CHAPTER 5

Neva’s POV

Dorian’s office had been his father’s a month ago. It still smelled of old leather and cold authority, and now it smelled of him too, coffee and dark cocoa, the scent I had breathed in the snow six weeks ago and could not stop breathing since.

I stood in front of his desk with my hands folded and my face blank, the way I had stood in front of this family my whole life.

“Shut the door,” he said.

I shut it. My heart was slamming so hard I was sure he could hear it.

Dorian did not sit. He came around the desk and leaned against it, arms crossed, studying me with those pale, unreadable eyes. For a long moment he said nothing, and the silence stretched until it hurt.

“The masked girl,” he said finally. “In the blue dress. The one who left through the north doors after the party.”

“I already told Cassian. I don’t know who she was.”

“You were the only person in that hall in a blue dress.”

The floor dropped away beneath me. I kept my face still through sheer force of will, nine years of practice holding the line.

“The mask I was wearing was silver,” I said. “Half the guests were masked. I served drinks, Alpha. I did not attend.”

“Then explain to me,” he said quietly, “why the scent on a mask my brother found at the old lodge is the same scent that has been in my house for nine years.”

My blood turned to ice.

He knew. Not all of it. But he had caught the edge of the thread, and Dorian was not a wolf who let a thread go once he had it.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“I think you do.” He pushed off the desk and stepped closer, and his scent rolled over me, and my traitorous body swayed a fraction toward it before I locked my knees. “The bond is severed. I cannot smell it the way I would if it were still whole. But I am not a fool, Neva. Something happened that night. And I want to know what.”

“Nothing happened.” My voice did not shake. It was the greatest performance of my life. “You rejected me in front of the entire pack. Then I served drinks until the hall emptied. Then I cleaned it. That is what the charity girl did at your ascension. That is what the charity girl always does.”

Something flinched behind his eyes at the word charity. Good. Let it hurt him. Let it be the thing that made him look away.

It worked. Barely. He stepped back, jaw tight, and I saw him decide he could not prove it, not yet, and that not-yet was the only gap I had.

“You are dismissed,” he said. “But this is not finished.”

I walked out of that office on legs that did not feel like mine, and the moment the door closed behind me I understood with total clarity that my seven months had just become seven days, or less. Dorian had the mask. Dorian had the scent. Dorian would keep pulling until the whole thing unraveled, and when it did he would find not just a masked girl but a pregnant one, and I did not know which of the three of them had left me in the snow, which meant I did not know which one would decide what to do about it.

I could not wait for the debt to clear. I could not wait for my body to show. I had to run now, tonight, with nothing, and I had to disappear so completely that not even Dorian’s nose could follow.

I went to my closet room and I moved fast and quiet. I had almost nothing, which for once was a mercy. A change of clothes. The small roll of cash I had hidden inside the lining of my coat, coin by coin, over nine years, the escape fund I had always known I would need. My mother’s only photograph. And the black mask, because I could not make myself leave it, the one proof that for one night I had been someone’s.

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach.

“It is you and me now,” I whispered. “That is all. That is enough.”

I waited until the house went quiet. The triplets had a pack council at the hall that ran late into the night, the kind of meeting new Alphas could not skip. It was the only window I would get. I pulled my coat tight, tucked my chin, and slipped out the side door into the dark and the snow, exactly the way I had six weeks ago, except this time I was not going toward a lodge to feel wanted.

This time I was leaving Nightpine for good.

I made it to the tree line at the edge of the pack lands. The lights of the pack house glowed small and gold behind me, and ahead was only black forest and the road beyond it that led anywhere but here. My breath clouded white. My heart pounded. Twenty more steps and I would cross the boundary, and once a rejected wolf crosses the boundary of the pack that cast her out, the territory itself lets her go.

Ten steps.

Five.

“Neva.”

The voice came from the dark ahead of me, not behind, and I froze mid-step with my heart in my throat.

Lucian stepped out from between the trees, right in my path, blocking the boundary line. He was not supposed to be here. He was supposed to be at the council with his brothers. His eyes went to my coat, to the bag clutched against my chest, to my face, and understanding spread across his features slow and terrible.

“You’re leaving,” he said softly. “Tonight. Without telling anyone.”

“Get out of my way, Lucian.”

“You can’t.” He took a step toward me, and his scent reached me on the cold air, warm chocolate, gentle, the scent I knew, and my whole body lit up in a way that stopped my breath, because I had smelled that exact thing before, six weeks ago, in a doorway, in the dark, against a mouth that would not tell me its name.

The mask. The blanket tucked around my shoulders. The gentleness of hands that could have taken and instead had asked.

Say you want this. And I will. I swear it.

I looked at Lucian standing in the snow with the moonlight on his jaw, the exact jaw I had glimpsed under a black mask, and the ground fell out of the entire world.

It had been him.

The sweet one. The youngest. The one too weak to save me in the hall, and the one who had followed me into the dark afterward. He was the father. He was the one who had left before dawn. And by the way his eyes suddenly widened, by the way his nostrils flared as the wind shifted and carried my scent, all of it, straight to him, he was, in that exact moment, realizing something too.

“Neva,” he breathed, staring at my stomach, his voice breaking. “Why do you smell like...”

He could not finish it.

Behind him, out of the trees, two more figures stepped onto the path.

Dorian and Cassian had come after all.