TOO LATE ALPHA

They cut the lights in the laundry block at ten past nine, and that was how I knew the night would go badly.

The lights at Harrow Ridge never went out on their own. The guards killed them when they wanted something to happen and didn't want to watch it.

I put down the sheet I was folding. Steam hung thick and wet in the room, and somewhere inside it I could hear three sets of feet coming without any hurry.

"Hollis." A woman's voice, clogged around a broken nose. Brannock. "Heard you're leaving."

I hadn't heard that. Nobody told me anything. "I don't know what you mean."

"Course you don't." Another body shifted on my left. "Nobody walks out of C block early. Somebody upstairs must like you a lot."

The first hit landed on my ribs, low on the right, where the last one had healed wrong. I got my arms up. That was the only thing Harrow Ridge ever really taught me about fighting. You don't win. You cover your head, tuck your elbows, keep quiet, because noise brings the guards and the guards are worse than anyone.

Two years ago I would have felt my wolf come up under my skin, all heat and teeth, before I'd even decided to be afraid. Now I reached for her the way you reach for a stair in the dark. There was nothing there. There hadn't been in a long time.

Somebody kicked the back of my knee and I went down on the wet concrete. I stayed there and counted, because counting was still something I could do.

I got to nineteen before the lights came back.

"Enough." Halloran's boots, in no rush. He looked at the three of them, then at me on the floor, and I watched him decide it wasn't enough of a mess to write up. "Hollis. Up. Warden wants you. Bring your things."

I looked at him.

"What you've got," he said.

What I had was a comb with four teeth missing. I took it. I left the spoon with the handle ground down under my mattress, and I stood there for a second feeling like I was walking out with the only door in the building unlocked.

---

Warden Pell's office smelled like cold coffee and radiator dust. I stood in front of his desk with my hands where he could see them and my eyes on the floor an inch in front of his shoes.

"Your sentence has been commuted," he said. "Four months early."

I said nothing. In here, when someone hands you something, you wait to hear the price.

"It came down from the Council this morning. Regional seal, not the Pack court's." He turned the paper toward me, then back again, like he didn't care for the look of it either. "Nineteen years I've run this place, and I've never seen a Council order move faster than a Council lunch. So don't ask me why, Hollis. I don't know."

"Who filed the petition?"

"Your Alpha's outside. Ask him." He pushed a pen across the desk. "Sign."

My hand shook so hard the first letter came out looking like someone else's. I watched it happen as if it belonged to a stranger. Then he slid over a paper sack, and inside was the grey wool dress I'd come in wearing. My mother had picked it for the sentencing because it looked *sincere*. It hung off me now. I knotted the belt twice.

Two years and eleven days after I'd gone in, I walked out through the same gate.

It was raining. Nobody had told me I'd get to see rain.

The car was black and too clean for that road, and Ezra was standing next to it with no umbrella, in a coat that cost more than the building behind me. He'd aged. There were lines around his mouth that hadn't been there, and his hair was cut too short, the way he always got it when he was worried and pretending he wasn't.

He was carrying nothing.

That's what I noticed first, and I hated that I noticed. Fifteen years, and Ezra had never once come to meet me empty-handed. A scarf, a thermos, some candy he'd stolen from the kitchen. He was standing at the gate of a labor prison with his hands hanging at his sides.

"Wren."

He started to smile. I remember that. He started to. His arms had come up halfway, and I knew exactly who he was waiting for. The girl who used to run across the yard at him at fourteen with her braids coming undone, who'd throw herself at his chest and start talking before she'd finished landing. She'd have told him everything. The laundry, the lights, the counting, all of it in one breath, crying and furious and wanting him to fix it.

I stopped three steps away and lowered my head.

"Alpha Hollis."

His arms stayed where they were. "Alpha?"

"Thank you for coming to collect me."

"Wren." He said it quietly, like I might bolt. "Don't be like this."

"Like what, Alpha?"

He looked at my lip, which had split again. "Who did that?"

"It's nothing."

He waited for the rest. I gave him nothing else, and after a while he opened the car door and I got in and pressed myself against the far side of the seat.

---

He drove himself. There was no one else in the car, and I understood that too. No driver meant no witnesses.

For the first ten minutes he talked about nothing. The weather. The road works outside Marrow Creek. Whether I was warm enough. I said yes, Alpha, and no, Alpha, and watched the rain run sideways across the glass.

Then he cleared his throat, and I knew the tone before he'd finished the breath. It was the tone he used when he'd already decided something.

"There's something you need to know before we get home. We have guests. Important ones. The Lycan King is staying at the estate this week, and the Council has been leaning on us all season. It matters a great deal that it goes well." His hands moved on the wheel. "Celeste's been preparing for weeks. She's nervous. I need you to keep your head down, Wren. No scenes. Please don't give her a hard time."

Two years.

Not *are you hurt*. Not *did they feed you*. Not *I'm sorry*. Guests, and Celeste.

I'd thought I had nothing left to be surprised by. It turns out there's always room. I had let myself hope, in the space of about forty minutes, from the moment Halloran said *Warden wants you* to the moment Ezra said *please*, and I felt it go out of me quietly, like air out of a tire.

I remembered the night I'd said yes. The Harvest Gathering, and a Council elder named Barrow who drank a glass of wine somebody had put wolfsbane in. He lived. His wolf never came back. Celeste had poured that wine, and I knew it because I'd watched her do it and thought nothing of it.

Ezra came to my door near midnight, and his hands were shaking. He said, *They'll go easy on you. You're a kid, you're adopted, the Council will see that. Six months, a fine, maybe house arrest. Cece won't survive it, Wren. She's only just come home.*

I said yes before he'd finished the sentence. That's the part I have never forgiven.

Two years hard labor. No appeal. No visitors. No letters. He'd said *light*, and nobody had ever come to explain to me why it wasn't.

"Understood, Alpha," I said.

His hands tightened on the wheel.

The car hit a pothole. My jacket sleeve slid back, and he glanced over out of habit and then he wasn't glancing anymore. He was looking at my wrist. A ring of old purple, yellow at the edges, and under it a paler line where the cuff had worn through the skin and healed over.

"Wren, what happened to your arm?" He was already reaching. "Let me see that."

My body moved before I did.

Knees up. Arms over my head. Chin down against my chest, shoulders rounded to guard my neck, my whole self folded into the shape it had learned to make in a hundred different rooms. I didn't decide to do it. I didn't decide anything. I just waited.

The tires bit gravel. The car stopped.

I counted. In Harrow Ridge nobody ever stopped before twelve.

I got to eleven. Twelve. Fifteen.

Nothing came.

When I looked up through the gap in my arms, Ezra's hand was hanging in the air between us, and he was staring at it, then at me, as if the two had come apart in his head and he couldn't put them back together. He was pale. In fifteen years I had never once seen my brother scared, and I was seeing it now, and it had nothing to do with anything he'd expected from this day.

"Wren." His voice cracked in the middle. "Did you think I was going to hit you?"

It was such a stupid question that I almost answered it.

I unfolded. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and found it was wet, which surprised me, because I hadn't felt any of it happening. I sat up straight and folded my hands in my lap.

"Please drive, Alpha," I said. "We shouldn't keep the guests waiting."

Ezra didn't start the car. He sat there with both hands on the wheel, looking at me like someone who'd just been handed a bill for something he didn't remember buying.