Chapter 3: Servant

By the third morning I understood exactly what Ironveil intended to do with me.

Not kill me. Not break me the way the curse had broken the last one. Something slower and more deliberate than that. Something the pack had clearly done before to people they wanted gone without the mess of direct confrontation.

They were going to erase me.

Heda came to my door before sunrise. She didn't knock. She simply opened it and handed me a sheet of paper covered in small, tight handwriting. No greeting. No explanation.

"Laundry. Floors. The great hall fireplace before the morning meal. The east corridor windows."

I looked at the list. Then I looked at her. "The Alpha's bride does not—"

"The Alpha has not confirmed you as his bride," Heda said. Flat. Final. "Until he does, you are a guest of undetermined status. Guests of undetermined status contribute to the household."

She left before I could respond.

I stood in the doorway holding the list and understood three things at once.

First, Heda was not cruel; she was efficient, and this was not her idea.

Second, someone with more authority than a head of household had given the order. Third, if I refused, I would lose the only roof I had left.

I went and picked up a bucket, a scrubbing brush, and a rag from the supply room.

The great hall was enormous and cold and built to make everyone inside it feel small. Stone columns rose like teeth. The long table could seat forty. I dropped to my knees in front of the massive fireplace and started scrubbing. The brush bristles were stiff and caught on the grout. Cold water soaked through the knees of my new dress within minutes. My knuckles scraped raw against the stone. I kept going.

They came in for breakfast. All of them. Senior wolves of Ironveil, filing in with the organized hierarchy of a pack that never let anyone forget their rank. They saw me. Every single one of them saw the "Alpha's supposed bride" on her hands and knees with a scrubbing brush. Not one of them said a word.

They sat. They ate. They talked around me the way you talk around furniture.

Reva took the seat at the head of the long table's left side, not the Alpha's chair but as close as she could get. She watched me the entire meal with that satisfied smile she had perfected into a weapon. She never spoke. Her silence was the loudest thing in the room.

A young wolf, maybe seventeen, gangly and uncertain, walked past carrying a plate of food. He stopped when he saw me. His face hardened for a second, then softened into something closer to discomfort, the expression of someone watching something that didn't sit right but lacked the courage to speak. He kept walking.

I scrubbed the floor.

I had been scrubbing floors since I was eleven. My father's pack had decided early that a daughter with no wolf gifts and no remarkable qualities was most useful on her knees. I knew exactly how to make my face into nothing while my hands worked. I knew how to be invisible inside my own humiliation.

What I had not mastered was how to stay invisible when someone was watching with the specific intention of seeing.

Kael stood at the far end of the room near the window. He wasn't eating. He held a cup he hadn't touched and scanned the hall with dark, unreadable eyes that catalogued everything and revealed nothing. When his gaze moved to me it didn't linger; just a sweep, a note taken, filed away. But I caught something in it. Just slightly. Just for a second. A flicker I didn't have time to understand before his face closed again.

I finished the list by midday. Every item. Perfectly done. Not because I was afraid of consequences. Because I refused, absolutely refused to give Ironveil the satisfaction of a job done poorly. If they wanted to use me as a servant, I would be the best servant this pack had ever seen, and I would do it with my spine straight and my face calm. I would not cry. I would not beg. I would not give Reva's smile a single thing to feed on.

I returned the bucket and brush to the supply room at the end of the east corridor. The room was small and dim, smelling of soap and pine. I allowed myself exactly thirty seconds inside it with the door closed. Thirty seconds to press my back against the wall, close my eyes, and feel the full weight of the morning without an audience.

Twenty-eight seconds in, the door opened.

The young wolf from the great hall stood in the doorway holding a bread roll and a small wedge of hard cheese. He thrust them at me with the urgency of someone completing a task before his nerve ran out.

"You didn't eat," he said.

I looked at him. Up close he was even younger. Too young for the careful blankness Ironveil seemed to install in everyone eventually. His eyes were brown and honest and slightly panicked, as though he hadn't fully thought through what came after handing a stranger food.

"I'm Pip," he said. "I work the stables. I'm nobody. So it doesn't matter if I'm seen talking to you."

Something inside me quivered like the memory of warmth. The feeling of recognizing something you had almost forgotten existed.

I took the bread.

"Thank you, Pip," I said.

He nodded rapidly, turned, and paced away with the energy of someone who had done something brave and needed to immediately be somewhere else.

I ate the bread in the darkness of the supply room. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in years.

But that was the most devastating part.

Because for the first time since the carriage door had slammed shut, I felt the thing inside my chest stir again.

Stronger this time. Hotter. It uncoiled behind my ribs, pressed against the burn on my neck, and pushed outward like it wanted to answer the kindness with something far more dangerous.

I finished the roll in three bites, wiped my hands on the rag, and stepped back into the corridor.

The north wing still waited above me.

The cursed Alpha was still awake. And whatever lived inside me was no longer content to stay quiet...