Chapter Two

Hadley

I woke at nine with one arm hanging off the side of the bed and the mug still sitting on my nightstand.

For a while I didn’t move. The headache had settled in behind my right eye and made itself comfortable, and the light coming through the curtains seemed personally offended that I was still alive, and there was a sour ring dried into the bottom of the mug where the last of the tea had sat.

I’d made a promise at some point in the night that I was never drinking again. I’d made it once before, after Maddox convinced me that mixing three different kinds of alcohol was fine because they were all technically clear. I hadn’t listened to myself then either.

This time I meant it.

I sat up slowly and reached for the mug so I could take it down with me.

The note was under it.

Folded once, in Avery’s handwriting, her ridiculous looping A at the bottom of it.

Drink this. All of it. And stop thinking before you hurt yourself. Love you, idiot. — A

I read it twice.

Then I sat on the edge of my bed with a cold mug in one hand and a piece of paper in the other and understood that I did not remember her writing it.

I didn’t remember her being in my room. I didn’t remember her leaving the ballroom, or coming upstairs, or standing where I was sitting now, close enough to set a mug down two feet from my head.

Stop thinking before you hurt yourself.

I’d told her something. Obviously I’d told her something — you don’t get a note like that from someone who doesn’t already know what happened to you. So either I’d found her or she’d found me, and somewhere in the last six hours I had said it out loud to another human being. The bed. The dress. The hours I couldn’t account for. I had told my best friend the worst thing that has ever happened to me and it was not in my head.

The place where it should have been didn’t feel like fog.

It felt like a room with the furniture taken out.

I went back for the shower next, because that one I could nearly reach. Water. Standing under it long enough for it to run cold. Washing my hair, then stopping halfway through and not being able to work out whether I’d already done it, so doing it again just in case.

Nothing before it. The pieces didn’t join up to anything.

I put the note down on the nightstand, and picked it up again, and folded it back along the crease she’d made, and pushed it into the pocket of the hoodie I’d stolen off Maddox two winters ago, because I couldn’t think of one single thing to do with a piece of paper proving my best friend had stood in my room while I wasn’t in my own life.

People lose nights. Everyone loses nights.

Nobody loses the walk between two rooms in their own house.

I squinted my way down to the family dining room.

—-

Everyone was already there.

Uncle Alaric at the head of the table with coffee in one hand and a stack of papers beside his plate, reading glasses low on his nose — the ones he swore he didn’t need, despite Aunt Elara having bought him three separate pairs on account of him losing them. She sat beside him in the soft blue dress she wore to breakfast most mornings, half-listening to Jaxson while she buttered toast. Maddox had built his plate like someone had warned him about a famine and he was the only one who’d believed it.

Behind Uncle Alaric, the old royal crest was cut straight into the stone, from long before anybody decided this room should be for eating in. A wolf under a split moon, worn almost smooth in places by four hundred years of hands brushing it on the way past.

And Killian was in his old seat.

The chair beside him was empty.

My chair.

Nobody had ever officially decided it belonged to me. There was no seating chart that put a wolfless Omega girl next to the future Alpha King — no seating chart at all, in fact, because this is a kitchen table with delusions of grandeur. I’d just started sitting there as a kid, probably because Killian used to cut my pancakes when they were too big for me to manage, and nobody had ever moved me since.

Three years he’d been gone. Nobody had taken it.

Normally I wouldn’t have thought about it for a second.

This morning I stopped just inside the doorway and couldn’t make my feet do it. That was the whole thing, really — I stood in a doorway I’d walked through ten thousand times and understood that the chair beside Killian had become a place I would have to explain sitting in.

He looked up first.

Black hair still damp from a shower. Faint shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there yesterday. Otherwise disgustingly normal, for a man I’d woken up next to at half three in the morning with enough of our clothes on his floor to raise questions I had no intention of asking over eggs.

I looked away before he could catch me at it and went the long way around the table.

Maddox glanced up as I pulled out the chair beside him. “Jesus.”

“Good morning.”

“You look like shit.”

“Maddox,” Aunt Elara warned.

“What? She does.”

I lowered myself into the chair with the care of someone twice my age. Even that made my head throb. “Thank you. I was worried nobody would tell me.”

Jaxson pushed the coffee pot toward me. “Ignore him.”

“Eighteen years of practice. It never takes.”

“And yet here I remain.”

Aunt Elara put her knife down, and her whole face changed.

“Oh, sweetheart.”

I looked at her over the water jug. “That sounds ominous.”

“I didn’t get to say it to you properly this morning.” Her smile went soft. “Happy birthday.”

And for one stupid second I’d forgotten.

Not midnight. I had midnight. The clock and the shouting and her arms round me — that was there, I’d had it in my hands an hour ago in the dark.

Just the fact that it meant today was still my birthday. That the day was mine and it was still going on and I was inside it.

“Thanks.”

Uncle Alaric lowered his papers. “Happy birthday, Haddie.”

“Thank you.”

“Eighteen.” Maddox looked me over with great solemnity. “How’s adulthood treating you?”

I stared at him.

He nodded. “That well.”

“It’s been nine hours.”

“And you’ve spent most of them unconscious. Strong opening.”

“Please choke.”

Jaxson took a drink of coffee. “She’s matured beautifully.”

Aunt Elara ignored all of them. “Did you at least enjoy your party?”

The question caught somewhere on the way down.

Music. Champagne. Maddox shouting that the child was legal. Killian’s hand at my waist.

You smell really good.

Then nothing.

“What I remember of it.”

It was out before I could do anything about it.

Uncle Alaric’s eyes came up over the top of his glasses and sharpened, very slightly, and stayed on me a second longer than the sentence deserved.

I smiled before he could ask.

“Maddox kept putting champagne in my hand.”

“That is slander.”

“You made a toast to my future criminal record.”

“That was emotional support.”

“And somehow,” Jaxson said, “you’re still trying to make this her fault.”

“I believed in her.”

Aunt Elara shook her head, but she was smiling, and Uncle Alaric went back to his papers.

Normal. For about ten seconds, sitting there with them being idiots around me, everything was normal.

Then Maddox clocked where I was sitting.

His eyes went to the empty chair beside Killian. Came back to me.

“Why are you over here?”

I reached for the water instead of the coffee. “Because I enjoy your company.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, and I remembered too late that I had chosen to sit beside the single most observant person in this house. Jaxson might notice something was off and decide it wasn’t his business. Maddox would notice and poke it with a stick until it either explained itself or bit him.

Across the table, Killian hadn’t said a word.

I could feel him looking at me anyway.

Aunt Elara saved me by asking whether I wanted eggs. I said my stomach wasn’t ready for eggs, which got Uncle Alaric lowering the papers again.

“You feeling all right?”

“Define all right.”

“That bad?”

I rested my forehead against the heel of my hand. “I think my brain’s trying to leave through my eyes.”

“I’d let it,” Maddox said. “Doesn’t seem to be doing much in there anyway.”

I kicked him under the table.

“Ow.”

“See. Still functioning.”

Aunt Elara smiled into her tea. But I caught her watching me a beat too long over the rim of it, and I put my whole attention into my toast, because she has this irritating ability to know something is wrong before I’ve worked it out myself, and I wasn’t ready for her to start asking.

I didn’t have the answers.

That was the problem.

The party was clear enough up until sometime after midnight. Killian and Jaxson coming through the doors. Aunt Elara crying despite having sworn twice she wouldn’t. Uncle Alaric hugging his son hard enough that Killian complained about his ribs. Maddox hugging Jaxson first out of pure spite, because somebody has to keep the future king humble.

Music. Too much champagne. Avery laughing next to me and stealing the strawberry out of my drink after I told her to get her own.

Midnight.

The whole room shouting. Maddox making a speech nobody had authorised. Aunt Elara’s arms around me. Uncle Alaric kissing the top of my head.

Killian smiling down at me.

Ancient now.

His hand at my waist.

You smell really good.

Then pieces.

Then nothing.

I put my hand in the hoodie pocket while Maddox argued with Jaxson about something I wasn’t following, and found the folded edge of the note, and ran my thumb along it.

She’d walk in any minute now. She’d sit down and butter something and say good morning, and I could just ask her. Were you in my room last night? Four words.

Except there is no way to ask a person that.

Not without telling them what it means that you have to.

I’d have to find my phone after breakfast, too. It hadn’t been on the nightstand, or under the bed, or in any of the three places I’d checked before I gave up and came down. Which meant it was somewhere in the ballroom, or somewhere in a corridor, or somewhere in a stretch of last night I have no access to whatsoever.

Something slid across the table and stopped beside my plate.

My phone.

I stared at it.

“Found that in my room,” Killian said.

I looked up. “What?”

“Your phone.”

“I can see it’s my phone.”

One corner of his mouth moved. “Good. Hangover hasn’t taken everything, then.”

I ignored him and picked it up. The case was scratched along the bottom edge from the time I dropped it outside the training hall, and the pressed daisy Avery gave me months ago was still there under the plastic where I’d trapped it, gone brown at the edges now.

“In your room.”

“Floor. Near the bed.”

My stomach tightened. “Oh.”

He reached for his coffee. “Figured you gave it to me to hold at some point.”

“Right.”

That sounded reasonable. It’s the kind of thing I do — hand him things to hold because he has pockets and I never do, all our lives, at every party we’ve ever been dragged to.

I just didn’t remember doing it.

I turned the phone over in my hands. There was nothing strange about any of this. He’d found it in the wreckage and brought it down to breakfast. He clearly wasn’t thinking about it twice.

Maybe he remembered more than I did.

I glanced up at him without meaning to.

“You don’t remember,” he said.

Apparently I’d looked too long.

“Of course I remember.”

It came out fast enough that Maddox stopped chewing.

Killian’s eyebrow went up.

“I mean —” I unlocked my phone and stared hard at a screen with nothing on it. “It’s a little fuzzy.”

“A little?” Jaxson said.

“Shut up.”

“Didn’t say anything.” He smiled into his coffee.

Killian looked like he was going to say something else. Then his hand went into his pocket instead.

“Actually.”

My stomach dropped before I knew why.

He set something small on the table and flicked it toward me. A tiny silver crescent moon spun once on the wood and dropped flat beside my plate.

I reached up and touched my left ear before I’d decided to.

Empty.

“Found that too,” he said.

I saw Maddox lean forward out of the corner of my eye and knew, with total certainty, what was coming.

“No.”

He ignored me. “Where’d you find it?”

“Floor.”

“Where on the floor?”

“Don’t,” Jaxson said.

“I’m gathering information.”

“Nobody asked you to.”

“There’s no situation,” I said.

Maddox turned to face me properly. “Your phone and your earring were both on Killian’s bedroom floor.”

Uncle Alaric lowered his papers.

Wonderful.

“Where were your clothes?”

I inhaled water. Coughed hard enough that my skull felt like it might come apart at the seam, while Aunt Elara said his name in the tone she reserves for people who have deeply disappointed her, and Jaxson reached across the table and smacked the back of his head.

“What the fuck?” Maddox grabbed his skull. “Why am I being assaulted?”

“Because you’re an idiot.”

“It was a reasonable question.”

“It wasn’t,” I managed.

“It was extremely reasonable. I’m attempting to establish whether you two fucked.”

“Maddox.”

That one echoed.

“What?” He looked genuinely baffled. “Are we pretending nobody was thinking it?”

“I wasn’t,” Jaxson said.

“That’s because you’re boring.”

“That’s practically his sister, dickhead.”

The words shouldn’t have bothered me. I’ve heard some version of them my entire life. Half the palace calls me the little sister when they think I can’t hear, and I’ve always taken it as belonging, which is what it’s meant as.

They bothered me now.

“Nothing happened,” Killian said.

I looked at him. He sounded so certain.

Maddox heard it too. “You remember nothing happening?”

Something shifted in Killian’s face. Not much. Just enough.

“I remember drinking.”

“Maddox,” Uncle Alaric said.

He shut up for approximately four seconds. “So neither of you remembers.”

Jaxson hit him again.

“Would you stop?”

“No.”

“You’re extremely violent before nine.”

“You’re being weird about his sister.”

“She’s not his sister.”

“Close enough,” Killian said.

And there it was again — that small wrong feeling, like putting weight on a stair that isn’t where you left it.

I tore the corner off my toast and didn’t eat it.

Maddox looked at me long enough that I finally turned. “What.”

He gave a low whistle.

“Maddox.”

“Just saying.” His gaze traveled over me with theatrical consideration. “Jaxson might have a point. You’re definitely not twelve anymore. You’re very —” He curled his hand into a fist and bit his knuckle. “— sexy.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Jaxson said, closing his eyes.

A growl rolled across the table.

Low. Felt before it was heard, coming up through the wood into my forearms.

Maddox’s eyebrows shot up.

Killian was staring at him. Not glaring, exactly. Whatever it was, it was enough that Maddox slowly lowered his fist and stopped talking, which has happened perhaps four times in his life.

Killian looked almost as startled by the sound as the rest of us did. He coughed into his hand and reached for his coffee.

“Something in my throat.”

Maddox kept staring at him. His mouth started to curve.

“Oh, that’s fucking inter—”

“Good morning, everybody.”

“Mate.”

Nobody moved.

The two words had landed on top of each other so exactly that for a second I couldn’t work out which had come first. I turned toward Killian.

He wasn’t looking at Maddox anymore.

He was staring past me, at the door, and his chair was already going back.

“Did you just say —” Jaxson started.

“My mate.”

Avery’s hand rose slowly to her mouth.

“Oh my Goddess,” Aunt Elara whispered.

And the room came apart. Aunt Elara shoving her chair back hard enough to catch the rug, Uncle Alaric on his feet, Jaxson swearing and grabbing Killian’s shoulder with a grin splitting his face, someone by the sideboard making a sound like she’d been winded. Maddox stayed where he was beside me, still recovering from having his own sentence killed in his mouth.

I barely registered any of it.

I was looking at Avery.

My best friend is Killian’s mate.

It took a few seconds to arrange itself into something I could hold. Avery. Killian. Mate. Avery, who has slept in the blue guest room and complained about the mattress since she was nine. Avery, who is going to be Luna Queen.

And then, somewhere in the middle of trying to understand that, I noticed she looked different.

Her hair had been black last night. I knew it the way you know things you’ve never had to think about — we’d taken enough photos that I could see it exactly, spilling over her shoulder while she leaned into my glass for the strawberry. Black. All of it.

Now two wide sections framed her face, and they’d gone almost white.

Not blonde. Not lightened.

White. With that faint pearl shimmer where the light off the windows caught it.

Almost exactly like mine.

Something went cold and slow down the length of my spine.

When did she do that?

You couldn’t do that overnight. You couldn’t do it at all — not to black hair, not in the six hours between a party and breakfast, not without a salon and a great deal of screaming. And she’d have told me. She’d have made me sit on the edge of the bath and hold the towel and listen to her complain about the smell of it.

I went looking for the memory without deciding to. Avery at the party, laughing. The strawberry. Black hair over her shoulder.

After that, she got harder to place at all.

Had I seen her later? I couldn’t say. I couldn’t remember her leaving the ballroom. I couldn’t remember saying goodnight to her, and I always say goodnight to her.

And she had been in my room. There’s a note in my pocket that says so.

My headache flared white behind my eye and I stopped reaching.

It wasn’t only the hair, anyway. She’d dressed. Not party-dressed — properly dressed, for eight in the morning, in a fitted cream dress and heels with her makeup already on and those new white pieces styled carefully forward around her face.

I looked down at the hoodie hanging halfway to my thighs.

Aunt Elara was crying now. Avery looked like she might start.

And Killian was staring at her like a man who’d been handed something he hadn’t dared ask for.

This was good.

That landed in me all at once, and it was so much bigger than the hair or the dress or any of it. This was good. For years I’ve half-joked about the day Killian would find his mate — some terrifying stranger arriving to take one look at the girl who grew up underfoot in the royal family’s house and decide I have no business being there. I’d pictured him disappearing into a life with no room in it for me. I’d made the joke so many times that Maddox stopped laughing at it.

But it was Avery.

Avery already knows me. Avery already knows all of us — knows where I hide the chocolate, and which nights are the bad ones, and how to shut Maddox up with a single look.

I wasn’t losing my best friend to Killian, or Killian to some stranger.

They’d found each other, and I got to keep them both.

A laugh got out of me before I was properly standing. “Oh my Goddess.”

Avery had barely turned before I had my arms around her.

She hugged me back hard, both arms, and her laugh came out shaky against my shoulder. “I know.”

“You’re his fucking mate.”

“Hadley,” Aunt Elara said. Laughing, though.

“What? He said it twice. I think we’re allowed.”

I pulled back to look at her properly, hands still on her arms. She was smiling. My best friend, smiling, because she’d found her mate — and whatever was strange about the hair and the dress and the pieces of last night I couldn’t account for, all of it could wait.

Then I turned toward Killian, and for the first time since I’d come downstairs I forgot to feel strange around him. Forgot the phone in my hand. The earring on the table. Waking up beside him. Close enough.

He’d found his mate.

I smiled at him. “Congratulations.”

His eyes met mine.

And something went out.

That’s the only way I know to put it. One second he was looking at Avery like he couldn’t believe his luck, and then he looked at me, and the warmth left his face the way heat leaves a room when a door opens.

My smile faltered.

I have known Killian almost my entire life. I know irritated Killian and furious Killian and the Killian who got his head stuck between the rails of the west staircase at eleven and refused for forty minutes to admit he needed help. I have catalogued every version of that face. I could pick his mood out of a crowded room from the set of his shoulders.

I had never seen this one.

Cold, and then past cold, into something I had no name for.

“Killian?”

His jaw tightened.

Ghost, I told myself. He’s just found his mate. Everything’s heightened. Newly bonded wolves lose themselves for a while, everyone says so, he isn’t fully himself yet.

So I did the thing I have always done when he gets too serious.

I tried to make it normal.

“Looks like you’re stuck with her now.” I stepped in and reached for his arm.

He jerked back like I’d come at him with something hot.

“Don’t fucking touch me.”

The room stopped.

I froze with my hand still out, halfway to him, in front of every person who has ever loved me.

For a second I genuinely believed I’d misheard, and I stood there waiting for the words to rearrange themselves into something else — some joke I’d missed the front half of — and they didn’t. They just sat in the air where he’d put them.

Killian has sworn at me plenty over the years. Called me a little shit at nine, a menace at twelve, threatened to sell me to rogues at fourteen after I put an anatomically ambitious penis across a photograph of his wolf. He’s shouted at me. He once threw me fully clothed into the lake at the summer house and stood on the bank laughing while I surfaced.

He had never in his life spoken to me like I was something he needed to get off his skin.

My hand dropped.

A growl came from the head of the table, and it wasn’t Killian’s.

“Killian.” Aunt Elara’s voice had changed entirely, her wolf pressed right up against the surface of it. “You do not speak to her like that.”

“Mum —”

“I don’t care what Ghost is doing. That is Hadley.”

“No — it’s fine.” Everyone turned to look at me, which was somehow worse than anything that had come before it. “Really. It’s okay.”

I put my hands up inside the sleeves of the hoodie because I didn’t know what else to do with them, and made myself look at Jaxson.

“It’s the bond, right? Ghost being protective. Because of Avery.”

He hesitated.

Half a second. Less.

I noticed anyway.

“Could be,” he said. “Everything’s heightened when it first hits.”

“See.”

Aunt Elara didn’t look convinced. Neither did Uncle Alaric, who hadn’t sat back down and hadn’t taken his eyes off his son.

I didn’t look at Maddox at all.

Avery touched my arm. “Hads —”

“I’m so happy for you.”

“I know.”

“No, I really am.” I said it to her, because looking at Killian hurt in a way I did not yet have a category for. “This is amazing. You’re his mate.”

She gave me a small smile.

I tried to give her one back and I have no idea what my face actually did.

Then, because apparently nothing in the last four minutes had taught me anything, I glanced at Killian one more time.

He wasn’t looking at me at all. He’d already turned away, one hand at the small of Avery’s back, his whole body angled toward her like I had stopped being in the room.

“I think I’m going back to bed.”

Aunt Elara stepped toward me. “You haven’t eaten anything.”

“Stomach’s not interested.”

“Hadley —”

“I’m fine, Aunt Elara.”

Too fast. I heard it coming out and kept going anyway.

I went back for my phone. The crescent earring was still lying where it had landed, forgotten somewhere between Maddox interrogating me and Avery walking through that door and rearranging the entire morning around herself.

I closed my fingers around it hard enough to feel the post dig in.

Maddox caught my wrist as I passed.

The idiot who’d been biting his own knuckle at me five minutes earlier was gone. What was left was just my friend, looking up at me with no joke anywhere on his face.

“You okay, Princess?”

That nearly finished me more efficiently than anything Killian had said.

“Yep.”

He studied me. He didn’t believe a word of it, and he didn’t say so.

I pulled my wrist free gently. “Don’t look so worried. Your sexiness assessment did no lasting damage.”

Normally that would have got me something. It didn’t. He just held on a second longer before he let me go.

I left before anyone else could try.

—-

I made it out of the dining room and halfway down the corridor before my face started burning.

I kept walking.

It’s the bond. That’s all it is. He’s found his mate, Ghost is reacting to her, Jaxson said so himself. I reached for him at the wrong second. It isn’t personal.

Except I have known Killian nearly my whole life, and not once — not at nine or twelve or fourteen, not through three years of letters — have I ever had to wonder whether I was allowed to touch him.

I counted the last month down on the calendar over my desk like a child. I drove Aunt Elara mad asking whether he’d confirmed the date yet. I spent yesterday morning in the kitchens helping decorate that ridiculous homecoming cake with the crooked crown Maddox insisted on, while Aunt Elara supervised a second one at the other end of the room that I was apparently forbidden to look at, because everybody had decided that pretending I didn’t know there would be a birthday cake at my own party counted as a surprise.

Maddox stood in front of it with his arms out the entire time. Wouldn’t move. Told me it was a national security matter.

And I don’t know if I ever saw it.

That stopped me in the middle of the corridor.

I don’t know whether they brought it out. I don’t know whether there were candles, or whether I blew them out, or who carried it, or what was written on it, or whether the whole room sang. That would have happened after midnight, and after midnight is where the floor gives way.

Somewhere in this palace there is a cake with my name on it that I may or may not have seen.

He hadn’t been home a full day.

I got to my room and shut the door and leaned back against it, and the wood was cool through the hoodie, and I stayed there.

Only then did I look down at my hands.

Phone in one. The earring pressed into the other, the post leaving a small white dent in my palm.

I still don’t know how either of them ended up on his floor.

I still don’t know how I did.

I took the note out of the hoodie pocket and unfolded it and read it again, standing there with my back against my own door.

Love you, idiot.

Her handwriting. The mug two feet from my head. Some conversation I had and lost.

She hadn’t mentioned it. Not downstairs, not while I had my arms around her, not in the four seconds before Killian said the word that changed the shape of everything in that room.

Maybe it wasn’t worth mentioning. Maybe I cried on her and she’s letting me keep the dignity. That would be like her. That would be exactly like her.

I folded it back along her crease and put it in the drawer of my nightstand, under the sketchbook I don’t let anyone look at, because it seemed like the sort of thing you keep.

Then I stood there a moment longer, and understood that the missing pieces had stopped being the thing that hurt.

They’d been overtaken sometime in the last ten minutes. Quietly, without my noticing. The way weather changes.

It was the look on his face when I reached for him.

Like somewhere between one night and one morning, in hours I couldn’t account for, I had become something he couldn’t stand to have near him.