The project was announced on Wednesday. Pack History, end of term assessment, worth thirty percent of the final grade, assigned in pairs by Professor Adler who had been teaching this class for twenty years and had developed the specific immunity to student protest that came from having heard every version of every objection and having stopped finding any of them persuasive. He read the pairs from a list. I was writing the date at the top of a clean page when I heard my name. “Blackthorne,” Professor Adler said. “With Ashford.” I put the pen down. Two rows behind me and one seat to the right, I heard nothing. No reaction, no movement, no sharp intake of breath. Nothing that would tell a room full of wolves paying attention that the pairing was anything other than alphabetical coincidence. Which was impressive, actually. I had a reaction and I had spent three years learning to have reactions silently. “The topic list is on the board,” Adler said. “Pairs will meet for the first

My mother was in the kitchen when I got home. Not cooking. Just in the kitchen the way she was sometimes in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a cup of tea and whatever she was reading, using the room the way she had always used it, as the place in the estate where ordinary things happened and the weight of everything else was proportionally lighter. She looked up when I came through the door. I put my bag on the chair and opened the fridge and looked at its contents without any real intention and closed it again. “How was school,” she said. “Fine,” I said. She looked at me over her cup. I sat at the table across from her and pulled her book toward me and looked at the cover and pushed it back. “Adler assigned the pack history project,” I said. “I know,” she said. “Eli mentioned it.” “He paired me with Caius Ashford,” I said. My mother looked at her cup. She did not say anything for a moment, which was its own kind of response, the specific considered quiet of someone

The first thing he said was: “How long.” Not how long have you been coming here. Not how long have you known. Just how long, which was the question that contained all the other questions and which I was not going to answer standing in a clearing in the dark with my heart doing something I was not going to acknowledge. “That is not your question to ask,” I said. He looked at me. He had not moved from the tree line. I had not moved from the centre of the clearing. We were twelve feet apart and the moonlight was doing what moonlight did and I was very aware of the specific quality of being seen by someone you had not invited to see you doing the thing you were most careful to do alone. “I am not going to tell anyone,” he said. “I know,” I said. “Then why—” “Because it is not your question,” I said. “You are here by accident or you followed me, and either way you saw something you were not supposed to see, and the appropriate response is to go home and not ask questions about it.

I got to school early. Not because I had somewhere to be but because the estate at seven in the morning had a specific quality that I was not in the mood for, which was the quality of people who loved me noticing that something was different and being careful about asking. My father Levi had looked at me over breakfast with the inventory expression, the one Eli had inherited, and I had looked back at him with the face and he had looked at his coffee and not said anything, which was the right call and which I appreciated and which I still needed to leave the house to get away from. I sat in the library for forty minutes before the first bell. I read the same page four times. Then Petra sat across from me and said: “Did you really tell Isla Voss she was the least interesting person in the garden?” “No,” I said. “That is not what I heard,” she said. “I said I was the most interesting person in the garden,” I said. “Including her. Those are different statements.” Petra looked at

I arrived at the library first. Same table, same chair, same window behind me with the training fields visible and the afternoon doing its late October thing outside. I put my notebook on the table and my bag on the chair and I sat down and I did not think about Eli saying something shifted or about a text saved on my phone from an unknown number that was not unknown anymore. I opened the notebook to the section I had been building on the mate bond recognition system and I read through my notes from the primary documentation Levi had given me access to, dense and specific and full of the language of institutional change, the way laws were written when the people writing them understood that what they were putting on paper was going to outlast the moment that produced it. My mother’s name was in the documents four times. My fathers’ names more than that. I had known this intellectually. It was pack history now, it was in the curriculum, it was something I had grown up knowing the

All Chapters of CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER: Chapter 171 - Chapter 175

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