Chapter 4

LYRA

Selene was practically vibrating with excitement.

She sat on the edge of the sitting room couch with her hands twisted together in her lap, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, her eyes darting to the door every few seconds like the Alpha King might walk through it at any moment. Even her anxiety was pretty. Everything about Selene was pretty. It was honestly exhausting.

"What if I'm not his mate?" She turned to Kael with those enormous eyes, her voice dropping into that small trembling register she reserved for moments she needed his complete and total attention. "What if I get all the way to that meeting and he looks straight past me and I'm just standing there like an idiot in front of everyone?"

Kael made a sound low in his throat and reached over, covering both her twisted hands with one of his. "That's not going to happen."

"But what if—"

"Selene…." He said her name the way you stopped a child from running into traffic. "There is no one in this pack who comes close to deserving that title and being a Luna of the Northern Pack, he's a powerful Man and I want the best for you." His thumb moved over her knuckles once. "No one."

Selene exhaled slowly, leaning into his side, her shoulders dropping. "You always know what to say."

I sat three feet away from both of them and pulled a piece of broken glass out of my foot.

I folded the piece of glass into my palm and reached down to press my sleeve against the wound.

"Why is there blood on the floor?"

I looked up.

Kael was staring at the dark smear beneath my foot, his brows pulled together, his expression shifting from indulgent brother into something harder to read. Selene was looking too now, her head tilted slightly, her eyes moving from the floor to my face with an attention that felt careful in a way I didn't trust.

"It's nothing." I kept my voice flat. "The glass from earlier."

"Why didn't you go to the healer?" Kael asked.

Something almost like a laugh moved through my chest. Almost. "I got used to handling it myself." I pressed my sleeve tighter against the cut.

"In prison the healers had better things to do than treat a traitor's injuries." I said it simply, the truth, stated plainly, the way I had learned to state things that hurt. "It's a small wound. It's fine."

The room went quiet. Kael stared at me and something moved through his expression. Then behind him, we could hear a soft broken sound.

We both turned and Selene had her hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes shining, her shoulders shaking with the kind of delicate trembling that made every person in a room instinctively want to fix something.

"It's my fault." Her voice came out barely above a whisper.

"All of it. She went to that place because of me. She was hurt, she was alone, she couldn't even get a healer to look at her, and I've just been sitting here worried about meeting some Alpha King like that matters at all when my sister has been—" A sob cut through the rest of it, small and perfectly sized. "I'm so sorry, Lyra. I'm so sorry."

And there it was.

That masterful pivot. I almost wanted to applaud.

Kael was on his feet before the second sob finished. Both hands on her shoulders, ducking his head to look at her face, his voice dropping into something soft and urgent. "Stop it, Stop that. This is not your fault, do you hear me? None of this is on you."

"But she said she couldn't even get—"

"Selene." He pulled her in, one hand moving to the back of her head. "Stop."

She pressed her face against his chest and went quiet.

And Kael turned and looked at me over her shoulder and the softness evaporated off his face like morning frost the second the sun hit it.

"Stop doing that." His voice came out hard and low.

I blinked. "Doing what exactly?"

"That…always looking pitiable.." He gestured at me vaguely, at my face, at my foot, at my general existence apparently. "...sitting there bleeding in silence where she can see it and making her feel responsible for every single thing that's ever gone wrong in your life." His jaw tightened. "She's not well. And you know exactly what you're doing."

I stared at my brother.

"You're right," I said quietly. "I should have been more careful about where I bled when the broken pieces was everywhere."

His eyes narrowed. "Don't get smart with me."

"I wasn't." I held his gaze. "I genuinely wasn't."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he straightened up and set Selene back from him gently, pressing a brief kiss to the top of her head before turning to the doorway.

"Everyone out," he called. The two pack members hovering near the entrance scattered immediately. He looked back at me. "The healer is coming to you tonight. Don't argue about it." He pointed at the door. "Go to your room. Stay there. Don't wander around the house looking for things to be upset about."

I stood up.

Pressed my sleeve one more time against my foot, then walked out without another word.

***

The corridor was quiet.

I walked slowly. I needed the space. The relative emptiness of the hallway. Just a few more seconds of nobody looking at me or through me or past me.

But I couldn't avoid the walls.

Selene's watercolor paintings hung where my combat trophies used to be. Her dusty periwinkle blue covered every wall I remembered as warm cream.

Her photographs lined every window ledge, her and Kael at the winter solstice celebration, her and the elder females at a pack gathering, her and three warriors who used to train beside me every morning and apparently hadn't missed me for five minutes.

Her flower arrangements sat on every side table.

Her books stacked on the shelf near the stairs.

Her handwriting on a small decorative sign above the entrance to the main hall, something sweet about home and family and belonging.

For three years, She had repainted this entire house herself and hadn't left a single wall.

I pushed open the door to my old room and I saw boxes and abandoned items.

I stood in the doorway and looked at the boxes sitting where my bed used to be, where my weapons rack used to stand, where I used to sit at the window after training and felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be in the world.

I walked inside and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my hands in my lap and breathed.

I was still sitting there when the healer knocked.

She was young and quick-handed and careful in a way that told me someone had briefed her. She kept her eyes on her work, cleaned the wound without asking questions, wrapped it efficiently and left without once looking directly at my face.

I was almost back to the guest room when the footsteps caught up to me.

"Why are you in the east corridor?" Kael's voice came from behind me. "Your room is on the third floor."

I turned around. He was standing at the far end of the hallway still in his day clothes, phone in hand, looking at me the way he looked at logistical problems.

"It's now a storage room," I said.

Something crossed his face. "Selene needed more space for her belongings." He said it carefully. "We moved your things out temporarily. I'll have it cleared within the week."

Temporarily was three years ago.

"The guest room is fine," I said.

He nodded and started to turn.

And I don't know what made me say it. I had swallowed so much for so long.

"Why didn't you come?"

He stopped and I continued.

"You promised me." My voice stayed steady. I was stupidly proud of it. "When you left me there that first day. You said it wouldn't be long. You looked me in the eye, Kael, and you said you'd come back for me."

The hallway felt enormous suddenly and cmpletely silent. "I counted days. For the first year I actually wrote them on the wall." I pressed my thumbnail into my palm. "Why didn't you come?"

The silence stretched. Long enough to become its own kind of answer.

Then he said, without turning around, "It was only three years."

I waited because surely there was more. Surely that sentence had a second half.

"Selene grew up without her family." His voice was even and calm. The voice of a man who had rehearsed this enough times that it no longer required effort.

"She missed years she can never get back. Years of her real life, her real home, her real family and all of it was gone." A pause. "Three years was the least you could give back, Lyra." His shoulders settled. "Stop being so selfish."

His footsteps moved away down the corridor.