TEN MINUTES

"I'm not performing for anyone."

It was the wrong thing to say. I knew it as I said it. The truth sounded exactly like a lie when you said it to someone who'd already decided.

Damon laughed, short and without any humor. "Then you're hoping for a new sympathetic ear. Ezra, maybe. The King. Or maybe just the staff, so they'll go around telling everyone how humble you've become." He stepped closer. I didn't move. "I know how it works, Wren. You've been doing it since the day Celeste came home."

"I haven't done anything since the day Celeste came home."

"Exactly." He said it as if I'd proved his point. "You *stopped*. You sat there like a martyr and let everyone else do the talking. You think I don't see what that is?"

I set the fork down.

"Say his name," said Damon.

"Whose?"

"Elder Barrow. You remember him. Sixty years a Council man. He hasn't shifted in two years. He sits in his garden every afternoon with his hands on his knees, and he can't hear his wolf. Do you know what that's like? Do you have any idea?" His voice had gone quiet, and I understood, with a kind of tired surprise, that some part of this was real. He *was* angry on behalf of an old man. That was what made him dangerous. "Say his name, admit what you did, and apologize. That's all I want. Say you're sorry, and I'll let you go back to your rag."

I stood up. My knees ached. He was a full head taller than I was.

"I didn't do it."

The room stayed very still.

I'd said it aloud once before, at the trial, and I'd been told to sit down. I had said it again to myself every night in the dark at Harrow Ridge, until it stopped feeling like a sentence and started feeling like a stone I could hold. I'd meant to keep it in my pocket. I hadn't meant to hand it to him.

But he wouldn't leave. And I was so tired.

"I didn't do it, Beta Rourke. Ask me again tomorrow, in a different room, and I'll tell you the same."

He stared. Then a smile spread across his face that wasn't a smile at all.

"Two years," he said. "Two years in a cell and you still lie."

"Ask Ezra—"

"Ezra's been too soft on you since you were a child. That's the whole problem." He caught my arm above the wrist.

My whole body locked.

It wasn't the grip. It was the way it was done, quick and hard, no warning. He felt me go rigid and mistook it for defiance. His fingers tightened. "Oh, you don't like that? Come on."

He walked me out of the dining hall and down a corridor I'd known all my life. Past the wine cellar and the old boot room, to a heavy oak door at the end that opened onto a stairwell going down. Stone steps. Cold air coming up like a breath.

The archive vault. Two hundred years of deeds and pack records, one door, no window. The lights inside had never worked right. Ezra used to tell us as kids that a girl could get lost in there.

"You'll sit down there and think," said Damon. "You can come out when you're ready to tell the truth."

I said, "Please, don't."

I said it very quietly. He didn't hear it, or he decided he hadn't.

The door shut.

The lock turned.

---

I don't remember the first minute clearly. Only the sound of that lock. It's the only thing from that minute that stayed.

Then the dark came down.

It had a weight to it. It had a smell, stone and old paper and my own breath coming back at me. I was on my knees. I didn't remember getting there. I could hear someone making a high thin noise in the back of their throat, and it took me a long moment to understand it was me.

*Count.*

One. Two. Three.

*Twelve hours*, said a voice that wasn't in the room. *You'll be out when you learn to be quiet.*

Six. Seven.

I was pressed into the corner with my arms wrapped around my head. My nails had dug into my scalp. I could hear myself begging. The words came in a whisper I didn't know how to stop. *Please. Please, I'll be good. I'll be quiet. I'll be quiet. Please, the light. Just a little light, I won't move, I won't make a sound, please*—

Somewhere far off a man's voice said, through wood, "That's enough of that."

I couldn't answer. I was counting.

"Very convincing." Damon, muffled. "But I've heard the Celeste-in-tears routine enough times to know when someone's borrowed it. You can stop whenever you like."

I couldn't stop. I didn't know how to stop. I was nineteen years old and eleven years old and eight, and the dark was in my mouth, and every wall in the world was closing in on me, and nobody was coming, because nobody ever came.

Then the whole corridor changed.

I felt it through the door, the way you feel a change in pressure before a storm. It was a weight in the air, enormous and controlled, pressing down like a hand on the back of the neck. Not anger. Just power, so plain and so total that it didn't need any anger.

"Open it."

The voice was low. It didn't shout. It didn't need to.

"Your Majesty—" Damon, sounding suddenly younger. "With respect, sir, this is a family matter, she's not—she's putting it on, she's the one who—"

"I said open it."

A key rattled. The lock turned.

Light came in, a long yellow wedge across the stone. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I couldn't stop shaking. I was pressed against the shelves with my knees to my chest and my hands over my head, and I couldn't look at whoever was in the doorway. I could only see boots. Black, well made, very still.

A man crouched down. He stopped a full arm's length from me, close enough that I could see his hands, far enough that I couldn't be reached. He didn't move any nearer.

"I'm not going to touch you." His voice was very quiet. It wasn't the voice from the corridor at all. "The door is open. You can look at it if you like. Nobody is going to close it."

I lifted my head.

Tall. Broad through the shoulders, in a black coat with silver at the collar, with hair the color of wet slate and gray eyes that took in the whole room at once and did not flinch at any of it. There was a scar through his left eyebrow. He was not looking at me the way people looked at me. He was looking the way you look at a fence when you're trying to work out where the fault in the line is.

He took off his coat, slowly, and laid it on the floor between us. He didn't hand it to me. He left it there, in reach, and drew his hand back.

The coat smelled of cold air and cedar. And something in my chest, something that had been dead for so long I'd stopped noticing the silence, turned over once, the way a sleeper turns when she hears her name in another room.

It was less than a heartbeat. Then it was gone.

"Get a doctor," the man said, without raising his voice or looking around. "Not a nurse. A doctor. Now."

Someone ran.

"Sir." Damon had found his voice again. "With respect, she's only been in there ten minutes. She's been like this before. She does this to get attention. Ask anyone in the household—"

The man rose. He turned.

I couldn't see Damon's face from where I sat, but I heard what happened. There was a scrape, a heavy dull sound, like a man's knee meeting stone. A Beta of Ironwood, six feet of stubbornness and certainty, dropped onto one knee without meaning to, because the air in that vault had gotten too heavy to stand in.

"Ten minutes," said the man. "Ten minutes."

He said it slowly, as if he was turning it over.

"I've fought in four wars, Beta Rourke. I have seen men fake fear. It's a performance. It happens in the face, in the voice. It doesn't happen in the hands." He didn't look at me. He didn't have to. "Look at her. Her body isn't afraid of *you*. It's afraid of this room. Nobody teaches a body that in ten minutes. Someone taught it over a very long time, and I'd like to know who."

Damon's mouth opened and closed.

There were footsteps in the corridor. Fast ones, a woman's and a man's. Ezra's voice called *what's going on*, and then Celeste's, thin and frightened, said *oh no, oh, Wren*—

The man in the black coat didn't turn around.

"Alpha Hollis." His voice was very even. "At dinner last night, you told me your adopted sister had come home unrepentant. Bitter. A woman who would need watching."

"Your Majesty, I—"

"I believed you. I'm not in the habit of doubting my hosts." He paused. "I'd like to hear you say it again. Now. In this room."

Nobody spoke.

The dark had started to drain from the edges of my vision. The light in the doorway was blurring, going soft. I was very tired. Ezra was saying something, and Celeste was crying, and Damon hadn't gotten up. The man in the black coat crouched down again, and his eyes met mine for one steady second.

"Either you lied to me last night, Alpha Hollis," he said, "or someone lied to you. I'm not yet sure which I'd prefer."

Then the light went out, gently, and I stopped counting.