Chapter 4

Iris jerks awake.

For a heartbeat she doesn’t know where she is — just that the whistle for first roll-call hasn’t come, that something is wrong, that she needs to be on her feet before they -

The pillow under her head is too soft.

The room reassembles in pieces. Cedric’s voice last night. The green guest room. Crisp linens. Cedar in the wardrobe.

Not Black Rock.

She lets her hands unclench from the duvet, slowly, finger by finger. Her heart is pounding the way it always does after a hard wake, but the panic ebbs as the room settles around her. She is not in a cell. No one is coming for her.

Then her stomach folds in on itself.

She lies still a moment longer, listening. Doors. Voices. Footsteps moving with purpose - the packhouse already up and at it, the morning underway around her without her in it.

No one is calling her name.

Of course no one is.

She drags herself upright, every joint stiff. She glances at the mirror across the room and immediately looks away. Hollow-cheeked. Sleep-bruised. Sweatpants bagging at the hips. Hair flattened on one side. She doesn’t bother to fix any of it. There’s no one to fix it for.

The corridor is empty when she steps out. The smell hits her halfway down the staircase — coffee, bacon, the warm yeasty pull of fresh bread — and her body lurches toward it before her head can catch up. A hundred childhood mornings rise up out of nowhere. Cedric making her swallow her vitamins. Mae sliding eggs onto a plate over the counter. Her father reading trade reports aloud from the head of the table while she ignored him to feed scraps of toast to the dog under the table.

Hunger drags her the rest of the way down.

The morning room sits at the end of the east corridor — the small glassed-in nook off the breakfast garden where the family has always taken first meal when there isn’t ceremony to keep. The doors are ajar.

She slows.

She hears Cedric’s voice first, low and easy, the cadence of a thousand Sunday mornings of her childhood. And then Viola’s, light and a little husky, complaining sweetly about the strength of the coffee. Cedric laughs - actually laughs, a small puff of sound through his nose - and the porcelain clinks as he pours her another cup.

Iris stops in the corridor before they can see her.

Through the gap of the door, the morning sun is pouring across the conservatory glass. Cedric in shirtsleeves, his hair still damp from a shower, bent over a folded newspaper with one hand wrapped around his cup. Viola across from him at the small round table, in a soft cream cardigan, picking the crusts off her toast and watching him from under her lashes. A basket of pastries between them. A teapot. Two place settings.

Two.

A third chair sits pushed in tight against the wall. No plate is set for Iris. No cup. No napkin folded by a name.

Cedric had said it in the car yesterday, hadn’t he. We’ll get this all sorted properly. Tomorrow. After the Queen.

Apparently the sorting hadn’t included a chair at the table.

Cedric refills Viola’s cup. Viola tilts her head and says something that makes him huff a quiet laugh into his coffee. Easy. Domestic. The kind of morning that doesn’t have a place at it for the daughter the family is still quietly debating what to do with.

Iris watches for the length of one full breath.

Neither of them looks up.

She turns from the doorway as quietly as she had come.

She is not going to walk in. She is not going to clear her throat in the threshold and watch Cedric’s face do that complicated thing again, and Viola’s do its rehearsed wounded one, and end up sitting in a chair dragged awkwardly from against the wall, trying to swallow food she could no longer keep down with the two of them watching. She is not going to perform “the daughter, restored” for anyone over a breakfast she hadn’t been invited to.

She will find her own food.

She takes the back staircase down to the service wing.

She remembers the route to the kitchen from raiding it for cookies between training sessions when she was twelve. She does not remember it being so big. Or so loud. The kitchen has tripled in size since she was last here - staff bustling, copper pots gleaming, four ovens going at once in preparation for what must be the Queen’s brunch.

She hesitates in the archway.

Three years ago she’d have walked in and said good morning to Mae and Tilda by name. They’d have fussed at her, fed her, scolded her for not eating enough, and sent her on her way with a sweet roll wrapped in a napkin.

She doesn’t see any of them.

The omegas at the prep tables are all unfamiliar - younger, starched aprons, moving fast under the bark of a head cook Iris doesn’t recognize either. Moonstone has clearly been overhauled top to bottom since the new Alpha took over.

Cedric. New Alpha. New household. Of course.

Iris keeps to the wall and tries to think. A roll. A piece of fruit. Anything she could carry away without being seen.

“You. There.”

The head cook has spotted her. A thick-armed grey-haired omega with flour up to her elbows, scowling across the kitchen.

“Where in the goddess’s name have you been? Queen’s brunch is at eleven. We’ve a table to set, the silver isn’t half polished, and the dining room still hasn’t been flipped. Move.”

Iris freezes.

The cook misreads the freeze. Her mouth tightens. “I said move. Goddess, the kind of help they’re sending us.” She turns to the omega beside her. “Tell Birgit they sent another useless one. Not even in uniform.”

“I’m not staff,” Iris says. Her voice comes out rough.

The kitchen pauses.

Heads turn — three, four — and take her in. The too-thin frame in a faded t-shirt, sweatpants three sizes too big, the unbrushed hair, the bruise-circles under her eyes. The kind of look strangers give a beggar at a service door.

A younger omega snorts behind her hand.

Three years ago, her wolf would have stretched up under her skin at this much hostility - would have raised the low, dominant warning that sent young omegas scattering. Now there’s only silence. Just her own hunger ringing through her like a cold bell.

“Sure,” the head cook says, dryly. “What are you, then? A guest of the family?” The amusement around the room is low and contagious now.

“I -” Iris starts.

I’m the Alpha’s sister. The words die in her throat. They’re not even true anymore. She’d let go of the room key, the seat at the table, the photo wall. She isn’t anyone’s daughter in this house. They can see it on her. They can probably smell it on her, too.

If she said her name - Fenrir - half of them likely knew her only as the convicted arsonist Cedric had hauled home from Black Rock yesterday. The other half wouldn’t believe her at all.

The head cook sighs, already losing patience. “Either help or get out of my kitchen. I don’t care which.” She gestures at a stack of empty trays. “Pick up. Go.”

Iris stands there one more second, stomach hollow and shaking, the smell of fresh bread thick enough to make her dizzy.

If she leaves, she’s hungry. If she helps, there might be a piece of bread for it at the end. The math doesn’t take long.

She picks up the trays.

The trays are heavier than they should be. Or her arms are weaker than they should be. Either way, she has to brace one against her hip with her wrist as she edges out into the servants’ corridor, head down, willing herself to be no one.

“Iris?”

She freezes mid-step.

The voice is familiar. Older than she remembers. Lower.

She turns slowly.

Adrian.

He’s standing at the far end of the corridor in a fitted navy shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, the silver circlet of his beta’s pin glinting over his heart. Taller than three years ago. Broader. The jaw she’d memorized when she was fourteen has gone sharper.

He’s looking at her - at the prison clothes, at the trays braced on her hip, at the kitchen behind her - like he can’t quite decide what he’s looking at.

Her stomach drops in a way that has nothing to do with hunger.

The boy she’d promised herself to, before any of it. The man who had written the witness statement that put her in Black Rock. Both, in the same body, and her chest can’t decide whether to crack open or shut down.

He takes a step closer.

The corridor light catches the line of his mouth.

He laughs.