could undo that. There wasn’t enough weight in a single bad morning to move something built over eighteen years.

She rested her head on my shoulder. “I thought finding my mate would feel different.”

“Different how?”

“Less terrifying.”

“He is fairly terrifying.”

“Helpful.”

“You could reject him.”

She lifted her head so fast that I laughed.

“Joking.”

“Don’t even say that.”

“Fine.”

She settled back against me and I put my cheek briefly on the top of her head, and the white pieces were softer than they should have been for hair that had been stripped six hours ago. I noticed it and didn’t do anything with it. There was no shelf in my head for it to go on.

“I might talk to him,” she said after a while.

“About what?”

“This morning.”

“No.”

“Hads —”

“Absolutely not.”

“He needs to apologise.”

“He will, once Ghost settles.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll put itching powder in his bed.”

She laughed against my shoulder. “There she is.”

“Never left.”

And for a while it almost felt normal.

—-

By late afternoon, hiding upstairs had become more humiliating than going down.

I showered again, mostly because it still felt like the party had got into my skin, and stood in front of the wardrobe in a towel with the doors open, and my hand went to the cream floral skirt.

The one she’d called revealing.

I stood there with my fingers on the hanger for longer than I want to admit.

Then I pulled it out, because it was one of my favourites and I’d have picked it anyway and I was not going to start dressing around a conversation. I put it with an off-the-shoulder blouse, lace at the loose sleeves, and sat on the end of the bed to pull on my old brown ankle boots.

Halfway through fastening one I heard her again.

Some of your clothes are a little… revealing.

I straightened up and looked at myself properly in the mirror. The hem sat high on my thighs exactly where it had sat for two years. Bare shoulders. Hair down past my ribs in waves that had never once stayed where I put them.

I looked exactly like I had looked yesterday.

Exactly like I had looked every day of my life in this house.

I finished the boot and went downstairs.

—-

I could hear Maddox arguing before I got to the sitting room.

“That’s bullshit.”

“It isn’t,” Jaxson said.

“It’s absolute bullshit.”

“You lost.”

“Because you cheated.”

“How?”

“Haven’t worked that out yet.”

I opened the door.

Maddox sprawled across one end of the sofa with a deck of cards. Jaxson opposite, looking unbearably pleased with himself. Killian in the armchair by the fire.

Avery on his lap.

I stopped for half a second in the doorway. Yesterday, Avery sitting on Killian’s lap would have been strange enough that Maddox would have photographed it for future leverage. Today she was his mate, and apparently that was the whole of what it took for something impossible to become completely ordinary.

His arm was around her waist. She was leaning in close, saying something against his jaw, rolling the pendant of her grandmother’s necklace between two fingers while she did it.

He murmured something back and she laughed.

Then she looked over and saw me.

Her eyes went down. My blouse. My skirt. My boots.

For less than a second they narrowed.

It was gone so fast that I’d already started doubting it.

“Feeling better?”

“Marginally.”

“Good.”

She settled back against him like nothing had crossed her face at all.

“Princess.” Maddox, from the sofa. “Come and save me. Jaxson’s cheating.”

“You’re losing.”

“Same thing.”

I crossed the room and tried very hard not to think about the fact that Killian was watching me do it.

Maddox caught my wrist and pulled me down beside him. “Help.”

“No.”

“You’re already here.”

“Against my will.”

“Details.”

I laughed and took the cards out of his hand. “You’re losing because you’re terrible.”

“Betrayal.”

“Reality.”

“You used to be nicer.”

“I have never once been nice to you.”

“Fair.”

I was rearranging his hand when the growl rolled through the room.

Low enough that I felt it in the sofa before I heard it.

Maddox went still beside me. Jaxson’s head came up.

My stomach dropped.

I turned.

Killian was staring at us.

No. Not at us. At Maddox’s hand, still curled loosely around my wrist.

Maddox followed his eyes and let go, slowly, the way you put something down in front of an animal.

“Problem?”

Killian didn’t answer straight away.

And for less than a second — gone almost before I’d registered it was there — something crossed his face that wasn’t anger at all. He was looking down at his own hand where it had closed into a fist against the arm of the chair, and he was looking at it like it belonged to somebody else. Like he was trying to work out why his body had done that without asking him first.

Then it went, and what replaced it was worse.

Avery looked between us. “Killian?” Her palm found his chest. “What’s wrong?”

He looked at me instead of answering her.

His eyes went down. Blouse. Skirt. Legs. Something in his face twisted, and when he spoke there was an edge underneath it that sounded almost like relief — like he’d found somewhere to put whatever had just happened inside him.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

I should have left it there.

“Obviously something.”

“Hadley,” Jaxson murmured.

“What? He’s the one growling at me.”

“I’m not growling at you.”

Maddox snorted. “Mate, unless there’s someone under the sofa, you absolutely are.”

Killian’s eyes came up. “Do you always have to dress like that?”

“Like what?”

“You’ve always known exactly what you’re doing.” Almost conversational. Like he was only now noticing it and was irritated with himself for taking eighteen years about it. “Every man in a room looking at you. Guards. Staff. Half the training hall. You’ve never once had to try.”

“That’s not —”

“It isn’t an accident, Hadley. It has never been an accident. Everyone’s just always let you get away with it because you’re small and you smile and my father thinks the sun comes up out of you.”

Something in my chest went very cold.

“You’re actually saying this to me.”

“I’m saying you throw your weight around like you own this pack and everybody’s too polite to mention it. Ask anyone who’s sparred with you how many of those bruises were an accident.”

“I have never —”

“Maybe I just didn’t notice before.” He laughed once, and there was nothing in it. “Spoiled little princess who’s never had to answer for anything in her life.”

Nobody moved.

I folded my arms, because it was that or let everyone in that room watch my hands shake.

“Notice what, exactly?”

His jaw clenched.

“That you dress like a fucking whore.”

Nothing happened next.

Nobody said anything. The fire kept going. Somewhere behind me one of the guards shifted his weight and the floor gave under him, and I stood in the middle of the sitting room I’d learned to walk in, in front of the man who taught me to swim, and I couldn’t make the word fit anywhere.

It wouldn’t go on me. That was the strange part. I turned it and turned it and it wouldn’t attach to any version of myself I could find, and while I was doing that everyone else in the room was already looking at me differently, because a word like that doesn’t have to be true to change the temperature of a room.

Maddox sat forward. “Watch your fucking mouth.”

“This has nothing to do with you.”

“It does when you talk to her like that.”

Another growl tore out of Killian — and there it was again, that flicker, quick as a blink, like the sound had cost him something and he didn’t understand what the price was. He shoved it down before I could be certain I’d seen it at all.

Maddox was on his feet before I knew he’d moved. Jaxson stood too.

“Maddox.”

“No.” He threw the cards down on the table. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Avery pressed her hand flat against Killian’s chest. “Stop. Both of you.”

His eyes found me again over her shoulder.

“Maybe have some respect for yourself and put some clothes on.”

I stood up.

My hands were shaking hard enough to see, so I curled them into fists and held them against my sides and hoped the room was faster at looking away than it was at looking.

I looked at Avery. I didn’t mean to. My eyes just went to her, the way they had gone to her every time anything had ever happened to me since we were nine years old.

Hers were wide and worried and fixed on my face.

And for some reason I thought of her standing at my wardrobe four hours ago with her hand on that exact skirt.

Some of your clothes are a little… revealing.

She’d been trying to warn me.

That’s what I thought, standing there. I thought: she must have seen something in him this morning, she must have known this was coming, and she tried to soften it for me and I laughed at her.

I looked at my best friend and felt guilty.

She started to get up. “Hads —”

“Don’t.”

Quieter than I wanted it. She stopped.

I looked back at Killian.

Three years. I’d waited three years for him to come home. I’d kept a hoodie that stopped smelling like him about eight months in and only smelled like me after that, and I kept it anyway, because it had been his once.

He’d been home one day.

Yesterday I was his annoying little princess. This morning he couldn’t stand to be touched by me. And now, apparently, I had always been exactly this, and the whole family had simply been too soft-hearted to tell me.

My throat had closed. I made it work anyway.

“Fuck you, Killian.”

Then I walked out.

Nobody tried to stop me before I got to the door.

That’s what I took with me. Not the word. Jaxson had got up but not moved, and Maddox was shouting behind me, and still — between the fire and that door there were fifteen feet of carpet and not one person in that family reached out and put a hand on my arm.

I made it into the corridor before my eyes started burning.

I kept walking. I didn’t wipe them, because wiping them would have meant admitting there was something to wipe, and I was not going to cry over Killian being cruel to me in front of people.

Not where anyone could see.

Behind me the room came apart into voices. Jaxson said his name. Avery said something too quiet to catch.

Then Maddox, clean and carrying through the open door, loud enough that half the palace could have heard him.

“What the fuck, man?”

I got round the corner, and I got up the first flight, and somewhere on the second I stopped being able to do it properly and sat down on the stairs in my revealing skirt with my back against the cold wall.

Nobody came.

I want to be fair about that — I’d told them not to. I’d said don’t, and Avery had sat back down, and everybody in that room had done exactly what I asked them to do.

It’s just that I’d never in my life asked before and had it work.