Thirty-Six: Wren

For three full minutes, no one comes near me. The dining hall resets, benches scraping, bowls being refilled, conversations rising and falling in wavelets that skirt the edges of real violence. My isolation is so complete it’s almost a physical thing—a moat of open air, a buffer of untouchability. I imagine the boundary as a circle of salt poured around my bench, every grain a warning: Here lies the Stray Moon. Do not approach.

Then the kitchen girl breaks the circle.

She carries a tray loaded with bowls—some destined for the warriors, some for the children, but one unmistakably for me. She threads her way through the crowd with the same self-erasing gait as before: shoulders rounded, gaze cast slightly down, movements careful and soft, the opposite of the brash, elbow-throwing betas who muscle their way to the food line. Even so, I see the way she scans the room, the way she counts threats, the way her hand drifts unconsciously to the scar on her wrist whenever a raised voice pierces the din.

When she reaches my table, she stops dead. Doesn’t slide the bowl toward me and scuttle away. Instead, she sets the tray on the tabletop and takes a moment—one, two, three heartbeats—before unstacking the bowl and placing it exactly in front of me. The steam rises between us, thick and fragrant, carrying the impossible memory of my grandmother’s kitchen and a winter night when I was still allowed to be human.

She meets my eyes. Really meets them. No hesitation, no fear, just a kind of tired solidarity, the kind you see in the mirror after the fifth bad day in a row. Her lips twitch, not quite a smile, but the memory of one.

“It’s venison tonight,” she says, voice barely above a whisper. “Fresh. Lucian ordered it.”

The name lands like a dropped match. There is no Lucian here, only Alpha Vale, only the silhouette in the big chair and the legend behind the law, but she says it soft, almost as if she hopes it’ll mean something. Maybe she’s testing me. Maybe she’s just reminding herself he has a name.

She lingers, hands resting lightly on the tray, waiting for me to do something. I pick up the spoon—clumsy, thanks to the cuffs—and dip it into the stew. It’s dark and glossy, flecked with wild herbs, carrots, hunks of meat so tender they shred under the slightest pressure. My mouth waters in spite of everything, but I force myself to blow on the first bite until it’s safe, then take it slow.

The flavor is huge, nearly obscene: juniper, bay, a backhand of black pepper and onion, the venison lean but rich, a wildness that sticks to the teeth. The food is a gift, or maybe a challenge, and I taste both in every bite. I don’t let my face show anything—not pleasure, not gratitude, not even the burn when I swallow a mouthful too fast and the heat makes my eyes water.

She doesn’t move. Watches me eat, maybe to make sure I won’t spit it in her face, maybe just because nobody else in this room will look me in the eye.

Our fingers brush as she adjusts the bowl’s position, her hand small and cold, a constellation of old burn marks around the knuckles. The contact is nothing, a passing static shock, but it leaves a charge in the air that won’t dissipate.

A warrior at the head table sees the moment and snorts, “Careful, Mira, or she’ll bite your hand off.” The others at his side join in with grins, but the girl—Mira, I guess—just lifts her chin and says, clear enough for the closest tables to hear, “She’s better manners than most of you.”

A few snicker, a few glare. The sound rolls around the room, then dies off. Mira gathers her tray, but as she turns away, an older omega—hair gone gray, eyes cold as a meat locker—hisses, “Back to the scullery, now.” The word “scullery” lands hard, a demotion, a reminder that Mira is only barely above me in this place.

She goes, but not before giving me the smallest of nods, a signal I don’t know how to read.

I eat the rest of the stew at a measured pace, not savoring, not hurrying. The heat and salt work their way through my veins, burning out the ache and leaving behind a sharp, restless energy. I use it to scan the room, mapping the social lattice: the warriors are the sun around which everything else orbits, the omegas drift like debris, the kitchen staff are moons doomed to collide and shatter. The children, at their own table, exist in a parallel universe where the only law is how quickly you can finish before a bigger wolf comes to take your plate.

Throughout the meal, I feel Mira’s gaze darting back to me whenever she thinks no one will notice. Once, she nearly drops a bowl, her attention caught by something—maybe a warning, maybe an invitation. I add her to my mental ledger, a name and a face in a sea of numbers.

The rest of the pack treats her as if she’s invisible. When she clears plates from the warriors’ table, they talk over her, sometimes through her, making crude jokes and snapping orders as if she’s an appliance, not a person. At the omegas’ end, she’s ignored so completely it’s as if she doesn’t exist until a bowl is empty and someone needs it gone.

The difference between how the pack looks at her and how she looks at me is a universe.

When the stew is gone, I set the spoon down with deliberate care, aligning it across the rim of the bowl like a bridge. I look up at the head table, meet the gaze of Scarface, and hold it. The next set of words is on the tip of his tongue, but he hesitates, maybe surprised to find me still sitting so straight, not cringing or hunched or broken.

It’s a tiny victory, but it ripples down the line. The warriors shift in their seats, some uncomfortable, some irritated, but a few with something like respect, or at least wariness.

When Mira returns to clear my bowl, I help her with it, lifting the edge so she can slide it onto the tray without risk of dropping. Our hands touch again, this time on purpose. She doesn’t look at me, but I feel her fingers press mine—an extra heartbeat of contact before she goes.

The older omega at the kitchen door scowls at the display, but says nothing this time.

The guards signal that my time is up. They haul me to my feet—less rough than before, but still not gentle. As I’m marched toward the exit, I glance back. Mira stands by the stack of empty bowls, head bowed, but I catch the angle of her eyes, the way she watches me leave.

The rest of the dining hall resumes its tide of noise, but I walk out with the aftertaste of venison and the memory of a stranger’s kindness on my tongue.

It isn’t much, but it’s enough to make the silver burn just a little less.