Chapter 2

Tory POV

His eyes turned cold, then furious, but he stayed silent.

Just as I'd expected.

He walked toward me, slow and deliberate, his gaze raking over my face like he was searching for something specific.

Something he was used to finding there.

Fear.

I gave him nothing.

Not a flinch, not a tremor in my chin.

I'd handed him that particular currency for six years, and I wasn't paying it out again.

He said nothing at all.

He simply walked past me, the same way he had in the apocalypse, except this time I was still breathing, still standing, and somehow that made it worse.

I'd known Aldrich long enough to read every silence he owned, and this one screamed louder than words.

He thought I was nothing without him.

He'd spent six years teaching me that lesson, one cold shoulder at a time, drilling it into me until I almost believed it myself.

Not this time.

If I really had ninety-two days before the sky tore itself open, I couldn't afford to stand in this training yard proving a point to a man who'd already proven exactly who he was.

I had to prepare. I had to move.

I turned my back on the pack house before he could see my hands shaking, and I didn't stop walking until the gates were behind me.

I couldn't stay there another minute, not even to gather my things. Whatever I needed, I'd find another way to get it.

There was only one person left who might believe me. Who might actually help me carry the weight of what I'd seen.

Mother.

The walk to her house felt longer than it used to, every step tightening something in my chest I couldn't name.

And when the house finally came into view, my stomach dropped before I even reached the gate.

It was too quiet. Too still. The kind of quiet that has weight to it.

"Mother?" I called out, my voice thin against the silence. Nothing answered but the wind. "Hello? It's me!"

I tried the door and it gave way beneath my hand, unlocked, which it never was, not once in the sixteen years I had spent with her.

My pulse kicked up a notch.

"Mother?" I stepped inside, and the air itself felt wrong, thick and stale, like nothing had breathed in this house for a long time.

Darker than I remembered. Colder, too, in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

It wasn't only the cobwebs stitched across the corners, or the dust lying undisturbed on every surface like a layer of gray snow.

Something about the whole house felt off, like a held breath.

My mother was many things, but careless with her home was never one of them.

She used to say a house reflects the state of the person inside it. If that was true, something here had gone very wrong.

I moved toward her room first, heart hammering harder with every step. Empty.

The bed was made, untouched, the way it might look if no one had slept in it for weeks.

I told myself she was fine. I told myself there was an explanation. I didn't believe either.

Next I went to my old room, the one I'd slept in for sixteen years before the mating ceremony took me to Aldrich's pack house and.

Nothing here either. No note, no sign, nothing but silence pressing in from every corner.

I drifted through the room anyway, trailing my fingers over things I hadn't touched in years, and every object sent a memory spiking through me sharp enough to hurt.

My old dolls, arranged exactly where I'd left them.

The paintings of Mother and me, her arm around my shoulders, both of us laughing at something I could no longer remember.

I was reaching for the edge of the bed when the floorboard beneath me groaned and shifted.

I froze.

"How have I never noticed a loose board here before?" I murmured to myself, more to fill the silence than anything else. I knelt, tucked my hair behind my ears with fingers that weren't quite steady, and pried the board up.

And there it was.

Mother's cedar chest, tucked into a hollow beneath my childhood bedroom floor like something meant to stay hidden.

"What are you doing here?" I whispered, as if the chest itself might answer.

My hands trembled as I lifted the lid.

Inside, nestled against dark velvet, sat two things: a letter sealed in wax the color of dried blood, and a ring engraved with a strange, looping E that seemed to catch the light wrong, like it was watching me.

The letter was addressed to *the last of the Elowen line.*

My whole body went still. Elowen.

The exact name the voice in my misery had whispered right before the meteor split my spine in two.

I hadn't told a single soul I had been given a second life.

I hadn't even let myself think the name aloud in daylight. And here it was, in ink, waiting for me in a hole beneath my childhood bed like it had been waiting for years.

My fingers shook so badly it took two tries to break the seal.

The handwriting inside was unmistakably my mother's, that same looping, careful script she used to leave on notes tucked into my lunch as a child.

Except this note wasn't gentle.

It wasn't warm. It read like something written by someone who knew she was running out of time.

Her voice rose up in my head as I read the first line, and it didn't sound like the mother who used to sing me to sleep.

It sounded like a woman confessing a sin she'd carried alone for sixteen years.

"If you are reading this, it means the sickness in your blood has finally woken, and I am already dead. I am sorrier than you will ever know that I never told you what you are."

"What?!!!"