Chapter Four — The Debt Girl

Isla didn't lie to me.

That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward, she didn't lie. She sat on the edge of my bed with her hands twisted together in her lap and she told me the truth in the careful, measured way of someone releasing pressure from a wound. Not all at once. Just enough so I didn't break.

"Your father borrowed money," she said. "A significant amount. From Alpha Damien."

I sat across from her in the chair by the window. Outside the grounds were dark. I could see the tree line and nothing past it. "How much?"

"I don't know the exact number."

"Isla."

She looked at her hands. "Enough that he couldn't pay it back. Enough that the Alpha could demand anything in return." She paused. "He came to your father three weeks ago to collect."

Three weeks ago. The same week my father had sat me down at the kitchen table with his cold hands and his eyes that wouldn't meet mine and told me I had been chosen.

"He was going to give himself," I said slowly. "As a bodyguard. That was the offer."

Isla's head came up sharply. "How do you know that?"

"I don't." I looked at her. "I'm guessing. Was I right?"

A long silence. Then a small nod.

"The Alpha rejected it," I said. It wasn't a question anymore. The pieces were assembling themselves without my permission, cold and interlocking. "He saw me instead. And he asked for me."

"Hazel..."

"For his son." My voice was very steady. I was distantly proud of that. "Not as a bride."

Isla said nothing.

That nothing was the loudest answer she had given me.

I stood up. I walked to the window and pressed my palm flat against the cold glass and looked at the dark tree line and breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way my mother had taught me when I was small and the world felt too large.

My mother. Who had held me too long at the door. Who hadn't sat down at the kitchen table. Who had pressed the silver bracelet into my hand and told me to keep it on and couldn't finish a sentence without her voice going strange.

She had known.

They had both known.

"What am I here to be?" I asked the window.

Behind me Isla was quiet for so long I thought she wouldn't answer.

"A companion," she said finally. The word landed wrong, too careful, too chosen. "For Alexander."

"A companion," I repeated.

"That's what they call it."

I turned from the window. "And what do they call it when they're being honest?"

Isla looked at me with something in her eyes that was dangerously close to pity. I didn't want her pity. I wanted the truth, the whole truth, the version no one in this house had the courage to hand me in one piece.

But she shook her head. "I've told you what I can."

"What you can," I said. "Or what you're allowed to?"

She flinched. That was answer enough.

I sat back down. I pressed my mother's bracelet between my palms, wincing slightly as that same unnatural, icy chill bit deep into my flesh, and made myself think clearly. My father's debt. Alpha Damien's price. A house full of people who looked at me like they knew something I didn't. A man who had looked through me like glass and asked me to draw his bath.

And Liam, warm, easy Liam who had left extra blankets and written out directions and said don't make it worse for the debt girl like he was already sorry about something that hadn't happened yet.

"Isla," I said quietly. "Am I in danger?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

The door to my room swung open.

We both spun toward it.

The woman standing in the doorway was tall, dark haired, wearing a deep red dress that cost more than everything in my wardrobe combined. She was beautiful in the specific, weaponised way of someone who had always known it and learned early how to use it. Her eyes moved from Isla, dismissed in under a second, to me.

She looked at me the way Alexander had. The assessment. The conclusion.

Unlike Alexander, she let me see the conclusion.

"So you're the debt girl," she said pleasantly.

Isla went rigid beside me.

I stood up slowly. "And you are?"

"Serena." She smiled. It didn't reach anywhere near her eyes. "I've been Alexander's companion for two years." She let that word sit between us, companion, wearing the same shape Isla had used but meaning something entirely different. "I wanted to introduce myself. Woman to woman."

"That's kind of you," I said.

"It is, isn't it?" She stepped into the room without being invited, running one finger along the edge of the wardrobe door. "These clothes are new. He had them ordered for you." She glanced at me sideways. "He's never done that before. Don't read into it. He does things for reasons that have nothing to do with you."

"I wasn't reading into anything."

"Good." She stopped at the centre of the room and faced me fully. "Because I want us to understand each other from the beginning, Hazel. You are here because of a debt. You will leave when that debt is considered settled. Until then you will stay in your lane, stay out of Alexander's way, and stay away from things that don't belong to you." The smile again. "We'll get along perfectly."

She walked back to the door. Paused at the frame.

"Also," she said without turning, her eyes dropping to my wrist. "The silver bracelet. Take it off. Real wolves don't parade around in toxins. If a member of this pack touches that metal by accident, it will burn them. Don't test your luck."

She left.

The corridor swallowed the sound of her heels and the room settled back into silence.

I looked down at the bracelet on my wrist. My mother's voice in my ear, keep it on, Hazel. Strange and flat and urgent.

I looked at Isla.

"Who is she really?" I asked.

"Exactly what she said she is." Isla's voice was careful. "And she is not someone you want as an enemy."

"She already is," I said.

Isla couldn't argue with that.

I sat back down. I kept the bracelet on.

An hour later, when the pack house had gone quiet and Isla had fallen asleep in the adjoining room, I heard footsteps stop outside my door.

Not Serena's heels. Something heavier. Deliberate.

They stopped. Stayed. Long enough that I sat up in bed and stared at the door and held my breath.

Then they moved away.

In the morning I would find a small bronze key on the floor just inside my door, slid under, placed carefully, making no sound. No note. No explanation. Just the key, cold and heavy in my palm.

It opened the door at the end of the east wing corridor.

The door everyone in the pack house walked past without looking at.

The door no one had mentioned once since I arrived.