Five Years, One New Name

POV: Elva

"Read clause nine again, Mr. Voss," I said, and slid the contract across the table with one fingernail.

Harlan Voss had spent three weeks trying to squeeze my margins and had arrived that morning in a good suit, smiling like an old friend. "It's a technicality, Ms. Lark. Surely you can absorb a little more on the herbal tariff. Everyone does in this trade."

"The Concordat shields werewolf-grown herbs from human tariffs when the buyer is a registered healer." I tapped the paragraph. "Your firm supplies St. Brigid's pharmacy. Your own lawyers initialed this clause."

"It's an old technicality."

"It's a signed one. Take it to the Concordat board if you like. I'd be glad to attend and explain why your firm didn't read its own paperwork." I held out a pen. "Or we keep the existing rate, and your pharmacy stays supplied."

He stared at the pen for a long, tight moment, and then he signed.

Mira, my assistant, waited until the door closed before she let herself smile. "You made him sweat."

"I need to sit down," I said, and did, because Winning had never cost me this much.

Five years had changed the woman in my mirror. My hair had grown dark past my shoulders with a streak of silver at one temple that had come in the spring after my daughter was born. I had delivered her alone in a rented room above a fishmonger's, two days of labor with no hand to hold but my own, and on the third night my wolf had finally woken with a roar I felt in my teeth. I'd waited my whole life for that roar. I hadn't expected it to arrive like a stranger, hungry and furious. Now I could hear a heartbeat through two closed doors, and I still woke some nights with Eriq's voice in my ears, telling me to stop making trouble.

I had chosen a new name from a bird and a bakery sign. Vesper Lark. I'd turned one rented office and one ledger into Lark Meridian Trading, which moved goods between human towns and werewolf territories, and no one in the markets knew who I'd been. No one in the pack knew I was alive. That was the entire point.

"Another letter came this morning," Mira said, laying a folded sheet in front of me. The wax carried a snarling wolf's head. "Their envoy is waiting in the lobby."

I didn't need to read the signature. "Lucan."

"He's sent eleven now."

"Refuse it. Refuse them all, Mira. I want nothing to do with Blackthorn Ridge."

"You've said that eleven times."

"And I'll say it a twelfth." My phone buzzed against the desk, and the screen read Dr. Halvorsen. I answered on the first ring. "Is she worse?"

"Her fever spiked again last night." Dr. Halvorsen kept her voice gentle, which made it worse. "We ran another panel on Nyra's blood, Vesper. It's a rare hybrid marker, werewolf and human, and its progression seems tied to both parents' bloodlines. Her wolf is trying to surface, and her body is fighting it."

"I'm coming now."

The drive to St. Brigid's took twenty minutes, and I remember none of it. Nyra sat propped against her pillows with her cheeks flushed an unhealthy red and her curls stuck to her forehead, one fist wrapped around the stuffed rabbit whose ear she'd chewed flat.

"You're late," she said. "Sir Pudding says so too."

"Sir Pudding is a terrible judge of time."

"He's a knight, Mama. Knights know everything." Her gaze dropped to my empty hands. "Did you bring it?"

"Bring what?"

"The white bunny with the blue bow. You promised."

I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my palm to her forehead, and it burned like a kettle. "Next time. I swear it."

"And ice cream? Strawberry? Sir Pudding wants some too."

"Anything you want." I kissed her hair. "Anything."

She was quiet for so long I thought she'd fallen asleep. Then she said, in a small, drowsy voice, "Mama? Do I have a daddy?"

My hand stopped moving on the blanket. The monitor beeped beside us.

"Everybody has one, sweetheart," I said carefully. "Yours is very far away."

"Is he a knight too?"

"No." I kept my voice level. "He's not a knight."

She considered this with great seriousness. "Then he can't have ice cream."

"No," I said. "He can't."

I stayed until her breathing slowed and Sir Pudding slid under her chin, and then I slipped out to buy the strawberry. My thoughts were scattered across a dozen worries, the fever, the marker, whether the Concordat board would hear the Voss case before month's end, and I barely noticed the elevator doors opening on the ground floor.

I stepped inside and turned to press the button.

The scent reached me before anything else. Pine, cold steel, and something darker beneath, something I had buried in my dreams for five years. My wolf lifted her head inside me, and she said his name before I could stop her.

I looked up.

Eriq stood in the elevator in a tailored black coat, his shoulders filling the small space, his eyes fixed on my face with an expression I had never once seen on him. It was hunger, and underneath it something that looked terribly like grief. The doors began to close, and he stopped them with a single finger.

"Elva."

My name rolled over my skin like a caress and a curse. The cold glass wall at my back was the only thing holding my knees up.

"You've mistaken me for someone else," I said.

"Don't." His voice was low and rough, and it cracked on the one syllable. "Five years. I've sent hunters across four territories, and you were in a city an hour from my border."

"I don't know you."

"Then why are you shaking?" He didn't move toward me. He only stood there with his hand against the door, as if any step might send me through the wall. "I bought this hospital in August, Elva. I've been walking its halls for three months, and I didn't even know why."

I clutched my wallet against my chest as though it could shield me. In that single, suspended second, I understood that the most dangerous thing in my life wasn't the rare illness burning in my daughter's blood.

It was the man who had just recognized me, and who owned the floor beneath my feet.