Chapter 3

Iris heads for the staircase, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

Queen Elara spoke to her. Smiled.

"Iris."

Cedric's voice stops her on the third step. She turns.

He's crossed the foyer, Viola trailing behind him like a shadow. The Queen and her entourage have moved deeper into the house, thank the goddess.

"The Queen seemed... interested in you," Cedric says carefully.

Iris shrugs. "She was being polite, I guess."

"She's never that polite," he mutters. And the kinds of questions she was asking… His eyes narrow. "What was all that about? The White Wolf?"

"I don't know.”

He raises an eyebrow, waiting. She doesn’t budge.

Viola peers around Cedric's shoulder. "She must have seen something special in you, Iris,” she says, tone slightly envious. “You're still so likable.”

For a convicted arsonist who survived three years of Black Rock, she doesn’t say. Iris gets the drift.

Cedric rubs his temples, feels the tension headache coming on. His voice is laced with threat,"Iris."

She doesn’t look remorseful, doesn’t even look back.

Three years ago, she used tears and clinginess to compete for attention with Viola. Now, it’s ice. Different tactic, but it’s the same old game. If she’d just cut the bullshit and quit being so difficult, they could move past this and be a family again. He needs her to see that before she pushes everyone away for good.

He catches up with her on the stairs, gritting his teeth. "I'd hoped three years would teach you some maturity. Didn't they have reformation classes in Black Rock? Apparently, you learned nothing."

Iris goes still.

Reformation classes.

For other werewolves, there were group classes at Black Rock. For Iris, reformation class was sickening doublespeak - a solitary, cramped room so dark she couldn't see her own hands, where she was locked for hours on end. She’d always been afraid of the dark - and had made the mistake of calling for help the first few times. Had been beaten violently for it.

"What is it?"

She realizes her hands are trembling. She shoves them behind her back.

Emotion flickers across Cedric's face. He opens his mouth to speak when Viola moans softly, cradling her scraped elbow.

“Sorry," she breathes. "It just - it really stings. I'm fine, though. Don't worry about me."

Shit. He’d forgotten. "Let's get you back upstairs,” he tells Viola, “I’ll have the healer look at that."

Iris takes a breath as they tread up the stairs without her, steadies herself, and shoves the memories trying to surface down as far as they’ll go.

Moving through the east wing, she finds everything has changed.

Iris passes white walls, gold-leaf-framed artwork, chandeliers, and marble. She’s stepped into a Viola fever dream.

Then she reaches the old photo wall. Iris stops.

Three years ago, this wall held fifteen years of memories. Blowing out birthday candles with Cedric grinning behind her. Training exercises where she’d insisted on joining the older wolves. A candid shot of her laughing at something Cedric had said, his arm slung around her shoulders.

All of it. Gone.

Now there’s only Viola. Viola at a garden party. Viola with Cedric at some formal event. Viola smiling softly at the camera, delicate and perfect.

She turns away, doesn’t want to see it anymore.

Her old room is at the end of this floor’s east wing - smaller than the suites Cedric and Viola occupy on the third floor, but it had been hers.

She reaches her room, tucked in at the end of the hall. Finds, to her relief, her colorful, handwoven runner rug at her feet, runs her fingers along the familiar brass sconce. They’d let Viola redecorate everything else, but had saved this small piece of Iris.

She lets out a breath. Viola had yanked her photos from the wall, but Cedric had made sure not everything of Iris was erased.

She opens the door.

Racks of clothes greet her. Dresses, blouses, coats. There are shelves of shoes, a velvet ottoman, and a gold-framed mirror.

Viola’s walk-in closet.

Iris stands in the doorway for a long moment.

She closes the door quietly. She’d been wrong to hope. Wrong to think they still cared about her.

Numb and weary, she retraces her steps through the corridor, back toward the stairs.

“Hey.”

She turns to see Cedric and Viola filing down from the third-floor landing. He’d come back to check on her, then. The way Viola had pleaded.

Cedric steps off the landing. “Why are you wandering around down here?”

“I was going to my room.”

Cedric raises an eyebrow. “You know you’re on the wrong floor, right?”

She shakes her head. “No. I was at the end of the east wing, on this floor.”

He stares at her. “You’re in one of the suites up on the third.”

“I gave that to Viola three years ago.” She’d seen the way Viola looked at the spacious suite and offered it to her - had wanted to be a good sister to her, had hoped they’d be close.

Cedric blinks. “I didn’t realize. I - ”

How could he have missed something like that? Guilt shreds him into small pieces. He’d let it happen, apparently. Never questioned it or checked where Iris had landed, and wait -

“Was,” he says slowly. “You said ‘was’ on this floor.”

“It’s Viola’s closet now,” Iris says blankly. A floor below her bedroom. Not a coincidence.

Goddess, he had fucked up. Really, really fucked up.

For a suspended second, the corridor is silent. Cedric’s face has the look of a man who has just walked into a wall he didn’t see. He opens his mouth - to apologize, to explain, he isn’t sure which -

“Oh, goddess.”

Viola’s voice. Very soft. Very small.

Cedric’s head snaps toward her. She’s staring at the closet door behind Iris, both hands pressed against her mouth, eyes already brimming. “Cedric. It was hers? All of it was hers?”

“Vi -”

“I never asked. I just thought it was an empty room — I never even thought to ask whose it had been, I -”

Cedric’s arm is around her shoulders before he registers having moved it. “Hey. Hey, none of this is on you.”

The guilt that had, a heartbeat ago, been pointing squarely at Iris slides elsewhere with the smoothness of something that has done this before.

Iris watches it go.

“She can have it back,” Viola whispers into Cedric’s chest. “All of it. I’ll move out tonight - please, I’ll do whatever -”

“Shhh. We’ll figure it out. Breathe for me. None of this is on you." he says, voice carefully even. “Iris, Viola’s offering you the room. Take it.”

"No," Iris interrupts. "I don't want her room.”

Cedric grits his teeth. For the love of -

Why? Why is she always so willful? And how is he ever going to fix things? How will she ever fit back in, be part of this family again?

“Cut the shit,” he growls, “Stop being difficult. There are exactly zero reasons to be ungrateful and throw a temper tantrum. It was a mistake. We’ll fix it.”

Iris looks at him. Really looks at him.

Three years ago, he could shut her down with that tone. She’d have folded and apologized just to make him smile at her again. She doesn’t have it in her anymore.

“I served the debt, Cedric.” The words come out evenly, almost gentle. “Three years. Whatever I owed Viola — whatever you said I owed her — I’ve paid it. I don’t need anything back from her.”

Silence.

Cedric’s face does something complicated, then slams shut.

He steps toward her,“Iris. Listen to me. Carefully.”

Her stomach turns.

“The Queen is in this house. She’s our guest for the rest of the week. You will not - not in passing, not as a hint, not as a slip of the tongue - say a single goddess-damned word in her hearing about Black Rock or what landed you there. Do you understand me?”

Of course. Of course this is what he hears. Not three years of her life. Not a debt cleared. Just leverage. Just a threat she might cash in.

Iris closes her eyes for half a second. Opens them.

“I’ll behave,” she says, the same words she’d given him at the gates of Black Rock. “I won’t embarrass the family.”

The Alpha-tension in his shoulders eases by a degree. He nods, then his voice gentles, the carrot following the stick. “Good. And listen - I meant what I said in the car. You’ll be looked after. You’re still an Alpha’s daughter. Clothes, a stipend, a position in the pack once you’re back on your feet. We’ll see to all of it.”

“Don’t bother,” Iris says. “I don’t see myself needing it.”

Cedric’s brow knits. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When the Queen’s visit is over, I’ll be gone, Cedric. I’m leaving.”

Cedric almost laughs. “What are you saying - that you’d walk out the gate? Iris. You’re an Alpha’s daughter, but you’ve been gone three years. You don’t have a pack of your own. You don’t have a coin to your name I haven’t put there. You don’t even have a coat that fits.” He shakes his head. “You’re exhausted. You’re being dramatic. Sleep on it, and we’ll talk tomorrow when you’re thinking straight.”

Of course. The same dismissal she’d gotten her whole childhood. You’re tired, you’re being silly, you’ll see it my way in the morning.

Cedric reads her silence as storm passing. He always had been able to outwait her. “Take the green guest room down the hall for tonight,” he says, magnanimous now. “I’ll have linens sent up. Once the visit’s over, we’ll get all of this sorted properly.”