Chapter 11

ELEANOR'S POV

The hairpin was not worth much. It was silver-plated brass. And the butterfly's wings were set with cheap crystal that had gone cloudy at the edges years ago. A jeweler would have laughed.

It was the only thing I had of my mother.

She had died when I was four. I remembered her hands and her voice humming something wordless over a pot of herbs. And the way this pin had caught the light in her hair. My grandfather had kept it for me in a drawer until I turned eighteen. When he handed it over, his face looked strange then. Careful. As if he were passing me something that might go off.

"Wear it when you need to remember who you are," he had said.

I hadn't understood. I was eighteen and an omega's daughter on the lowest rung of a small pack. I apprenticed to the healers because no one else would have me. I had no idea who I was. I just wore it.

Seven years ago, it broke.

…

It was Midsummer. And the northeastern packs had gathered at Blackthorn for the yearly feast. Every Alpha in three states was there and every heir as well. All of them seemed to have brought a hundred servants to fetch their drinks. I was nineteen, assigned to the healers' tent, and I had been on my feet for fourteen hours.

I went behind the tent for one minute of quiet. A rose trellis stood against the wall, heavy with blooms, and I leaned against it, closed my eyes, and breathed.

The trellis snagged my hair when I stepped away. The pin snapped.

I stood there holding two pieces of my mother in my hand. But something in me that had been holding steady for fifteen years just let go. I slid down the wall and put my face in my knees and cried the way you cry when you think no one is listening.

"That looks expensive."

I jerked my head up.

A man sat on the back steps of the manor, ten feet away, a glass of untouched whiskey dangling from his fingers. He was about twenty-three, tall, with dark hair pushed back carelessly. The black shirt he had on was open at the collar. I knew who he was. Everyone did. Dominic Thorne, the Alpha's son, the heir, the wolf, who the whole feast was quietly built around.

I scrubbed my face with my sleeve. "It isn't. It's only brass."

"Then why are you crying like someone died?"

"Someone did." It came out sharper than I meant. I flushed. "Sorry. I'm sorry, young Alpha. I'll go."

"I'm not an Alpha yet, and I'm not that young. It's Dominic." He set the whiskey down on the step. "Show me."

"What?"

"The pin."

I should have refused. A girl like me did not hand things to a boy like him. But he held out his palm so plainly, with no mockery in it, that I put the two pieces into his hand before I could stop myself.

He turned them under the lantern light. He frowned at the broken stem like a surgeon looking at a fracture.

Then he reached up and unfastened the silver cufflink from his sleeve. He then took out his pocketknife.

"What are you doing?"

"Hold still. And hold this."

I held the lantern while he worked. He bent the cufflink's thin wire into a tiny splint and wound it around the broken stem. He then pressed it flat with the back of the blade. He worked slowly. His dark head bent. His brow furrowed with concentration. and for ten minutes the biggest Alpha feast in the Northeast carried on without him.

When he finished, the butterfly sat whole in his palm. A thin silver thread ran across its back like a scar.

"It won't be perfect," he said. "But it'll hold."

He slid it carefully into my hair himself. His fingers were warm and steady, and the world went very quiet.

"Everything breakable is worth fixing," Dominic said. "Remember that."

I looked up at him with my face still blotchy from crying, and I was gone. Just like that, at nineteen, behind a tent, because a man had paid attention to something that mattered to me.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Eleanor Ashmoor. Ellie."

"Ellie." He tried it out, then nodded. "Go back to your tent, Ellie. Don't cry in the rosebushes. They bite."

He picked up his whiskey and walked inside.

I had thought that was the end of it. A kind stranger, a kind moment. But three days later I was carrying a basket of herbs across the healers' yard when someone called my name. My actual name, from across the courtyard, and I turned. He was standing there in jeans and a gray sweater with his hands in his pockets.

"Eleanor Ashmoor," he said. "I looked you up. I don't remember anyone's name from that feast except yours."

----

Two years later, a truck forced his car off a wet highway, and the pin on my head held. It held through everything. It held through five years of poultices and sleepless nights and the long walk back to his feet.

I turned the butterfly over in my palm now and traced the thin silver thread across its back, the scar he had made.

Everything breakable is worth fixing.

I had fixed him. I had fixed his legs, his company, his pride. I had held every broken piece of that man together until he could stand.

And no one, not once, had ever thought to fix me.

I closed my fingers around the pin and sat on the floor of my emptying apartment for a long, long time.

The box beside me was half full. It could take one more thing.

I put the hairpin in my pocket instead.

This one, I decided, I was keeping.