Sixty Days Before the Flood

"Fetch Vivienne's medicine, Liora. Now."

Cassian did not look at me when he said it. He looked at his cuffs. He tugged the left one straight, then the right, the way he did when he wanted a room to know who owned it.

A pin bit into my ribs.

I stood on a wooden stool in the middle of the Moon Hall with my arms held out like a scarecrow. Three seamstresses circled me. Cream silk hung off my shoulders. Cedar and beeswax filled the air, thick and sweet, and the smell hit the back of my throat like a fist.

I knew that smell. I had smelled it once before, right before I died.

Snow. White, endless, roaring snow.

I blinked. The hall came back. Candles. Carved beams. The long banner over the dais with the Blackthorn crest stitched in silver thread.

"Liora." Cassian's voice dropped lower. "The Alpha gave you an order."

The Alpha. He always said it that way. Not I. The Alpha.

My heart slammed once, hard, against the pinned silk.

A steel gate. Iron bars slick with ice. My fingernails scraping down them, tearing, leaving red on the white.

"Liora," Odalys said from the front pew. My stepmother sat with her purse in her lap and her ankles crossed, watching me like a shopkeeper watching a customer touch the merchandise. "Don't make this difficult. What does it cost you to fetch a bottle?"

"The apothecary is across the valley," I said. My voice came out flat. Steady. I did not know where I had found it. "Forty minutes each way."

"Vivienne has a headache," said Luna Regina Rourke. Cassian's mother folded her hands over her stomach and smiled the smile of a woman about to deliver a proverb. "A Luna does not need to be thanked. A Luna needs only to be useful."

Every eye in the hall turned toward me. Beta Marlowe. Two elders in grey robes. Tess Marlowe by the window, arms crossed, watching. Tamsin in the corner with a tray of tea, her lips pressed together.

And Vivienne.

My half-sister sat on the front bench with one hand pressed lightly to her stomach and the other to her temple. Her hair fell over her shoulder in soft golden waves. Her eyes shone, wet and wounded. She looked as if she might faint from the effort of existing.

"I'm sorry to be a bother," Vivienne whispered. "I know you're busy with the fitting. It's only that the pain is so bad, and Cassian is worried about the baby, and I..."

She let the sentence die.

The baby.

My stomach turned over, slow and cold.

Cassian's back. Broad. Turning away. Vivienne's white coat vanishing through the open gate. The steel groaning shut.

"Cassian!" My own voice, ragged. "Please! Cassian, I'm still out here!"

He did not turn around.

I counted.

It was a habit. When my chest went tight, I counted exits. There were four in the Moon Hall. The front doors, twelve strides away. The side door by the kitchens. The archive stairs. The window over the herb garden, small enough to squeeze through if I dropped the silk.

Four exits. Four ways out.

In my last life, I had never once used any of them.

"Liora." Cassian finally looked at me. Gold eyes, sharp jaw, the face half the valley sighed over. He crossed the floor in six long steps and stopped so close that I felt his heat on my skin. "Get down from the stool. Take the truck. Bring back the medicine."

I looked at the pincushion on the seamstress's wrist.

I reached over and straightened it. Its edge was crooked.

"No," I said.

The word dropped into the hall like a stone into a well.

No one moved. One of the seamstresses stopped with her scissors midair. The candle nearest the dais popped and hissed.

Cassian's mouth twitched. "What did you say?"

"I said no." My hands did not shake. My hands were the steadiest part of me. It was my knees that were failing, and I locked them so he would not see. "Send someone else. Send a driver. Send Vivienne's mother. I will not go."

Odalys shot up from her pew so fast her purse thumped to the floor. "Liora Hale!"

"You have not said no to this family in twenty-four years," Luna Regina said, softly, dangerously. "Think carefully about what you are doing."

I did think.

I thought about a lot of things in that silence.

I thought about six years of cooking for Cassian's warriors and never eating with them. About the winters I healed his pack's broken bones with my own hands until my fingers went numb and my vision went dark. About the nights I waited up for a man who came home smelling of my sister's perfume and said nothing, and I said nothing, because saying something might have cost me the only home I had.

I thought about how much I had loved him.

That was the part that made my throat burn. Not the betrayal. The love. I had given him all of it. I had poured it out like water, and he had let it run through his fingers.

I stepped down off the stool.

The silk pooled around my ankles. A pin stabbed the back of my thigh, and I ignored it. I walked forward until I stood a single pace from him, and I looked up, and for the first time in my whole life I did not lower my eyes.

"Ask me what today is," I said.

Cassian frowned. "What?"

"Ask me the date."

He stared at me as if I had grown a second head. "Liora, this is not the time for..."

"It is the ninth of September," I said. "Sixty days from now, the river will rise past the mill road at midnight. By dawn the lower valley will be underwater. By the end of the week, the power grid will be gone. There will be no rescue. Not for the pack. Not for anyone."

A ripple went through the hall.

One of the elders coughed. Tess's head snapped up. Somewhere behind me, a cup rattled against a saucer.

"She has lost her mind," Odalys said. Her voice climbed. "She's ill. Cassian, she's been under so much stress with the ceremony..."

"I have not lost my mind," I said, without looking away from Cassian. "I lost my life."

The words came out quiet.

They landed harder than a shout.

Cassian's expression shifted. Confusion. Then something uglier underneath it. His nostrils flared, and his hand flexed at his side, and I watched the alpha in him rise like a tide, dark and possessive and entitled.

"You are speaking to your Alpha," he said. "In front of the pack elders. In front of my mother."

"I know."

"You are hysterical."

"I am the calmest I have ever been."

It was true. That was the strangest part. Terror was in me, yes. It coiled low in my belly, cold and slick, an animal I could feel breathing. But under the terror was something else, something hard and bright and clean.

Rage.

Not the hot, sloppy kind. The kind that had spent one lifetime learning to be patient.

"Cassian," Vivienne said, in a small, trembling voice. She had risen from the bench. Her hand still rested on her stomach. "Please. Don't be angry. I don't want to cause trouble between you two. I'll go myself. I'll manage."

She swayed.

Cassian moved instantly. He caught her elbow, and his whole body softened, and his voice went gentle in a way I had never once heard directed at me.

"Sit down, Viv. Don't strain yourself."

I watched his hand on her arm.

I watched how easily it lay there.

Six years, I thought. Six years I stood outside that tenderness.

My chest ached. Not the sharp ache of a fresh wound. The dull, hollow ache of something that had already died and was only now being buried.

Cassian turned back to me. The gentleness was gone. He looked at me the way a man looks at a broken tool.

"You will apologize," he said. "You will apologize to Vivienne. You will apologize to my mother. And then you will take the truck, and you will fetch the medicine, and we will forget this outburst ever happened."

"No."

"Liora."

"No."

He stepped closer. The candlelight caught the gold in his eyes and turned them molten. I felt the bond stir between us, that thin silver thread that had been tied around my heart since the night the Moon Goddess announced us, and it tugged. It always tugged when he was angry. Like a leash.

"Careful," he said, very low. "You are nothing without this pack. You have no family outside these walls. No money. No name. No protection. Everything you are, I gave you."

I almost laughed.

I did not. But something in my face must have shifted, because his eyes narrowed.

"I was nothing with it," I said.

The room went dead silent.

I heard my own pulse. I heard the seamstresses breathing. I heard Tamsin, in the corner, set down her tea tray with a soft, deliberate clink.

I looked at the elders. The grey-robed men who had blessed our union without once asking whether I wanted it. Then at Beta Marlowe, whose cologne I would recognize anywhere, and whose scent, I was suddenly certain, clung to the collar of my sister's coat.

Then at Cassian's mother, whose smile had finally cracked.

Then at Odalys, who was already calculating what my refusal would cost her.

Then, last, at Cassian.

The man I had loved. The man I had bled for. The man who had closed a steel gate on my fingers and walked away.

The bond pulled at me again. Harder this time. It wanted me to obey. It wanted me to bend.

Fear rushed up my spine. If I did what I was about to do, there was no undoing it. The pack would call me a traitor. My family would call me a curse. The bond itself would tear something inside me that no healer could stitch.

Sixty days.

I had sixty days, and every one of them was mine.

I straightened my shoulders. I lifted my chin. I set my bare heels against the cold stone floor and let the silk fall from my shoulders until I stood in nothing but my thin white slip, small and pale and shaking, and I spoke in a voice that carried to every corner of the Moon Hall.

"I, Liora Hale, daughter of the Hale line, stand before the elders of Blackthorn and the eyes of the Moon Goddess."

Cassian's face went white.

"Liora," he said. "Do not."

"I have been your mate for six years. I have healed your wounds. I have kept your house. I have loved you with everything I had."

Gasps broke out behind me.

"Stop this," Luna Regina hissed. "Stop her!"

Odalys lunged. Tess Marlowe was already moving. Two elders rose from their seats. Cassian's hand shot out toward my throat, fast as a snake, fingers reaching.

I looked him dead in the eyes.

"I reject you, Cassian Rourke," I said. "I reject you as my mate."

For one heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then I heard it.

A sound no human ear could catch. A sound that only wolves feel in their bones. A high, cracking, glassy shriek, like a frozen lake splitting from shore to shore.

The silver thread in my chest snapped.