CHAPTER 4

Neva’s POV

Two lines. I stared at them until they blurred, and then I made myself stop, because a girl who cries in a locked bathroom is still a girl who has to walk out of it and cook breakfast.

I wrapped the test in tissue, buried it at the bottom of the kitchen bin under the morning’s eggshells, and washed my face in cold water. In the cracked mirror I looked exactly like the charity girl I had been yesterday. Nothing showed. Nothing had to show. It only had to stay hidden for seven months, until my debt cleared and I could vanish.

Except seven months was suddenly a very long time to hide a thing that grows.

I did the math with shaking hands while the bacon spat in the pan. If I left the day my debt cleared, I would be far along by then, too far to travel easy, too far to start over clean in a new town with no name and no money. The plan I had clung to for nine years did not fit around a baby.

I needed to leave sooner. I needed money I did not have. And I needed to make sure that not one wolf in Nightpine, above all not the three upstairs, ever learned that the charity girl was carrying a Kane.

Because a mate they had rejected in front of the whole pack was a humiliation they could laugh off. A pregnant mate they had rejected was a scandal that would follow their new rule forever. If Dorian would tear a mask off my face to protect his title, I did not want to imagine what he would do to protect it from this.

The kitchen door banged open and all three of them came down at once, and my whole body went rigid.

They had been strange since the party. That was the only word I had for it. Dorian barely spoke, but his cold eyes kept landing on me and sliding away like he was angry at himself for looking. Cassian had stopped performing entirely, which was worse than any joke, because a quiet Cassian was a Cassian I did not know how to read. And Lucian could not look at me at all.

“Breakfast,” Dorian said, and sat.

I served them without a word. I felt Cassian’s eyes on the back of my neck the whole time, and when I set his plate down he caught my wrist, just for a second.

“Neva.” My real name. From Cassian. It stopped my heart. “That masked girl at the party. The one in blue. Do you know who she was?”

The floor tilted under me.

“No,” I said. My voice came out flat and even, nine years of practice holding it steady. “I was in the kitchen most of the night. Serving.”

He searched my face. I gave him nothing. I had given this family nothing for nine years, and it was the one skill that might save me now.

“Why,” I made myself ask, “does it matter?”

Cassian let go of my wrist. Something flickered across his face, guilt, or grief, or both. “It doesn’t,” he said. “Forget it.”

But it did matter. I could see that it mattered to him more than anything had in his easy, golden life. And that terrified me more than his cruelty ever had.

Third Person

The triplets did not go to their ceremony meetings that morning. They went to Cassian’s room and shut the door.

“It’s been six weeks,” Cassian said, pacing. He had not slept properly since the party. None of them had. “Six weeks, and I still smell her on that mask every time I close my eyes. Coconut and something warm. She was our mate, and one of us was with her, and she is gone.”

“We rejected her,” Dorian said flatly, from the window. His jaw was tight. “The bond is severed. There is no her anymore. There is only a mistake we made in front of the whole pack, and a scent that will fade.”

“It is not fading.” Lucian’s voice was raw. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands, and he had said almost nothing for six weeks. “It is not fading for me. I feel like something was cut out of me and I cannot get it back and I do not even know her name.”

The three of them fell silent. None of them would say aloud what all of them felt, the phantom ache of a bond torn out by their own words, a wound that did not close because a rejected bond never truly does. They had been raised to believe they were the luckiest wolves alive. They had met their fated mate at last, and in three sentences, for the sake of a crowd and a crown, they had destroyed her.

“I should not have laughed,” Cassian said quietly. It was the first time in his life he had ever regretted playing to a room. “I keep seeing her face when I said it. The charity girl. Neva. She did not even cry. She just looked at me like she had always known we would.”

Dorian turned from the window. “The masked girl and Neva are not the same thing,” he said. “Do not confuse them. One is a stranger we will never find. The other is the servant who has lived under our roof for nine years, and she is leaving in seven months whether we like it or not, and we have no claim on her because we ended it ourselves.”

“You ended it,” Lucian said, lifting his head. His eyes were red. “You tore off her mask. I only followed.”

“You all followed,” Dorian snapped, and for once his cold voice cracked. “Do not pretend any one of us is cleaner than the others.”

The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the house.

Neva’s POV

I heard none of that. I was in the debt office off the pack hall, standing in front of the ledger keeper, asking the question that would decide everything.

“I want to clear my debt early,” I said. “How much would it cost to buy out the remaining balance now.”

The old wolf peered at me over his spectacles, surprised. He ran a claw down the column, and my heart climbed into my throat, and then he named a number so large it took the air out of my lungs. Nine years of unpaid labor did not shrink a debt. It fed it. Interest had done what interest does.

I could not pay it. Not in seven months of scrubbing floors. Not in seventy.

“Is there any other way out of it early?” I asked, and I heard the desperation leak into my voice for the first time in years.

“Only two ways a bond-debt clears early.” He shrugged. “You pay it. Or the family that holds it releases you.” He looked at me almost kindly. “And the Kanes have never once released anyone.”

I walked out of that office and into the corridor and stood very still, because the walls of the cage had just become clear to me all at once. I could not pay my way out. The Kanes would never let me out. And in a few short months my body would tell everyone the secret I could not afford them to know.

I was trapped in the one house in the world where I most needed not to be, carrying the one thing I most needed to hide, owned by the three wolves I most needed to escape.

I pressed a hand flat against my stomach, and for the first time since the two lines, I let myself feel afraid.

Then I heard Dorian’s voice behind me, low and dangerous.

“Neva. My office. Now. We need to talk about the night of the party.”