Chapter 9: Oh Snap

Maeve

By nine thirty, the eastern ballroom had become a cage dressed in silver.

Blackthorne Mansion had been designed to impress enemies before they ever reached the wolves living inside it. The ballroom alone was larger than the council hall back home, with ceilings high enough to swallow the music drifting from the quartet stationed on the raised platform near the eastern wall.

Three enormous chandeliers hung overhead.

Hundreds of narrow crystals caught the candlelight and scattered it across the polished black marble floor. Every reflection looked sharp enough to cut. Silver branches twisted around the tall stone columns, their bare limbs decorated with white flowers that gave off a faint wintery scent.

Beyond the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, the forest waited.

The full moon hung over the trees, turning their upper branches silver while the ground beneath them remained hidden in darkness.

That was where we would be sent in less than three hours.

Forty-two women entered.

Only some of us would leave alone.

I took a glass of champagne from a passing servant but did not drink it.

The bubbles rose slowly through the pale liquid while I studied the women scattered throughout the ballroom. Some stood in large groups, laughing too loudly and pretending they were not watching one another. Others remained near the walls, their backs protected while they examined every entrance and exit.

Several had dressed for the ceremony.

Silk gowns.

Jewels.

Hair braided with silver thread or decorated with flowers.

Others had come prepared for the Hunt itself. They wore fitted trousers beneath long tunics, boots built for rough terrain, and clothing dark enough to disappear between the trees.

I fell somewhere between them.

My dark green dress looked formal from a distance, but the skirt had been split discreetly along both sides to allow movement. Soft leather boots were hidden beneath the hem. Three blades rested against my body, one at my thigh, another beneath the fitted bodice, and the smallest tucked inside the sleeve around my left wrist.

The Huntmaster’s people had searched us when we arrived. They found nothing. Mara had taught me how to hide a weapon before I was old enough to shift.

The thought tightened something inside my chest.

I lifted the untouched champagne to my lips, mostly so no one would notice the way my expression changed.

Mara had been beneath Ronan’s home for three years. Three winters. Three summers. Three years without seeing the sky except through whatever narrow window he might have allowed her.

I had imagined the dungeon a thousand different ways. Wet stone. Rusting chains. Silver bars burning her skin whenever she moved.

I had imagined her thin and pale, her dark hair hanging in dirty strands around her face. I had imagined bruises along her arms and old blood beneath her fingernails.

The letters never gave enough details.

Perhaps she had been afraid Ronan would punish her if she wrote too much. Perhaps he already had.

My fingers tightened around the stem of the glass.

“Careful.” A woman’s voice came from my right.

I turned.

The she-wolf standing beside me nodded toward my hand. “You’re about to snap that.”

I looked down. A thin crack had already appeared near the base of the stem.

I set the glass on the nearest table before it broke. “Thank you.”

“I’d hate for you to injure yourself before the Hunt.” Her mouth curved slightly. “It would make the rest of us look bad.”

She was close to my height, with warm brown skin, dark eyes, and tightly curled hair gathered into a high knot. Unlike most of the women wearing gowns, she had chosen a fitted black tunic over narrow trousers. A belt circled her waist, but the officials had clearly removed anything that might have served as a weapon.

A narrow scar disappeared beneath the left side of her jaw.

She held out her hand. “Sable Wynn.”

“Maeve Cross.”

Her grip remained firm, but her expression shifted when she heard my surname. Not fear. Recognition.

“You’re Mara Cross’s sister.”

I released her hand. “So I’ve been told.”

Sable studied me for another moment, apparently deciding whether to ask the same questions everyone else wanted answered.

She did not.

“I’m from Frostmere,” she said instead.

I knew the name.

A small mountain pack on the far northern ridge. They had lost nearly a third of their hunting grounds during a landslide two years earlier. The winter following it had been brutal.

“What are you hoping to win?” I asked.

“Land.” Her answer came immediately. “Blackthorne owns an unused stretch of valley south of our border. If I reach the sanctuary, Alpha Darius will have to grant me a favor. I intend to ask for it.”

“And if he refuses?”

“The Hunt laws won’t allow him to.”

“He might find another way around them.”

Sable smiled. “That’s why I’m asking for the land in front of every witness.”