Poison in a Honeyed Glass

Chapter 2: Poison in a Honeyed Glass

The world went soft at the edges.

I stumbled out into the storm, and the cold didn't touch me. That was the first terrible sign. Rain hammered my face and ran down my neck and soaked the green dress I had bought for a boy who wasn't worth it, and all I felt was heat. It rolled up from my stomach in slow, hungry waves until my skin prickled and my breath tore out of me in ragged clouds.

Behind me, the front door banged against the wall. Lowell's voice. "Delphine, wait."

Then Bettina, light and unbothered, heels clicking across the porch boards. "Let her go. Let her walk it off. Honestly, babe, she'll embarrass herself enough without our help."

Embarrass myself. The words slid around in my head and wouldn't hold still.

I ran. Or I tried to. My legs belonged to somebody else, and the pines along the road bent and smeared into long black streaks. Linnet paced frantic circles inside me, whimpering, clawing at my ribs. Something's wrong, she kept saying. Something's wrong, something's wrong.

I knew. God, I knew. A drug, in a glass my stepsister had folded into my hands with a smile. My mouth tasted like burnt honey. Every sound was too loud, every smell too sharp: wet asphalt, rotting leaves, woodsmoke, and far off, threaded through the thunder, a heavy thump of bass.

Music. Music meant people. People meant help.

My phone buzzed against my hip. I dragged it out with fingers that wouldn't close right. Eleven percent battery, a cracked screen, rain smearing the glass. Three notifications stacked on the lock screen.

Lowell: Come back. Don't do anything stupid.

Lowell: Please. You're not thinking clearly.

Bettina: Sleep tight, Del. 

I stared at that little yellow heart until it swam. Then I shoved the phone into my coat and followed the music.

Through a gap in the cedar hedge. Down a gravel path lined with black SUVs, their engines ticking as they cooled. To a manor of dark stone with every tall window glowing gold, floodlights raking the rain, silhouettes moving behind the glass. Ravenshade. The old hunting estate. Tonight was the Winter Summit, I remembered dimly, every Alpha in the territory under one roof, guards on every door with earpieces and dark suits and eyes that never blinked.

I didn't go to the front. Even through the fog in my head I understood that if I staggered into that ballroom looking like this, I'd be a video on somebody's phone by midnight and the story of Silverbrook by morning. So I circled the wall with one hand dragging along the wet stone until I found a service door propped open with a crate of wine. A narrow corridor swallowed me, smelling of floor wax and cold stone.

The heat crawled up my spine. I leaned against the wall, palms leaving damp prints on the plaster. I needed air. Quiet. A door that closed.

The third door on the left was unlatched. I pushed it open and fell inside.

Dark. A fire burned low in the grate, and beside the tall window stood a man with one forearm braced against the glass, his head bowed, his back to me. Black shirt open at the collar. Shoulders so broad they blocked the storm.

The air tasted like smoke and winter pine.

My wolf went utterly still. Then she lunged.

"Get out." His voice was low and wrecked, dragged over gravel. He didn't turn. "Now."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." My knees folded and I caught myself on the back of a chair. "Someone put something in my drink. I can't think. I only need a minute. Please."

Silence, long enough to hear the rain. Then he turned.

The firelight gave me only pieces of him. A hard jaw. A pale scar from brow to cheekbone, thin as thread. And his eyes, gold and burning and ringed with silver, locked onto me so hard I swear the temperature in the room changed.

"Silver," he said roughly. "Someone slipped it into my wine. It's in my blood. I can't hold my wolf." His hand fisted on the windowsill and the wood groaned under it. "You need to leave. I'm not safe tonight."

"Neither am I," I whispered.

It was true. Whatever was in me, whatever was in him, we were two lit fuses in a closed room. I felt his wolf reach for mine across the dark. Not the clean golden thread I'd known with Lowell. This was darker. Hungrier. A recognition that went straight past thought.

He crossed the room in three strides, and I should have been afraid. I had never seen anyone move like that. Instead I tipped my face up, and every cell in my body leaned toward him.

He stopped a breath away. His fingers hovered beside my cheek, trembling with the effort of not touching me.

"Tell me to stop," he said, his voice splintering. "Say it, and I'll walk out that door even if it kills me."

"I don't want you to."

It wasn't only the drug talking. I knew that even then. It was twenty-one years of being good and careful and quiet. It was a girl who had carried a lemon cake through the rain for a boy who never loved her. It was the part of me that wanted, for one night, to be chosen by someone who couldn't lie about it.

His forehead touched mine. His breath shuddered. "Last chance."

I kissed him.

After that there was only fire and rain and the roar of two wolves slipping their leashes. His hands were careful even when he wasn't. He kept asking, a rasp against my skin, are you sure, are you sure, and I kept saying yes. I told him my name didn't matter. He said his didn't either. For a few hours in a dark room with a dying fire, I wasn't Delphine Ashby, the girl everyone pitied. I was wanted.

Toward the end, his mouth found the curve of my shoulder.

"Mine," he breathed, more growl than word.

Teeth pierced my skin.

Pain exploded, white and searing, a brand pressed to the bone. Something burned across my shoulder blade, carving itself into me in a crescent of heat, and as my vision swam toward black I felt his arms close around me like he would never let go.

Then the dark took me.

I woke to cold.

Gray light leaked around the curtains. The fire had burned down to ash. The sheets beside me were empty, and when I pressed my palm into the dent in the pillow, it was already cool.

He was gone.

Somewhere deep in the building, men were shouting. Doors slammed. Boots pounded the corridor, and a voice barked orders I couldn't make out. I lay frozen with the sheet at my chin, listening. They were looking for somebody. I didn't let myself wonder who.

I only knew he hadn't stayed.

My shoulder was on fire. I sat up, every muscle complaining, and stumbled into the bathroom and flipped on the light. The mirror gave me a stranger. Smeared mascara. A bruise blooming on my hip. Hair full of knots. A girl who looked like she had survived something.

I twisted to see my back, and my breath left me.

A crescent mark curved across my left shoulder blade, raised and red-gold, the edges still tender. Inside it, like a seam of light under the skin, something shimmered silver.

An Alpha's mark. I had read about them in the old texts Silverbrook kept in locked cases, but I had never seen one. I touched it. It pulsed under my fingertip like a second heartbeat, and Linnet curled around it inside me, whimpering, content and wrecked at the same time.

Mine, she whispered.

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. A man whose name I would never learn had called me his in the dark and then vanished before I could open my eyes. I pressed my forehead to the cold tile and waited to cry, and nothing came. Everything in me had gone too hollow.

My green dress lay in pieces across the carpet. I pulled on what was left of it, wrapped my soaked coat over the top, and buttoned it to my chin. The silver ring on its chain had slipped around to my back. I tucked it under my collar with shaking hands.

I left the way I'd come. Down the narrow corridor, past the service door, out into a morning the color of dishwater, mist curling off the gravel. My phone had died in my pocket. I didn't care. I only wanted to walk, and keep walking, until the road swallowed me.

I made it to the end of the drive.

A white convertible sat parked on the shoulder with its top up and its engine running. The vanilla reached me before I saw her.

Bettina leaned against the hood in a cream coat, a paper cup of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other. Lowell slouched in the passenger seat behind the glass, unshaven, not meeting my eyes.

"Morning, sunshine," Bettina said brightly. She lifted the phone. The camera clicked. "Don't mind me. Content."

"You were waiting here." My voice came out cracked and strange. "All night?"

"Not all night. I went home and showered. I'm not an animal." She tilted the screen toward me. "But you know what? You're so easy to track, Del. Your phone's been sharing its location with Daddy's family plan since you were fifteen."

On the screen, a photograph. Me at the service door, hair plastered to my face, the crate of wine at my feet. Another, from the hedge, my shape crossing the gravel path toward a dark window. A third, taken minutes ago at the end of the drive, zoomed so close I could see every freckle on my own face and the collar of my coat dragged crooked, the torn edge of my dress, and the red-gold curve of the mark rising above it.

My stomach dropped through the road.

"You're sharing those with who?"

"Nobody. Yet." Bettina swiped to a group chat. Silverbrook Elders 🐺. Fourteen members. A draft message sat in the box, every photograph attached, her thumb hovering over the arrow. "Section nine of Pack Law. An unmated she-wolf who bears the mark of an unknown Alpha is tainted. Exile. And her father, as her guardian, forfeits his Beta seat for failing to keep his line clean. Dear old Daddy. Thirty years of service, gone before lunch."

"You drugged me." I looked at Lowell. "You both stood there and watched her do it."

"Prove it," Bettina said pleasantly. "It's called Moonveil. It's out of your blood in six hours, and it scrubs your scent for weeks, so nobody can even smell who you were with. Honestly, I'd say thank you. It's very generous of me."

Lowell finally climbed out of the car. His shoes crunched in the gravel. He stood across from me with his hands in his pockets, jaw tight, a man pretending he was somewhere else.

"Say something," I whispered to him. "Please. Just one thing. Say you're sorry."

He drew a breath. When he spoke, it was the formal voice, the one he used at pack gatherings, reciting old words.

"I, Lowell Danforth, heir of Silverbrook, reject you, Delphine Ashby, as my mate and my chosen. Let the bond be broken."

It tore.

I felt it go, the hot bright thread that had been pulled tight between my ribs for a year, and it didn't snap so much as shred, fiber by fiber, each one a white wire of pain. My knees hit the gravel. Linnet howled inside me, the sound ripping my chest wide open, and I clutched my own ribs and gasped and gasped and couldn't pull in air. The gravel bit my palms. Somewhere above me, Bettina's coffee cup tipped and hissed against the wet gravel.

When the worst of it passed, I was still alive and there was nothing left but a raw, ringing quiet where the bond had been.

Lowell didn't touch me. He stepped back. Looking away.

"Get up, Del," Bettina said, almost kindly. She crouched in front of me, her cashmere hem trailing in the wet, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. The same gesture she used when we were girls. "You're making a scene. Listen, because I'm going to offer you something better than the truth. A deal."

I couldn't speak.

"The Crown sent a summons last week. They want a Beta's daughter from Silverbrook to wed the King. Mommy got my name on the list. Daddy signed it, naturally. He signs everything." She smiled. "You know who the King is, right? Ambrose Hallett. The Brutal King. Two brides, two funerals. Everyone says he killed them. I'd rather be Luna of Silverbrook with Lowell, thanks."

My father's signature. My father, who hadn't called. Who hadn't sent one text all night.

"So here's what happens," Bettina went on. "You go to Duskhollow in my place. You marry the Lycan King and you smile and you keep your mouth shut. And your little secret dies with me. Refuse, and I hit send. Exile for you. Disgrace for Daddy. A wolf who can't even shift, cast out with no pack and no name and a stranger's mark on her back. How long do you think you'd last?"

The wind pushed rain across the road. Somewhere in the manor behind me, a siren began to wail, thin and far away.

"The wedding is in five days," Bettina said, standing and brushing off her coat. "I'd start packing."

She got back in the car. Lowell followed without a word. The engine purred, and the white convertible slid away down the road with its taillights bleeding red in the mist.

I stayed where I was, kneeling in the gravel, with the mark burning at my back and the bond torn open in my chest and the memory of a stranger whose name I would never know. Nobody was coming for me. Nobody had ever come, not once, not even when I needed them most.

I pulled the ring out from under my collar and closed my fist around it until the silver cut into my palm. Mom, I thought, the way I used to when I was twelve and the house went quiet at night. Tell me what to do. But the ring stayed cold and the road stayed empty, and the only answer was the wind combing through the pines, patient and indifferent, as if the whole mountain had already decided what became of girls like me.

My phone was dead. My father hadn't called. The one person I'd have trusted to catch me had signed my name away, or Bettina's, which was the same thing,

in the same careless ink.

Somewhere behind me, the siren kept wailing.

Five days.