Chapter Four

Everything She Was Not Allowed to Have

Emily's POV

Beta Jayden woke me before dawn with a knock so hard it rattled the door in its frame.

"Get up and pack your things. You are leaving with Ironblood at first light."

He was already gone before I could ask a single question.

I sat up in the dark on my narrow cot and stared at the wall. The room was barely a room at all, a stripped closet that had been cleared out years ago and given to me when the actual servants moved into the proper quarters. A cot, a small window too high to see out of, and a hook on the wall where I hung my two spare dresses.

Packing did not take long. I folded my dresses and my one pair of worn boots into the old canvas bag I kept under the cot. I added the small piece of soap I had been saving and the broken comb with half its teeth gone. I looked around the room one last time.

I did not feel sad. That surprised me a little.

I expected to feel afraid. And I was, a little. But underneath the fear was something else. Something very small and very careful, like a flame cupped in both hands against the wind.

When I stepped into the main hall, Alpha Lucas was already there. He stood near the front doors with Adam and two other men from his pack. He was dressed simply in a dark shirt, dark trousers, no symbols of rank except the way every other person in the room unconsciously gave him space.

He looked at my bag. Then at me. "Is that everything?"

"Yes."

Something crossed his face, Not compassion. I had seen enough compassion to know the difference. This was closer to anger, though he kept it controlled. He gave one small nod and turned toward the door.

My brother was not there to say goodbye. I had not expected him to be.

His wife, Olivia, was. She stood at the top of the stairs in a silk robe, watching me leave with a smile she was not even trying to hide. She had made sixteen years of my life worse in every small way she could find. Extra chores, taken food, little cruelties dressed up as household rules.

I did not look at her. I walked through the front door and did not look back.

The cars outside were long and dark. Adam opened the rear door and I stopped walking.

I had never been in a car like this. I had ridden in the back of pack trucks for supply runs, squeezed in with boxes and bags. But this was different. The seats were leather. The inside smelled like clean air and something warm I could not name.

"It does not bite," said a voice behind me. I turned to find Lucas standing there with something that was almost a smile. "Get in, Emily."

I got in.

He slid in beside me. Adam took the front. The car moved and I watched the pack house disappear through the window, smaller and smaller until it was just a shape in the mist, and then nothing at all.

I did not realise I had been holding my breath until I let it go.

"You will have your own room," Lucas said, not looking up from the folder in his hands. "Your own bathroom. You answer to no one for household tasks. If someone asks you to clean something, you are free to say no."

He paused, glancing sideways at me.

"That is not an instruction. That is a right. Understood?"

I did not know what to say to that.

"Understood?" he repeated, quieter.

"Yes," I managed.

We drove for nearly two hours. I spent most of it watching the trees pass and trying to process the fact that I was breathing different air and that no one was going to call me back.

Ironblood's territory announced itself before I could see it… a feeling, a shift in the air, something that pressed gently against the edges of the hollow space inside me where my wolf used to live.

The pack house was enormous. Three storeys of dark stone and tall windows, set into a hill like it had grown there. There were wolves everywhere talking in the yard, training near the tree line, moving through the great doors with purpose.

No one stared at me with contempt. One or two glanced curiously. That was all.

Inside, Lucas walked me through the ground floor, pointing out the dining hall, the kitchen, and the library. He stopped outside a door on the second floor and opened it.

The room was plain but large. A proper bed, a window that looked out over the hills, a wardrobe, a desk, and a door that led to a bathroom all my own.

I stood in the doorway and could not make myself go in.

"What is wrong?" Lucas asked.

"Nothing," I said. Then, because something about him made lying feel very difficult "I just… I have never had a room like this."

He was quiet for a moment. "Then it is long overdue."

He left me to settle and pulled the door gently shut.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress was soft. The pillow was real. Through the window, the hills were green, very wide and going on forever.

I pressed both hands flat to the mattress and breathed.

That was when I felt it.

Not the pull this time. Something different. Something from inside, a sound, barely there, like the echo of a sound rather than the sound itself.

A growl—low and distant..

Coming from somewhere deep inside my own chest.

From the place that had been dark and silent for sixteen years.

My hands flew to my sternum. I pressed hard.

It came again, faint, like something waking up slowly in a cold room, turning over, becoming aware.

My wolf.

Still bound, still trapped. But for the first time in sixteen years, not completely silent.

I sat on that bed for a long time, listening to the quiet of a house that did not feel like a trap.

But just as my eyes grew heavy, something slid under the door.

A folded piece of paper.

I picked it up with shaking hands and opened it.

“We know where you are, leave now or we will finish what we started sixteen years ago.”