LOGINALICE'S POVThe bell started before it was dawn.One. Then another. Then another, and I lay there in the dark and counted every one of them. There was nothing else to do with myself. Today they bury Lily.I sat on the edge of the bed a long time after it stopped. This house has been quiet for sixteen days, and it was worse this morning than it's ever been. I said her name out loud in that room. Not because I expected anything back. I didn't want that child to go out of the world without one person saying it kindly.Then I got up and went to work. It's the only thing I've ever known what to do.The clinic was nearly empty. Somebody had pushed all the chairs back against the walls in the waiting room and nobody had put them straight again. The book lay open on the front desk, the whole page crossed out. Twenty-one cancellations, and two that hadn't bothered to cancel.Even being sick can wait a day, apparently.Morwen was at the front desk, going through files that didn't need going t
LISA'S POVI was awake before first light, and the first thing I did was open the wardrobe, tomorrow they put my daughter in the ground and somebody has to decide what she wears.The white one is still hanging there, embroidered at the sleeves, the hem left unfinished because she'd grown two inches in three months and I kept promising to take it to the seamstress. I never did. Now I never will.I ran a finger along the stitching, crooked on one side where she'd begged for the needle herself, her hands too small to hold the line straight, and I told her it was beautiful.I meant it.I folded the dress, put it back, and shut the door on it. Then I picked out what she'd be buried in instead — the blue one with the flowers, the one she chose herself and nobody argued her out of. She had it on the last time she waved at me, both arms up over the schoolyard fence.I sat on the edge of the bed a long while before I could get a proper breath. The house doesn't make a sound anymore. It hasn't
BENJAMIN’S POV I stood up there and watched them file out of my own hall in twos and threes, easy about it, saying goodnight — one man laughing at something in the doorway before he'd gotten as far as the step. Every one of them would sleep tonight believing something that wasn't true, because I'd stood in front of them and read it in my own voice.The floor was wet the whole length of the aisle from two hundred pairs of boots, and a woman came in with a mop before the room was even empty.Callum stayed. Marlow stayed. Drake was against the wall by the third window, hadn't moved off it all night. When the last of them had gone, he came down the aisle and stopped in front of the table."Nobody in that room turned a hair," he said."No.""I watched every face on the left side for the whole of it. So did your man on the door, I'd guess, since you put him there for it. Not a flinch out of anybody.""Then either they're better than us, or they weren't in the room.""Or they were sat there
BENJAMIN'S POVMarcus had his hand out for it before I was through the side door."Give it to the clerk. Let him read it out. It carries better from a man with no stake in the thing.""I'll read it.""Then read all of it, Alpha. They've had four days of you telling them the investigation continues, and there is not one person on those benches who believes that means anything."The hall was full in a way I'd never once seen it full — every bench taken, men standing shoulder to shoulder down both sides, more of them packed into the doorway who couldn't get in and stayed anyway. Somebody's baby started up and got carried out. The door banged. The whole room turned to look at a door.Alice was in the second row on the left where Callum had put her. Coat still on. Hands in her lap.I went up and I didn't sit down."Four days ago a woman from this clinic did not come to work," I said. "Today she is dead. She was found buried in the eastern woodland, and there was a letter with her. I said i
Alice’s POV "Alice.”"Benjamin."He went through it in the order a person goes through a building they already know. The dispensary. The storeroom door, which he opened and didn't go into. The two treatment rooms, the back corridor, the store of linen nobody has ever once inspected in the history of this territory. He read the shelves. He read them with his hands down at his sides the whole time and didn't lift one jar or pull one drawer open, and that's not how a man inspects a building.Then he came back to the front desk and stopped on the other side of it."That's not what you came for.""No."He took it out of his coat. It had been folded twice, once along a crease that wasn't his, and he set it down on the desk and turned it round so it faced me, and then he took his hand off it."Read that, and tell me what a doctor sees."So I read it.I poisoned Doctor Watson's tea. I have hated her since the day she came back and took a building I ran for six years and made it hers. Lily's
ALICE'S POVThe man Callum sent stood on my step in the dark and handed me both pieces of it in one breath. He didn't come in for either."Your confinement is lifted as of tonight, Doctor. The Alpha's order, and it's got nothing to do with anything found today.""And what was found today?""Cora Maren. In the eastern woods, this afternoon. She's dead, and there was a letter with her."I had a hand on the door frame and I left it there."What did the letter say.""I don't know that, and I wouldn't tell you if I did. I was told to say it plainly and not make a speech of it, so that's what I've done. The Alpha's in the hall at eight."He walked back down toward the road, where the other one was waiting. They both turned their heads when I came out onto the step. Neither one moved to stop me. That was all of it.No paper. Nobody signing anything. I stood in my own front garden in the cold, allowed to be there, and there wasn't a place in this territory I wanted to go.The hedge along the
ALICE’S POVI should have taken Lucian home.I should have picked him up, carried him away from this festival of false joy and false hope, and tucked him into bed with a story, a kiss, and a promise that tomorrow would be better.But I didn’t. Because Lucian wanted to see the fireworks. And I could
ALICE’S POVThe Blue Moon Festival was Lucian’s idea of heaven and my four-year plan of endurance.He’d been talking about it for weeks—the lanterns, the fireworks, the honey cakes from the booth near the stage. When he’d asked, he’d pressed both hands together like he was praying, eyes wide, and I
Alice’s POV"What?""Is this your new plan? To trap me again?" Benjamin’s voice dripped with contempt. "Did you run out of tricks, Alice? Is faking our son’s terminal illness really the best you could come up with?"I couldn’t breathe. The hospital hallway seemed to close in around me, the walls pr
ALICE’S POVI hadn't slept. I'd counted his breaths instead.It had been four hours since Lucian collapsed at breakfast. Four hours since I’d screamed loud enough to wake every wolf on our floor of the western wing. Now the monitors did the counting for me — soft, steady, mechanical as my son slept







