Chapter 5

Wren's POV

Sable talks the whole drive, which I'm grateful for, because it means I don't have to.

"So here's the thing you should know up front," she says, one hand loose on the wheel, sunglasses pushed up into her hair even though the sky is more gray than bright. "Rhydian doesn't do things like this. Ever. Man hasn't taken on new staff in three years because he says he doesn't like strangers in the house. And now he adds you to a contract in front of an entire negotiating table like it's nothing. So either you're about to have the easiest job of your life, or something's going on that nobody's told me about yet, and honestly I'm betting on the second one."

"I don't know either," I say honestly. "I poured his wine. That's the whole story from where I'm sitting."

"Uh huh." She glances over, quick and assessing, the same look she gave Callum on the steps. "What's with the mark?"

My hand goes instinctively to my wrist before I can stop it. "It's a binding."

"I know what it is. I'm asking why you have one." Her voice isn't unkind, just direct, the way I'm starting to understand Nightfall wolves might just talk in general. "Bindings aren't handed out for nothing."

"I did something bad," I say, the answer I've given a hundred times, worn smooth from repetition. "Five years ago."

"What kind of bad?"

I look out the window instead of answering, watching the trees blur past, and after a moment Sable lets it go, which I appreciate more than I know how to say.

We stop an hour in, a gas station at the edge of nowhere with a single pump and a cooler full of drinks that all look like they've been sitting there since last summer. Sable buys two anyway, tosses one into my lap without asking what I wanted, and leans against the car while it fills.

"You don't talk much," she says, not unkindly, more like she's cataloguing it. "Is that a you thing or a your-brother's-house thing?"

"Bit of both, probably." I turn the bottle over in my hands, not opening it yet. "Talking gets noticed. Noticed isn't usually good."

"Huh." She squints at me over the top of her sunglasses. "That's a sad way to live, you know that?"

"I'm aware."

"Well." She caps the pump, slides back behind the wheel. "Nobody's going to notice you for talking where we're going. Trust me, half the pack talks over each other so much Rhydian's threatened to install a bell system in the dining hall. You'll fit right in, or you'll go quietly insane. Either way it'll be an improvement on wherever you just came from."

I almost smile at that. It surprises me enough that I catch myself doing it in the side mirror, an unfamiliar expression on an unfamiliar version of my own face.

"How long have you known him?" I ask, mostly to keep her talking, partly because I actually want to know. "Alpha Vane."

"Since we were kids. My mother was his father's Beta before I was his." She says it simply, like it's just fact and not the enormous weight it clearly is, an entire life built around one family's service to another. "I've watched that man make a hundred decisions in six years running this pack. Cold ones, mostly. Necessary ones. He's good at necessary." She glances at me sideways. "Last night was the first time in a long while I watched him make a decision that wasn't necessary at all. That was just what."

"He doesn't want anything from me," I say, too fast, too defensive, and Sable's mouth curves like she's biting back a laugh.

"Sure," she says, pulling back onto the road. "We'll get there. Figure the rest out later. For now, you want to know what to expect?"

"Please."

"Corwin's the healer; he's Rhydian's uncle. He'll probably want to look at that mark the second we're through the gate, so brace for that. Adrian's Rhydian's cousin, and I'll be straight with you: he's not going to love that you're here, mostly because Adrian doesn't love anything that isn't Adrian getting more power, so don't take it personally if he's cold." She pauses. "And Rhydian himself, well. You'll figure him out. Everybody does, eventually. Man's not exactly subtle once you know what you're looking at."

"What am I looking at?"

Sable grins, sudden and sharp. "You'll see."

We crest a ridge maybe an hour later, and the trees open up into a wide valley, dense forest giving way to a cluster of buildings that look older than anything in Ashgrove, stone and timber instead of the modern construction Callum favored, everything built into the landscape instead of against it. There's a wall around the perimeter, low but clearly warded; I can feel it the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm.

The moment we cross the boundary line, my wrist ignites with pain.

Not fire. Not literally. But something under the binding mark flares hot and sharp, a jolt that runs up my arm and makes me gasp out loud before I can stop it, and Sable's head whips toward me so fast the car swerves slightly.

"Hey. Hey, what's wrong?"

"My wrist," I manage, gripping it with my other hand, the silver ring of the mark glowing faintly, actually glowing, something it has never once done in five years. "It's never done that before."

Sable pulls the car over without being asked twice, engine idling, and stares at my wrist with an expression I don't like at all, somewhere between fascination and alarm.

"That's not normal," she says slowly. "That is not a normal reaction to crossing a ward line. I've seen a hundred bound wolves cross into this territory and none of them lit up like that."

The pain fades as fast as it came, leaving my wrist aching and cold, and I pull my sleeve back down over the mark with hands that aren't quite steady.

"Maybe it's nothing," I say, without believing it.

Sable doesn't believe it either. I can see it on her face, the way she's already reaching for her phone, already thinking three steps ahead of where I am.

"Corwin needs to see this tonight," she says. "Not tomorrow. Tonight."

She pulls back onto the road, faster now, and I sit with my hand pressed over my wrist the rest of the way, watching the stone buildings get closer.

By the time we roll through the actual gate, a wide arch of old timber strung with iron that looks decorative until you notice the faint hum coming off it, a small crowd has already gathered in the courtyard. Word travels fast in a pack this size, apparently, and I feel a dozen sets of eyes track the car as it pulls to a stop, curious, wary, a few openly hostile in a way that makes my stomach tighten before I've even opened the door.

"Ignore them," Sable says, reading my face. "New faces make people nervous, especially when the new face showed up because their Alpha rewrote a contract on the spot to get her. You'll be old news in a week."

"I don't think old news is really an option for me," I say, and Sable actually laughs at that, short and surprised, like she wasn't expecting me to have that much bite in me yet.

"Yeah," she says, killing the engine. "Maybe not. Come on. Let's get that wrist looked at before Corwin has an aneurysm waiting for us."

I climb out into cold mountain air that tastes cleaner than anything I've breathed in five years, and I think, for the first time since dawn, about the way Rhydian looked at me across that dinner table, like he already knew something about me that I didn't know myself.

I'm starting to think he did.