Chapter 2

"Take it back."

Cassian's voice cracked down the middle of the sentence.

I could not answer. I was on my knees on the stone floor, and I did not remember falling. Pain ripped through my chest in long, burning strokes, as if someone had reached inside and pulled a rope out of my ribs hand over hand. My lungs would not work. My fingers dug into the cold flagstones until the nails bent.

"Liora. Take it back. Now."

He crouched in front of me. Close. His hand closed around my jaw and forced my face up.

I expected grief.

I had spent six years imagining what Cassian would look like if he ever lost me. In my dreams, his eyes filled with tears. His voice broke. He begged.

His eyes were black.

Not sad. Not shocked. Black from rim to rim, the wolf swallowing the man, his lip curled back from his teeth. Rage rolled off him in waves, hot and suffocating.

"You do not get to leave me," he said, and spit flecked my cheek. "You are mine. You were born to be mine."

I understood then, clear as a bell.

He was not heartbroken. He was furious that something he owned had walked out of the house.

A laugh scraped out of my throat. It hurt like broken glass.

"Something funny?" His grip tightened. My teeth ground together.

"You," I rasped. "You never even asked if I was hurt."

He blinked.

Only once. But I saw it. The tiniest flicker of confusion, like a man who had never considered that the question existed.

"Alpha." Beta Marlowe's hand landed on Cassian's shoulder. "Not here. The elders are watching."

Cassian's jaw flexed. Slowly, the black bled out of his eyes. He let go of my face and rose to his full height, straightened his cuffs, and turned to the room with his mask back in place.

"My mate is unwell," he announced. "The stress of the ceremony has clouded her judgment. The rejection is void."

"It is not void," said the eldest elder quietly.

Every head turned.

Old Harlan Grey sat at the end of the pew with his hands folded over his cane. His voice was thin, but it carried. "A rejection spoken before three witnesses and the Moon Goddess cannot be undone by the Alpha's word. The bond is broken. The girl is free."

Luna Regina's face went the color of ash.

"She will regret this," she said. "In a week she will be on her knees at our door."

I dragged in a breath. Then another. The pain was settling into something I could survive, a deep, raw ache under my sternum, like a tooth pulled and the socket left open.

I did what I had done ten thousand times for other people. I laid my palm flat on my own ribs and pushed warmth into the wound. The healing gift answered slowly, sluggish and reluctant. It hurt worse than the injury itself.

But it worked.

I got one foot under me. Then the other. Silk slid off my shoulders, and I did not care. I stood in my slip in front of the entire pack leadership, shaking, sweat running down my spine, and I did not cover myself.

Tess Marlowe crossed the floor. She unclasped her own coat and draped it over my shoulders without a word. Her eyes searched my face, sharp and unreadable.

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't," she murmured. "I'm not on your side. I'm just curious."

Before I could answer, Odalys seized my wrist.

"That is enough." Her fingers dug into the bone. Her face was drawn tight, blotchy with panic. "You have humiliated this family. You will come home with me, and you will think about what you have done."

"Let go."

"You ungrateful, selfish girl. Do you know what I sacrificed to raise you? Do you know how many favors I called in to secure this match?"

There it was.

Not are you all right. Not why did you do it. A ledger. Always a ledger.

She hauled me toward the doors. I could have fought. My body still felt like wet paper, but I had four exits memorized and a dead woman's memory of how to break a grip.

What I knew was this: if I fought here, in front of the elders, I would look unstable. And I needed them to think I was harmless for as long as possible.

So I let her drag me.

Behind me, Cassian's voice rose. "Marlowe. Have her watched."

"Yes, Alpha."

Vivienne's small, tearful sob echoed after us.

The doors closed.

Odalys's house sat at the bottom of the hill, a narrow stone cottage squeezed between the butcher and the feed store. I had grown up in it. I had slept in the attic room under the eaves since I was eight.

She pushed me inside and slammed the attic door behind me.

I heard the key turn.

"You will stay there until you apologize," she called through the wood. Her heels clattered down the stairs. "I will not have my name dragged through the mud for your tantrum."

Silence.

I sat down on the narrow bed.

Everything was exactly as I remembered. The slanted ceiling. The chipped washbasin. The single window with its cracked pane. A faded quilt my mother had stitched before she died.

My mother.

I pressed my palms to my eyes and let myself shake.

It came in waves. The fear first, the sheer animal terror of what I had just done. Then the grief, sharp and unexpected, for the girl who had trusted him. Then a strange, dizzy joy, because I was alive, and the snow was not falling, and my hands were not frozen to iron bars.

I was crying without noise. I had learned that young.

I do not know how long I sat there. The light in the window faded from gold to grey to indigo. I heard the rain begin, a soft patter on the slate.

Sixty days.

I lay back on the quilt and stared at the rafters and counted everything I would need. Food. Fuel. Water. A place above the flood line. Money, which I did not have. Allies, which I did not have. A plan, which I did not have.

A tap sounded at the window.

I froze.

The tap came again. Soft. Patient.

I rose and crept to the glass. A hooded figure crouched on the shed roof below, rain streaming off her cloak, one thin hand raised.

Tamsin.

I cracked the window. Cold air rushed in.

"Miss Liora," she whispered. Her old eyes flicked over my shoulder, checking the room. "Quickly. There is little time."

"How did you climb up here?"

"Old bones climb what they must." She pushed something through the gap. A small object wrapped in oilcloth, heavy and cold in my palm. "Your grandmother's. She told me to give it to you the hour you broke the bond. Not a minute sooner."

My breath caught.

"She knew?"

Tamsin's lips pressed together. "She knew many things. I never dared to ask how."

She was already sliding backward across the wet slate.

"Tamsin, wait. What is this?"

"Read the letter first." She hesitated, then her voice dropped even lower. "And whatever happens, child, whatever they offer or threaten, you must not let them follow you to the ridge."

She was gone before I could ask another question. The rain swallowed her footsteps.

I shut the window and locked it with numb fingers.

Under the flicker of a stub of candle, I unwrapped the oilcloth. Inside lay a key, heavy and silver, cool as moonlight, with a crescent worked into its bow. Folded beneath it was a single sheet of yellowed paper, the ink faded but the handwriting bold and slanted and unmistakably a woman's.

I unfolded it with trembling hands.

There were only six words.

Do not let them see the ridge.