Chapter 3

The tall boy looked at me.

For a single breath something crossed his face — a flicker of surprise, quickly smothered. I understood it. Whoever Selah had been, she would never have said a word like that to his face.

I ignored him. As far as I was concerned, I had never written a diary about anyone.

But the girl's memories answered the question before I finished asking it. His name was Callan Mortimer. He was the boy Selah had loved, quietly and hopelessly, for the better part of a year — and she had written all of it down in a notebook she never once found the courage to hand over.

"Are you just going to stand there and pretend it never happened?" Delilah's voice climbed, delighted to have a crowd. She lifted her chin and began to recite. "*Every time Callan walks by, I forget how to breathe—*"

Delilah had handed it over for her. Read it aloud in this same courtyard, passed the pages hand to hand, turned every private line into a joke until the whole school was laughing. Callan's contribution had been a single word, delivered without looking up. Gross. That was the stone that finally pulled the girl under.

Then Selah's body did something I had not told it to do. My pulse climbed. Heat crawled up my throat, and there was a small, stupid ache low in my chest that had nothing to do with me. A leftover instinct from a life that wasn't mine.

"I remember enough," I said.

She stopped.

"You're the kind of coward who needs someone smaller to stand on." I kept my voice level, almost bored. "You find a weak thing, and you make it your entertainment, because it's the only way anyone looks at you at all. I remember exactly that much."

For a moment her mouth moved and nothing came out. I turned and walked past her before she found her voice again.

I had gone perhaps ten steps when someone threw both arms around me from the side.

"I was so scared," a girl said into my shoulder. "You didn't answer any of my messages last night. I thought—" She pulled back, her eyes wet and bright. "I thought something awful had happened."

Every muscle in my body locked. I was a queen. Soldiers had knelt to me and generals had wept at my table, but in two hundred years no one had simply flung their arms around me as though I were something rare and easy to break. I did not know where to put my hands.

The name rose out of Selah's memory. Mia Lorne. Omega, small, fierce in the way of people who have decided to love regardless of what it costs them. Once, when Delilah had turned on Mia, Selah had stepped in front of her — and inherited the whole year of cruelty that followed. This girl was the reason Selah had carried any wound at all.

"You were so brave back there." Mia's smile trembled at the edges. "But she's going to make you pay for it. You know she will. She always does."

"Don't worry about that," I said. I meant it more than she could possibly know.

The next class was history. Delilah dropped into a seat two rows over and spent the first ten minutes watching me with the flat patience of a wolf that hasn't finished its hunt. I opened the textbook and let her watch.

The pages told me how much time had passed.

Two hundred years since a queen died to seal the Demon King behind the Gate. The kingdom I had built was gone. In its place stood the Argent Union — a loose braid of packs, each one ruled by its own Alpha, all of them bowing to nothing higher than a council that argued and voted and called the noise governance. They still sang the old queen's name at their festivals, the book said. They simply no longer let anyone wear her crown.

Two hundred years. I sat with the number until it stopped feeling like a wall and started feeling like a fact I could use.

"—maybe our newest expert can help us out."

Delilah's voice slid in, sweet and poisoned. She had her hand raised. "Selah's ranked dead last in our year, ma'am. Might be worth checking whether she even did the reading."

Laughter rolled through the room. I raised my eyes from the book.

"I'm sorry," I said to the teacher, unbothered. "Would you repeat the question?"

The laughter swelled. The teacher — a tired woman with chalk dust on one sleeve — sighed and repeated it.

"The sealing of Valerius Acheron, two centuries ago. The incantation the queen spoke. Can anyone give me the actual words?"

The room settled into the particular silence of students who have no idea. But this was mine. I had said those words with the last breath of the life before this one.

"She offered her soul as the price," I said. "She swore to become the cage that held him, and she asked the Moon Goddess to take her life and give her people back hope and daylight." I paused. "Your book has it wrong, though. It says *chain*. She never said chain. She said *cage*."

Someone snorted. "She's making it up as she goes."

"A chain can be broken," I said. "A cage holds. The word matters."

The teacher was looking at me strangely now. She went to her desk, drew an older, thicker volume from the stack, and ran a finger down the page. The quiet stretched thin while she read.

"…She's right," the teacher said at last, almost to herself. "The primary source says *cage*. Our textbook is a mistranslation."

No one laughed after that.

The whole room had gone still, and every set of eyes in it had turned — finally — to the girl who was supposed to be ranked last.