Chapter 2: Not Yours Anymore

My wrist was dying, and I could feel every inch of it go.

The mark didn't burn the way it had in the first minutes. That fire I could have fought. This was slower. A cold, crawling numbness that started at the black lines and worked its way up my forearm, like something was being unstitched under the skin, one careful thread at a time.

I pressed my palm over it. Pressed hard. As if I could hold it in place.

*Please. Not this too.*

The rain had no mercy in it. It hammered the mud and my back and the ruined dress, and I stayed on my knees outside the Silverstone gates because standing up would mean I had somewhere to go. Behind the wall, a roar of laughter went up, muffled by stone. Music, maybe. They'd started the feast without me. Of course they had.

I wanted to be sick. I wanted to scream until the gates cracked. I did neither. I just breathed through my teeth and counted, the way I used to when the kitchen girls shoved me against the pantry door. *One. Two. Three.* If I could get to ten without making a sound, I'd survive another minute.

I got to six.

Footsteps.

Not the pack. I knew the pack's walk the way you know your own stairs in the dark, the loose, careless rhythm of wolves who owned the ground they stepped on. This was slower. Deliberate. Each step set down like the person making it had all night and wanted me to know it.

I dragged myself backward through the mud. My heel slipped. My elbow went down hard.

"Stay back." It came out a croak. "I'm warning you."

I had no idea what I was warning him with. My bad attitude, maybe.

He came out from between the trees like the dark had decided to let him through. Tall. A cloak so black the rain seemed to slide off it instead of soaking in. His hood hid everything but his jaw, and I couldn't have told you why my skin prickled, only that it did, all down my arms. This wasn't Kael's kind of power, the loud, golden kind that made a room kneel. This was heavier. Quieter. The kind that didn't need to prove anything because it had already decided how this ended.

He stopped three steps from me and said, almost conversationally, "You're loud when you're hurting."

Heat flooded my face before I could stop it. Shame. Absolutely stupid, useless shame. "Were you watching?"

"Long enough."

"Then you know I don't need help."

"I know you can't get up."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. My arm gave a violent twitch and I hated that he saw it.

He crouched, slowly, the way you'd approach something that might bite. This close I could see his eyes under the hood, dark and steady and completely unimpressed by my mud. "An Alpha Prince just threw you out in front of two hundred wolves," he said. "And you're still glaring at me."

"I'm not—" I was. I was glaring so hard my head hurt. "I'm not weak."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile.

"Good."

I stared at him. *Good?* My whole body had just been taken apart, and the first word a stranger offered me was *good*, like I'd passed some test I hadn't known I was sitting.

He straightened. "Get up."

I didn't move. My legs weren't refusing him. I wasn't sure they were mine anymore.

The wind shifted, and behind him the forest groaned. Not wind. I'd lived on the edge of those woods my entire life, and I knew every sound the trees made, and that wasn't one of them. Something out there was listening. I could feel it the way you feel someone reading over your shoulder.

"I can give you what Silverstone never will," he said.

My breath snagged. I hated that it did. I'd spent nineteen years learning that when someone offered you something, there was a hook in it, and I should have heard that hook the second he spoke. I knew it. I *knew* it.

"A place where you're not trash."

The word hit before I was ready for it. Trash. Not a stain, not nothing. Trash. Something thrown away, and had anyone ever said it out loud, they'd have been right.

My fingers dug into the mud until my nails filled with it.

"Why?" I whispered. My voice cracked down the middle, again, and I didn't care anymore. "You don't know me. Nobody does that. Nobody just—why?"

He tilted his head. The rain ran off the edge of his hood in a thin, steady stream.

"Because they made a mistake."

I waited for the rest. For the price. For the joke.

Nothing. Just the rain, and him, and that hand held out in the dark, bare, steady, clean. Not a mark on it. Mine were torn and brown and shaking.

Sit in the mud, my pride said. Prove something to people who've stopped watching.

Then the mark flared.

White, blinding, tearing through my wrist like a blade dragged down the bone. I folded over with a sound I'd sworn I wouldn't make. The black lines crawled another inch and *went out*. I couldn't feel it anymore. I couldn't feel the place where Silverstone had been, and I'd thought I wanted that, I'd thought I wanted anything but that, and the emptiness was so much bigger than I'd imagined.

It wasn't pride that got me up. It wasn't courage, or trust.

It was that I couldn't stand being alone in my own skin.

I grabbed his hand.

His fingers closed around mine at once, warm, certain, and he pulled me to my feet like I weighed nothing. My knees nearly went. He didn't let them.

And the forest changed.

The air thickened. A pressure rolled out of the trees, the way the air goes heavy before lightning, and every shadow between the trunks seemed to lean one inch closer. A sound came up through the ground, through the soles of my feet. Not a howl. Lower than that. Slow. The sound something makes when it's choosing.

My nails bit into his palm. "What is that?"

He didn't look back. That scared me more than the sound did. A man who doesn't look back at that either isn't afraid of it, or already knows what's there.

"We're not alone."

Ice poured down my spine.

I turned my head. Slowly. Rain filled my eyes, and I blinked it away, and between the trees something *shifted*. A shape too wide to be a man. The branches moved when it passed them. It moved like it was in no hurry, and I understood that was the point. Too big to be human. Too controlled to be wild.

My lungs forgot how.

Then, from the depths of the woods, the first howl came again. And the answer came from behind me.

Close enough to stir my hair.

I whipped around. Nothing. Mud, rain, the black wall of Silverstone. Empty dark, and the unbearable certainty of eyes on me from inside it.

"Don't let go," the stranger said, very quietly.

I hadn't been planning to.

And then he leaned in, his voice so low it barely reached me over the storm, and what he said froze every drop of blood in my body.

"They already know you're here. They've been waiting for you since the day you were born.”