CHAPTER 3

Neva’s POV

I should have run. I did not.

The masked man stood in the moonlight outside the old lodge, tall and broad and still, and every raw and severed nerve in my body turned toward him at once. His scent reached me through the cold, and my breath caught, because it was one of them. I knew that much. One of the three threads that had been torn out of me an hour ago was standing in front of me now, wearing a black mask, saying nothing.

But the bond was broken. Cut clean. And with it gone, I could not tell whose scent this was anymore. The mating pull that would have named him had been ripped away by his own mouth, or his brother’s, or his brother’s. All that was left was a man in the dark and a girl who had nothing left to lose.

“You followed me,” I said.

“I did.” His voice was low, roughened, deliberately muffled behind the mask. He did not want to be known any more than I did. Two masked strangers in the snow, both pretending to be someone else. “You should not be out here alone. Not tonight.”

“Why do you care.” It was not a question. “You threw me away in front of the whole pack.”

He flinched. I saw it, even in the dark. “That was not supposed to happen like that.”

“It happened exactly like that.”

He stepped closer, and the snow crunched under his boots, and his scent wrapped around me warm and aching and impossibly good, and I hated how my body leaned toward it. Nine years of being nothing in that house. One hour of being wanted, then unwanted, in front of everyone I knew. And now this, the cruelest thing of all, a piece of what I could have had, standing close enough to touch.

“Take off the mask,” I said.

“No.” A pause. “If I take it off, you will hate me. Right now, out here, you do not know which one of us I am. Let me be no one. Just for tonight.”

Let me be no one. The same wish I had made in Tess’s mirror. The same wish that had brought me here in this ridiculous blue dress.

Maybe that was why I did not step back.

“I don’t want to be Neva tonight,” I heard myself say. My voice cracked on it. “I don’t want to be the charity girl who got rejected by three Alphas at their own party. I want to be someone. Just once. Just tonight.”

“Then be someone.” He lifted a gloved hand, slow, giving me every chance to pull away, and brushed a loose curl from my face. His knuckles grazed my cheek and left a line of heat behind them. “And so will I.”

I do not know which of us moved first.

His mouth found mine, and it was nothing gentle. It was a searing thing, desperate and full of everything neither of us could say, and I gasped against him and let him take more. Static crackled down every nerve I had. No one had ever kissed me like this. No one had ever kissed me at all. Eight years of holding myself rigid and small, and it all came apart against a stranger’s mouth in the snow.

His hands slid to my waist and pulled me flush against him, and a sound broke out of me that I had never made in my life. He answered it low in his chest, backing me gently toward the dark shelter of the lodge doorway, out of the wind, out of the world.

“Tell me to stop,” he breathed against my lips, “and I will. I swear it.”

I thought of the hall. The laughter. Three backs turning on me. Every year I had swallowed and scrubbed and survived.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered. “For once in my life, don’t anyone stop.”

His hands were in my hair, on my jaw, dragging warmth across skin that had been cold for nine years. He kissed me like he was starving, like I was something worth being starving for, and I clung to the broad shoulders of a boy I could not name and let myself feel, finally, wanted. Not charity. Not debt. Not a joke. Wanted.

His mouth moved to my throat and I tipped my head back and the last of my careful, guarded self dissolved into the heat of him. His breath was ragged. Mine was worse. The blue dress slipped from one shoulder and his hands were reverent and rough all at once, and I stopped thinking, stopped grieving, stopped being anyone at all.

“Say you want this,” he rasped.

“I want this. I want you. Whoever you are.”

And in the dark of that doorway, with both our faces hidden and the snow falling soft and silent around us, I gave myself to a masked stranger who had broken my heart an hour before, and he gave himself back, and for one stolen night neither of us was the person the world had made us.

I did not cry. Not then.

I was warm, and I was held, and I was, for the length of one night, someone.

I woke before dawn to a cold empty space beside me and a folded blanket tucked around my shoulders that had not been there when I fell asleep.

He was gone.

On the floor of the lodge doorway, where he had knelt to leave it, sat the black mask. Just the mask. No note. No name. He had taken his face away with him and left me the one thing that proved I had not dreamed him.

I picked it up with shaking hands. It still smelled of him, warm and aching and utterly familiar, and utterly unknown. One of them. I would never be able to prove which. Even if I walked up to all three Kane brothers this morning and breathed them in, the bond that would have told me was gone, severed, dead.

I sat there in the gray light with a stranger’s mask in my hands and understood exactly what I had done.

I had let one of the boys who ruined me ruin me a little more. And I had wanted it.

I dressed in the ruined blue gown and walked back through the snow to the pack house, and I made a decision with every frozen step. No one would ever know. Not the pack, not the triplets, not whichever masked coward had crept away before sunrise. In seven months my debt cleared and I would leave Nightpine forever, and I would take this night with me and bury it so deep it would be like it never happened.

That was the plan.

I held to it for exactly six weeks.

Then I stood in the tiny bathroom off my storage-room bedroom, gripping the edge of the sink, staring down at the test I had walked two towns over to buy so no one in Nightpine would see the charity girl purchase it.

Two lines.

And I understood that whichever masked Kane had walked away from me in the snow had left me with far more than a mask.