Chapter 4 — Rank Means Nothing

The summons comes at dawn.

Not a knock. A folded paper slid under my door while I was still asleep, which means whoever delivered it didn't want to be seen delivering it, which means it wasn't official pack business.

Except it is.

I read it twice. Then a third time because the words aren't changing and I want them to change.

Alpha Caius Voss requests the presence of Omega Sera Ashveil in the main hall. Seventh hour. Attendance is not optional.

Attendance is not optional.

I set the paper down on my cot. The nail in the wall catches the early light. Outside my window, the pack is already moving — I can hear the Gamma patrol change, the kitchen Omegas starting breakfast, the specific rhythm of a morning that doesn't know yet that something is different.

I have forty minutes.

I reach under my cot for the Moonveil root bundle.

My hand finds the cloth wrap. I pull it out. Unwrap it on my lap.

Three pieces. Small ones.

I've been rationing since Tuesday because the market vendor said his next shipment was delayed and I didn't want to — I press one piece under my tongue and wrap the other two back up and tell myself three is enough. It's enough. I've made it work with less.

Ash says nothing.

I dress. I braid my hair. I look at the summons one more time.

Main hall. Not Caius's private study. Not the Beta council room.

Main hall.

Where the pack eats. Where they gather. Where there are always at minimum thirty wolves going about their morning and not trying to be an audience but being one anyway because that's what a room full of wolves is — a room full of creatures who read each other for information and can't turn it off.

He's going to do this in front of everyone.

I think about why. An Alpha who believes he's found his mate summons her to his study, privately, because confirmation of a bond is intimate. Sacred, technically. The ceremony exists for a reason.

Unless he's not certain.

Unless he wants witnesses because he doesn't trust what he felt, doesn't trust that the Omega with nothing worth smelling could possibly be — and he wants thirty wolves present when it turns out he was wrong so the story becomes not Alpha found his mate but Alpha investigated an anomaly and dismissed it.

He's protecting himself.

From me.

I almost feel something about that. I breathe through it and go to breakfast instead.

The kitchen is loud and warm and smells like bad porridge, which is what it smells like every morning, which is what I ate every morning for three years before I started taking the early shift and eating alone. I take my bowl to the end of the long table where the other early-shift Omegas sit in the particular silence of people who have learned that conversation before seventh hour costs more than it gives.

Dara slides in across from me.

She's Delta. Healer. She sits with the Omegas sometimes, which the other Deltas find baffling and she finds irrelevant. She has kind eyes and ink-stained fingers and she always smells faintly of dried chamomile and something else underneath, something older, that I've never been able to name exactly.

She looks at my face.

"You got the summons," she says.

Not a question.

I look at her. "How do you know about the summons."

She wraps both hands around her cup. Doesn't answer immediately. There's a crack in her cup — I've seen it before, she uses the same one every morning, never gets a new one — and she runs her thumb over it the way a person does when they're deciding something.

"Everyone knows," she says. "By now."

I set my spoon down.

Everyone knows.

I think about the paper slid under my door before dawn. The delivery timed so I wouldn't see who brought it. The main hall instead of the study. Thirty wolves who can't turn off the part of them that reads a room.

Everyone knows means the story is already written before I walk into that hall. Whatever I do this morning has an audience that decided what it was watching before I arrived. That's not an accident. That's architecture.

Caius is precise. I've always known this about him. He doesn't waste movement any more than he wastes words.

This is a test.

Not of the bond.

Of me.

I pick my spoon back up. Eat. The porridge is bad the way it's always bad, thick and slightly burnt at the bottom, and I eat it because I need something in my stomach and because Dara is watching me with that expression she sometimes gets, the one I've cataloged but never quite decoded — not pity, something more complicated, something that has waiting in it.

"He's already there," she says. Quiet. "Kael."

I don't react.

I'm very careful not to react, which is its own kind of reaction, and Dara is smart enough to read it, and for a moment we both sit with what just happened in this conversation.

"Why would I need to know that," I say.

She looks at her cracked cup. "I don't know," she says. "I thought you might."

I leave my bowl half full.

The main hall at seventh hour is exactly what I calculated. Thirty-two wolves by my count, arranged with the specific casualness of people who have positioned themselves. Gammas near the back. Two Betas flanking the center. Pack members who have things to do this morning and are definitely not here for the spectacle and are very thoroughly here for the spectacle.

Caius stands at the front.

Grey shirt. Different one than the ceremony but the same cut, the same cost. He watches me walk in from the moment I appear in the doorway and his face does the thing again — that open confusion — before it smooths out.

He's been here a while. He's had time to prepare that smoothness.

I walk to the center of the room.

I don't look for Kael.

I find him anyway because the room has a specific shape around him, a slight curvature of unconscious distance that thirty wolves have created without knowing they've done it. He stands near the east wall. Arms loose. Eyes forward.

He's not watching Caius.

He's watching me.

I look at Caius.

"Omega Ashveil." His voice carries the Alpha undertone. Every wolf in the room straightens slightly. "Step forward."

I step forward.

He's five feet away now. Four. I stop at three because three is close enough to be respectful and far enough to make a choice look like a choice.

He scents the air.

I feel the Moonveil root sitting under my tongue and I count: two pieces left after this, one if this takes longer than an hour, which means tomorrow morning I wake up with nothing between me and whatever I actually smell like.

His expression changes.

Not the confusion. Something beneath it. Frustration, maybe, clean and controlled, the kind that comes from a man who expected an answer and got a question instead.

"You're suppressing your scent," he says.

The hall goes very quiet.

Not a question. A fact, stated in front of thirty witnesses, which means the next ten seconds are going to define something and I need to decide what.

I say nothing.

"That's a Delta-rank herb." Still that flat Alpha tone. Informational. "Omegas don't use it."

"Omegas don't buy it," I say. "Not the same thing."

Someone near the back makes a sound. Swallows it.

Caius looks at me for a long moment. I look back. The candle on the table to my left has burned down to a stub, the wax pooled in a shape like a running animal, and I notice this because I notice everything and because it's easier than noticing the way thirty wolves have stopped breathing at the same rate.

"Stop taking it," he says.

Four words.

Not a request.

My tongue finds the Moonveil piece. Small. Already dissolving. One dose standing between me and whatever I am.

*Now,* Ash says.

Six letters. One word.

Not an instruction.

A warning.

I look at Alpha Caius Voss in front of thirty witnesses and I think about the paper slid under my door before dawn and the main hall instead of the study and the story already written before I arrived, and I think about four years of consistent invisibility and what it cost and what it bought, and I think about Kael near the east wall not watching Caius.

Watching me.

"What," I ask, very quietly, "do you think you found?"